Doncaster City are back in the limelight after signing Wes Hoolahan, Ross McCormack and Charlie Mulgrew, but questions remain about the man who is bankrolling it all.
On Saturday 17th February, 34 people gathered in an old mining village once home to the Yorkshire Main Colliery to watch its namesake football club contest a 12-goal thriller with Glapwell FC in the Abacus Lighting Central Midlands Alliance League.
The attendance, although down on the 64 average for the season, was about on par for the eleventh tier of English football, where other clubs with similar pit connections – Staveley Miners Kiveton Miners Welfare, Rossington Main – ply their trade, each with the aspiration of keeping the old works teams alive long after the industry packed up and moved out for good.
Down the road in Armthorpe, however, one club is bucking the trend with attendances that regularly hit the high hundreds. Almost a thousand (844) turned up to their latest fixture against Dearne & District FC to watch new signings Wes Hoolahan, Ross McCormack and Charlie Mulgrew make their debuts after the transfers announced to much fanfare.
The game moved City within seven points of the league leaders with two games in hand, raising the prospect of promotion in their first season up to the tenth tier where they’ll get the opportunity to climb through the Northern Counties East leagues, Northern Premier League and then National League North before the National League proper comes into view.
It’s an unlikely prospect, but one that you wouldn’t put past them with former Premier League and international players on their books.
The PR machine
City, wearing sky blue, Sports Direct-sponsored shirts and tweeting alongside the hashtag ‘the city is blue’ in a thinly veiled swipe at the local league outfit, Doncaster Rovers, have made their fair share of media splashes since coming into existence in 2022 when they joined the Sheffield & Hallamshire County Senior Football League before moving to the Central Midlands Alliance the season after.
With the club barely established, they became a national talking point after they used an obscure piece of history to submit an application to the Scottish Football Association requesting special license to compete in the Scottish Cup next season.
They claimed, rightly, that Doncaster was ceded to King David I of Scotland in 1136 in the first Treaty of Durham and officially it had never been given back, prompting the club to try its luck.
The clever PR trick got the club featured on national news stations with Good Morning Britain sending a camera crew down to their training ground.
The (latest) Experiment
The club has also piqued media attention with the signing of former football heavyweights Hoolahan, McCormack and Mulgrew, who all started against Dearne & District but failed to make it onto the scoresheet during the clash.
Those with allegiances to local rivals Doncaster Rovers will be all too familiar with the time when the clubs’ owner, Willie McKay, brought in a handful of ex-Premier League players to make weekly jaunts back from France to compete in The Championship.
El-Hadji Diouf, Pascal Chimbonda, Habib Beye and Freddie Piqiuonne were among the players who came back to play during an ill-fated season which, according to reports, would often see the big-named signings miss training sessions only to greet the team on the coach down to games at motorway service stations, sometimes with KFC buckets in hand.
Football agent McKay was also the one who organised the doomed flight Emiliano Sala took from Nantes to Cardiff after the Argentinian striker agreed on a £15 million in January 2019. Sala died alongside David Ibbotson, 59, when their Piper Malibu aircraft crashed into the English Channel close to Alderney on 21 January 2019.
Motive
McKay’s involvement with newcomers Doncaster City has raised questions about his motive, which venting fans point out could be little more than another “ill-thought-out circus” here.
When I talked to individuals involved in running the club for Doncaster Rovers fanzine popularSTAND last year they were at pains to point out what a good bloke he is and highlighted the development of a new St George’s-style complex in South Yorkshire as proof that he’s looking to invest back into the local community.
But as the editor of the aforementioned fanzine pointed out to me over a beer the following night, if he really wanted to help out a local club, he wouldn’t have had to look far for others that would have been ripe for investment. Yorkshire Main, for example, who tell me their only aspiration is to be sustainable and develop facilities so that they can survive into the foreseeable future, seem to qualify as a prime target for investment. Even Armthorpe, which groundshare with City, would have been ripe for it.
But that would have meant no new kit, or new badge, or Sports Direct sponsorship or PR stories briefed to the national media that attract camera crews and journalists. It would have meant doing the boring stuff like running tea bars and putting a new roof on the changing facilities after it got blown off in a recent storm. The stuff every other league team has to do without any media kickback.
My fear for City is that their experiment will end up the same way their neighbours did when Mr McKay got involved all those years back, all for one simple reason. When you start a football club up from the ground up you have to really care about it, and I mean really care about it, and for years on end before it even becomes half of what they imagined it to be. Most of all, you can’t do it for vanity’s sake, not even a little bit, because all football clubs are bigger than one individual, but at this level, they are especially so – and you can’t experiment your way around that.
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