Meet Blackpool FC, a crumbling English team with amazing fans fighting to save them

The history of English football is the history of the battle between the people who own and run football clubs, and the people who don’t, but who love them. And right now, the most striking manifestation of this eternal war is a club whose fans occupied the pitch at the end of last season and are now boycotting home games; who are manufacturing their own shirts and trying to buy their club back from as repugnant a shower of suits as you could ever hope to find.

Blackpool FC!

Blackpool FC were founded in 1887, and are nicknamed the Tangerines because they’ve worn bright orange since 1923. (Except for a weird five year period in the 1930s when they wore thin alternating stripes of dark and light blue, and were presumably nicknamed the Toothpastes.)

Apart from the football, the Lancashire seaside town of Blackpool is most famous for: its tower, which was inspired by some inferior monstrosity in Paris; its illuminations, a sixty-six day festival of over a million coloured lightbulbs; and being the chosen holiday destiny for almost every family in Coronation Street at one point or another. In 2001, a local businessman decided to turn Blackpool into north England’s answer to Las Vegas. He didn’t quite manage it. But it does have a pleasure beach, including a large, Pepsi-sponsored rollercoaster.

Their glory days came back in the 1950s, when they could boast the talents of Stanley Matthews on the wing, Stan Mortensen up front, and some other human beings not called Stanley elsewhere in the team. That team peaked when they beat Bolton Wanderers 4-3 in the 1953 FA Cup final, a game known through history as the “Matthews final” even though Mortensen scored a hat-trick.

Blackpool’s latest top-flight adventure came in 2010-11, when Ian Holloway, back when he was good, brought an entertaining team up through the playoffs. Built around the pre-Liverpool talents of current Stoke City stalwart Charlie Adam, back when he was good, they caught their supposed betters off-guard by actually attacking — unusual for a newly-promoted team — and at one stage they even topped the Premier League for a couple of hours. Come January, they were comfortable in eighth ... and then it all fell to pieces. They went into the last day needing a victory at a title-chasing Manchester United. You can guess how that went.

Throughout their recent history, Blackpool have been under the control of the Oyston family, who are arguably the worst people in football. Seriously. Grand patriarch Owen Oyston resigned as chairman in 1996 after he was convicted of rape and sexual assault; he served three years of a six-year sentence, and continues as a director to this day. Meanwhile the current chairman, his son Karl, was recently suspended from all football activities for four months after sending text messages to a supporter calling him a “massive retard” and an “intellectual cripple,” and advising him to “enjoy the rest of your special needs day out.”

This isn’t simply a question of hideous human beings, however. Underpinning all this is the sense that the Oyston’s deliberately frugal approach to the Premier League was been for their own benefit and profit, rather than the club’s, a sense that was reinforced in 2012 when it emerged that Karl had paid an £11 milion salary ($16.7 million USD at current exchange rates) to a company owned by his father, and a total of £26 million to connected companies. Tax reasons, apparently. Meanwhile, one of the deteriorating stands at Bloomfield Road went unreplaced for seven years.

Though Holloway nearly led them back to the Premier League at the first attempt, his departure in November 2012 precipitated a period of sharp decline on the pitch. Managers came and went, and Blackpool began their 2014-15 Championship campaign with just eight players and no goalkeeper. And by the time they’d found a goalkeeper, he had to play in a replica shirt he’d already autographed for a competition, because they’d shed their kitman.

They were relegated, of course, but the manner of their relegation caught national attention. Before the final game of the season, at home to Huddersfield, Blackpool fans spent the buildup protesting against the Oystons outside the stadium. Then, just after half time, they occupied the pitch. More than hour of protest led to two things: one, the game being abandoned; two, the most wonderful pitch invader of all time.

Blackpool fans staged a protest on Saturday, and they were all but relegated with a 4-0 loss to Wigan Athletic. Supporters are staying away from Bloomfield Road, the local press have had their access restricted, and the playing squad is young and dangerously thin: in short, this is a club in the midst of a fullblown crisis.

Is this a bad thing? Obviously, on the most straightforward level it is: losing football matches is a generally bad habit for a football club to get into. But from the wider perspective, you could perhaps argue that the better shape Blackpool are in, the more likely the Oystons are to stick around. The Blackpool Supporters Trust have put together a bid that proposes to take the club into the hands of the supporters, leaving the Oystons with almost all the assets apart from the team and the stadium, and you wonder if that offer might look more and more appealing in the face of another relegation.

So, if the Oystons sound like exactly the wrong kind of bastards, then relegation might be good, for Blackpool’s sake. Because a team that play in bright orange should always be a joyous thing, and right now, they’re a misery.