Match day with Chester: Reformed, realistic and still Wrexham’s fiercest rivals

These days, £26,000 does not buy a lot in football.

The same was true in 2010 too, but it still seems a small price to pay for 125 years of history tied to a city’s football club. For Chester City, it meant they ceased to exist after that five-figure sum brought about the demise of the club via an unpaid tax bill.

But from the ashes rose something special — a fan-owned phoenix club with big ambitions of returning to the English Football League (EFL) operating under a new name: Chester FC.

“‘Chaotic’ would be the word, certainly for the time about 15 years ago,” says Jeff Banks, now a director at Chester after he was involved in launching the phoenix club.

“The problems started coming out of the woodwork, like unpaid bills and players not being paid. The supporters couldn’t do anything to save Chester City as it was. The owners tried to offload the club by selling it for £1 but, with all the debt attached, nobody was willing to do that. In the end, it was the tax bill that went to the High Court and that brought down the hammer and killed Chester City off.”

Chester City had a fine reputation as a Football League club, with a 69-year pedigree in English football’s top four leagues before they dropped into non-League in 2000. But the last episode of their history is one of the sport’s more remarkable tales, which has left the new Chester — fan-owned and playing in the same stadium as the old club — playing in the National League North and trying to ignore one of the most talked-about teams in football just 14 miles down the road: Wrexham.

A wander around Chester’s Leap76 stadium on match day provides some reminders of the club that came before: the photographs of former squads lining the walls and the old club crest woven into the carpet pattern. Despite its turbulent end, memories of the old club have informed the new for a fanbase that went through hell and back to save football in their city.

“There was an element of fans who didn’t want to let Chester City go,” says Banks. “But none of us wanted that — we were powerless to stop it from going the way it did. After it was liquidated in the High Court, the same day we applied to reform as Chester FC. Doing that enabled us to take the history of the club with us. Prior to that, we were having public meetings at Chester Town Hall.

“We were encouraging people to come and listen to the plans that we put forward to try to save football in the city. Those plans gathered more and more support and gave us the belief that we could actually do something.

“It wasn’t just an idea on the back of a fag packet; it was a proper business plan and it was ready to go as soon as everyone believed in it. It was a snowball effect — we needed support financially from fans but we were unified in wanting to be the owners of our own football club.“

Bad experiences with owners had been a bruising lesson for Chester City, with financial problems and on-field woes occurring under three successive regimes. Under Mark Guterman, the club entered administration in 1998 before they were bought by American Terry Smith, who made himself manager as the club slid down the league.

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Once Chester eventually dropped out of the Football League in 2000, they were bought by the Vaughan family, originally from nearby Liverpool, who brought the good times back with investment in the squad and a brief return to the EFL in 2004. But a slow unravelling over the next five years saw financial challenges coupled with relegation. It proved to be terminal for the club.

“As a fan, you feel powerless seeing your club become a shell of what it was,” says Jim Green, Chester’s vice chairman. “We owed everybody money, and that was other clubs, stakeholders in the game — but also people and businesses in Chester. I knew supporters who were owed money by the club because they were trying to do stuff out of goodwill and they ended up not being paid.

“It got to the extent that the club owed the coach company too much money that they refused to take them to an away game at Forest Green, so that was postponed. For the league, that was it — and pretty quickly after that, fixtures were suspended. If you’re a football team that is not allowed to play football, you’re not going to have long left.”

In 2010, the group of fans who were behind saving football in Chester, City Fans United, had just 12 weeks to get their new club up and running, having secured the lease to play at the stadium owned by the local council. They had an early battle with the FA on their hands as they were initially placed four divisions below the National League — where Chester City had folded. It was eventually reduced to a three-division penalty as they started life in the sixth-tier Evo-Stik Division One North.

Three back-to-back promotions from 2010 to 2013 put Chester back in the National League. But since then, they have moved between the fifth and sixth tiers as they find their feet again as a 13-year-old club. Teams in the division are a mix of part- and full-time, depending on budgets, with Scunthorpe United leading the National League North in the sole automatic promotion spot.

Fan ownership means Chester are “a club with a ‘just outside the play-offs’ budget — for every £1 we have to spend, we have to generate £2 of value” according to manager Calum McIntyre. Budgets are tight; there are only five members of staff — one of which is a cleaner and one is the groundsman — with match days staffed by volunteers.

When The Athletic spends time at Chester for the 2-0 win over Tamworth, match day is a lesson in all the best elements of fan ownership and lower-league football, with friendly faces and cooperative spirit at every turn. Manning the boardroom bar is Pam Hipkiss, a lifelong Chester fan and volunteer who saw her and husband Barrie’s service to the club honoured with a stand named after them in June 2022.

Vice-chairman Green, in his seventh year in the post, works voluntarily on a match day for the club with his full-time job working for the club’s community foundation taking up five days of the week. His office doubles as a storeroom and is where the England-Wales boundary cuts through the stadium, which clings to the very north west of England and is a one-hour drive from Manchester.

Chester’s location presents an interesting example of how a lower-league team can grow and enjoy success despite being in the orbit of some of the country’s biggest clubs. For Chester, they are in the vicinity of Liverpool, Everton, Manchester City and Manchester United — not to mention arch-rivals Wrexham down the road.

Among the initiatives that have been successful in engaging younger fans is a policy to give free season tickets to local schools, enabling children and their families to get their first taste of football in Chester. The club has also seen a high uptake in membership as part of the club’s fan-ownership model, and they are averaging gates of around 2,000 this season.

“It’s a cooperative effectively,” says Green of the ownership model. “So to be a member is £12 a year, and anybody over the age of 16 can become a member. You don’t have to be a Chester fan but the majority are, and that society owns 100 per cent of Chester Football Club. It’s genuine fan ownership.

“There’s about 1,800 of us at the moment who have all paid £12. We all get the same voting rights and the same benefits. They get a vote on the new kits, major decisions that the club makes and they have the opportunity to stand for election to the board. If there was ever a decision over the ownership of the club in the future, then a vote would go to the members and not the board.

“We’ve never got to a vote. There have been a couple of people who have expressed an interest in investing as a percentage shareholding or a complete takeover. But it’s never got as far as a vote to members. The members would probably want a good quality business plan and a clear idea of what new owners might bring if it ever did come to have a vote because what we have is precious and, as fans, we’ve lost it before.

“The threshold for a lot of fans is quite high, but it’s not to say it’s not something they would ever consider. If I won the EuroMillions on Tuesday night I might have a conversation — not that my Mrs would be very happy. But that can happen, it’s happened at other clubs where a private owner has come in with a vision and resources.”

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When Green says “other clubs”, it can easily be swapped out for one club in particular: Wrexham, Chester’s biggest rivals. Though the two sides are unlikely to meet in a derby any time soon after previously boasting the most fiery rivalry outside the Football League, the strength of feeling between the two clubs has not faded.

“It’s probably one of the most intense rivalries in football,” Green says. “We might not have the numbers of some of the other derbies — but the cross-border England-Wales angle and everything else makes it intense. I don’t think there’s any jealousy of what they’ve got, because I don’t think they could ever have imagined that to happen.

“They’ve been fan-owned and they know the challenges that come with it; it’s not easy. But when it’s right and it’s working, it’s the best feeling in the world because it’s yours and you have been part of it. That’s something you can’t replicate.

“We’ve been in private ownership with a really good team and, as a fan, it’s great: you turn up and watch, and hopefully you pick up a few trophies. But the joy we get out of it when we’ve all mucked in together can’t be replicated.”

Chester’s connection with fans goes well beyond its ownership, extending to the dugout where the 30-year-old manager (and lifelong fan) McIntyre is in charge. After stints working for Liverpool and Manchester United, as well as coaching through the age groups in Chester’s academy, McIntyre landed the managerial position full-time in May 2022.

Last season, he led the side to a National League play-off semi-final, where they lost to Brackley Town in their bid to return to the fifth tier. This campaign, they are in a healthy position to try to win promotion via the play-offs again.

“Managing the football club that you support and you’ve grown up at is the best and worst thing in the world at the same time,” McIntyre says. “The main thing is that you have to emotionally detach yourself and you just need to be a manager. When things are good here, it’s the best place in the world. Football clubs are like family to people, they’re not just institutions, they are places where they go and spend time together — and that matters.

“That isn’t representative of levels; Manchester United doesn’t matter any more to its supporters than Chester does. But we have an additional layer because we’re fan-owned. They keep the club going with finances and on the board by making day-to-day decisions for the club.

“The aim is to get promoted, so we haven’t done anything yet. But last season, we had our highest finish for a while; (now) the crowds are up and there’s a feel-good factor around the place. We’ve got a group of players that will match the supporters’ ambitions and buy into the football club.”

McIntyre has a young but impressive squad at his disposal, including players with a raft of EFL appearances. Captain George Glendon is a Manchester City academy product who was named on their bench for a Champions League game before stints at Fleetwood Town and Carlisle United, while defender Joel Taylor and midfielder Kevin Roberts have Football League pedigree.

“Since the gaffer has come in, he has put the connection back into the fans and players to get the city buzzing again,” says Glendon. “He tries to make us show it on the pitch. The fans get right behind us and we show them that a lot of us care about this club and we want to get it back to where it deserves to be.

“I’ve met some great people — volunteers and people who work at the club. It keeps you attached. I said to the gaffer in the summer that I just wanted to get one promotion with the club.

“The EFL should be the goal. Everyone always associates Chester with being in the Football League. It feels like we’re making the right steps on and off the field, especially in the last few years. I’ve seen a massive change.”

A National League return is first on McIntyre’s mind after he took his first minutes in football management while stepping up as caretaker at the end of the 2017-18 season. Back then, Chester endured another tough season off the pitch as they relied on crowdfunding to survive.

With the disappointment of last season’s play-off defeat to drive them on and the challenges of the past to inform them, Chester’s goal is to find a natural level as high up the pyramid as possible while remaining a fully functioning fan-owned club.

“There are generations of fans that have grown up watching Chester in the Football League,” says Green. “Primarily that was League Two, but we had the odd flirtation with League One and people have fond memories of that period. For the younger generation under 25, this (National League) is what they’ve known. So there’s a bit of a generational battle.

“But we’ve had to reassess because we’re technically a different club to Chester City; we’ve got a different ethos and football itself has changed. The money that’s in the game and the number of private owners that are willing to lose a million pounds a year to chase promotion, it’s changed massively.

“Football is broken. Hopefully, the new regulator will address that because if they don’t then there will be another Chester City and another Bury and another Macclesfield. It’ll just keep coming and, at some point, it’ll be your club.”

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(Design: Eamon Dalton for The Athletic; photos: Rick Matthews)