Cod Almighty | Diary

Keep your Lego and puppies, just hire more staff

25 June 2019

"We don't have any tangible interest [in a takeover of the club] at the moment... We have had plenty of tyre kickers."

John Fenty, major shareholder, Grimsby Town Football Club
Quoted on GrimsbyLive, 21 May 2019

"Grimsby Town Football Club can confirm it is in discussions with a number of interested parties relating to the purchase of a shareholding in the Club... these talks are developing and in some cases discussions have been ongoing for almost a year."

Statement by Grimsby Town Football Club
Published on club website, 25 June 2019

If John Fenty is on his way out, then there's no reason to suppose that his exit will differ in style from most of his other actions while at the helm of Grimsby Town Football Club. All we can do is hope the job gets done cleanly and completely. What could have been taking so long?

It's not so much the non-chairman's approach to finance that's a problem as his influence on the overall working culture of the club. As Trentside Diary and I both noted here yesterday and at the weekend, Tom Shutes will not be the sort of chairman who rides in on a golden steed, tossing wads of fifties to a gullibly adoring crowd. If your original/regular Diary's hopes are not misplaced then the new guy is not coming in to spend more – he's coming in to change the way things are done.

This doesn't just mean, say, giving a straight answer to a straight question, or issuing an important statement during business hours rather than, say, half past 10 on a Monday evening. It means showing your supporters that they matter rather than telling them to shut up. And it means making sure your organisation goes about its business professionally – whether this means not illegally approaching managers under contracts to other clubs, not stitching up local journalists for doing their job, or just making sure that your official communications use spelling and sentence structures that would at least make it through the end-of-year literacy tests in the fourth year of infants school.

I tend to think that if you get the basics right, everything else improves from the bottom up. And then, in the end, you're making more money from better catering, better merchandising, better community engagement, better customer analysis, better marketing, a ticketing system that doesn't involve writing everything down in a big book, and an online sales platform which makes it easier rather than harder for people to give you money, and then you don't need to prop up the transfer budget with £800,000 of spare change from the region's leading provider of hotel and leisure construction logistics consultancy.

In the meantime the rumour mill, which has been surprisingly accurate this summer, suggests that the number of Grimsby Town forwards in the world is shortly to increase by one Moses Ogbu. Ogbu is a Nigerian who has been playing in Sweden and latterly, I think, Saudi Arabia. A half-arsed 15-second DuckDuckGo search fails to yield anything more than that, so you're on your own now, sorry.

And in deals that have already been completed, central defender Kirsty Smith and left-sided attacker Libbi Wright have become the first two confirmed signings for Grimsby Town Women. All of us here at Cod Almighty look forward to watching the new team next season. These are exciting times for the women's game. I mean, it's obviously still too much to expect that the Fishy messageboard could have a thread on the women's World Cup without descending into the fucking gutter, but hey, one step at a time.