The handsome, self-satisfied face of Wrexham owner and thespian Ryan Reynolds stares out from the sides of buses winding their way up the high street, past the old hat works and public library. It implores us to watch his new movie, If, which is deemed a provocation in Stockport ahead of the League Two clasico.
The final fixture of the season, seven months after Stockport County’s 5-0 take-down of Tinseltown’s Welsh vanity project, has lost some of its significance since both teams are already promoted. Yet the rivalry between clubs built on diametrically opposed philosophies will never be anything less than visceral.
These ancient relics of football’s industrial past have become the yin and yang of upward mobility, Stockport’s low-key proprietors contrasting with Wrexham’s Netflix plumage.
Few outside of Stockport’s south east Manchester hinterland would recognise Mark Stott on a bus let alone on the side of one. Stockport’s owner covers his tracks as fastidiously as Jay Gatsby in America’s jazz age, you hear of him but glimpse him only fleetingly.
Like F Scott Fitzgerald’s social climber, Stott has a few quid. Not enough to make a difference at the team he supported as a kid, Manchester City, but sufficient to transform the prospects of his local club and give Stockport a remarkably similar financial profile to Wrexham. The turnover of both has risen rapidly to around £9m with annual losses of approximately £5m.
The difference is the cash injection from Reynolds and co-owner Rob McElhenney, currently standing at £9m is loaned at 3.5 per cent over base, whereas the near £8m ploughed into Stockport by Stott was converted into an equity stake. The context of Saturday’s showdown has already shifted to next year when the rivalry will playout in English football’s third tier.
“Ultimately, it’s a League One game,” Stockport manager Dave Challinor tells i.
“You still have two competitive groups of players that really want to win. There’s a little bit of niggle in it. We had some run-ins with Wrexham in the National League where they beat us in the FA Trophy semi-final, and we had our first opportunity to win the league there and lost. They got beat in the play-offs by Grimsby but then won the title last year and did brilliantly to get back-to-back promotions.
“They would have loved to have won the title this season, but we pipped them to it. There are bits their players won’t be happy with and bits our players still aren’t happy with, so the game will be feisty with something on it.”
When the teams meet next season, Stockport’s Edgeley Park could already be under reconstruction with work on the first phase of the club’s £40m redevelopment due to start in January. The aim is to increase capacity from 10,000 to 18,000 and fund the club’s further expansion from the increased turnover. CEO Jonathan Vaughan, also part of Stott’s property empire, the Vita Group, believes the club is well positioned to deliver on its ambitious plans.
“We are property guys. That is where we have had success and where our experience comes in. Funding any development at a football club can be challenging. Lenders generally don’t like to lend against loss-making entities. But we have some really good relationships across the market, so we are confident we are able to bring in a sensible, serviceable level of debt to fund the expansion.
“We have tried to understand the fabric of the club, the culture, the fanbase and apply our business approach to that. That is the cornerstone of the success we have had. So far we are on track with regards to the plan. In business you have to have your objectives set out, everybody aligned and working toward goals and objectives. The ambition is to get to the Championship. We are confident we have the supporter base to achieve that.”
Whatever the result in Wrexham, the champions will return to an end-of-season celebration on Sunday, a vivid contrast to the disappointment of a year ago when they lost to Carlisle on penalties in the play-off final at Wembley. Challinor, not ordinarily given to displays of emotion, was fined in the immediacy of defeat. But a day later back at Stockport’s end of season shindig, deeper feelings began to crowd him and he pulled his polo shirt over his head to conceal his tears from the players he felt he had let down.
“Around emotion you are always worse when you understand the effect it has on other people. I was disappointed but I was fine in terms of speaking to the players. It’s only when you see family or friends around the club. We came back here and people were saying say well done, its fine, but you know it’s not. Not really. That’s when it hits you.”
Since Stott completed his takeover of the club four years ago, Stockport have been promoted twice. Should they continue their performance arc, the target of the Championship within seven years appears within their grasp. Stott’s investment ensures the rubric of the club is sound. The alchemy is brought by director of football, Simon Wilson, a data analyst who spent eight years in the vanguard of applied football science at Manchester City, and a coach who has never finished outside of the play-offs in 14 years as a manager across four clubs.
Incredibly Challinor, an uncompromising former centre-half with first class honours in physiotherapy, has yet to complete his coaching badges. I put it to him that with his record and academic attainment, he should be teaching the course rather than completing his Uefa licence.
“Not at all,” Challinor said. “It formalises what you have done. It initiates thinking. Are you doing things right? How can you improve? What you need to look at around staffing, budgets, etc. Starting where I did in non-league you have to have a handle on all those things, leadership, management, etc. It stimulates questions and pulls out the bits that are relevant to you.”
Challinor and Wilson cram in meetings when opportunity presents at Stockport’s rented training base in Carrington. As part of the grand design, Stockport will build a new facility within the town boundary. A site has been identified and is part of the consultation process surrounding the redevelopment of Edgeley Park. As director of football, Wilson is the rational thinker and visionary who sees the big picture and sets the parameters for delivery.
In this epoch, as the success of neighbouring City and the convulsions at Manchester United demonstrate, Wilson’s role is at least as important as the coach.
“I’ve been involved at a club [Manchester City] that has won the Premier League. I have been relegated twice at different clubs. I have worked in international football and lower league football and that has given me an understanding of what works,” Wilson said.
“You see the same things in teams that do well and teams that fail. It comes down to good alignment of principles. Is there clarity? Do we know what we are doing?”
For Wilson, the building blocks are spread across four fundamental elements; a clear way of playing, players capable of executing, a coach and training culture based on delivery of the chosen style and an infrastructure that supports and reinforces the project.
“It’s about the attitudes and behaviours of everybody involved. The most important thing is the team and the players. Everyone can contribute. Everything people do here matters. And form a management point of view it’s about making sure people are constantly reinforced and supported.”
Stockport are pitched more towards Liverpool’s high octane approach than City’s dominance of possession. “We play according to three game principles,” explains Wilson. “We like to play on the front foot, engage the crowd. We like to make the pitch big in possession, and be aggressive without the ball. That’s it.”
City set the industry standard following the Abu Dhabi takeover in 2005. That blueprint is etched in Wilson’s thinking. He arrived at City two years before the transformation, a period when the club was run on a budget to finish 14th.
“If you got 13th it was a celebration. The first chapter was to take that to a top-six club. It took us a couple of years to become a Champions League team and to win it was another chapter.
“You build in blocks. We did an academy redevelopment plan in 2012 where we selected a game style and a way of working. We copied the best, which was Barcelona. It’s a journey. Here at Stockport, we are four years in with a vision to get to the Championship. We have had success. Underneath that we have built an academy and are starting to capture and build our game style. The next three years will be an evolution of that.”
The fans love it, of course. They are drawn from a conurbation of 300,000. Their team is undergoing a similar transformation to the town, which is part dilapidated Victoriana, part modernist urban vision courtesy of a £1bn redevelopment programme gradually transforming the look of the place and how people feel about it.
Reconciling an ambitious future for this part of the world with a past conditioned by a different kind of life experience can be a tricky business. Whilst Stockport is rightly concerned with what’s ahead, the club is minded not to lose the values that underpin its identity as the fan base grows.
The man responsible for maintaining the soul of Edgeley Park is its president, Steve Bellis, a lifelong fan and time-served member of the board. He shared an anecdote that defined Stockport’s orientation as a community touchstone, a place determined to preserve the best of itself in the utopia envisioned.
An email from a nursing home in Newcastle alerted Stockport to the presence of their oldest surviving player Alan Oliver, who appeared 151 times for the club in the 1950s. He was 99. Stockport were one of eight of Oliver’s former teams contacted by the home.
Bellis was touched and pledged to visit Newcastle at the season’s end to present Oliver with a cap, maintaining the tradition of honouring every player who has played 100 games. He also promised to bring along the League Two trophy should they win it.
Oliver was said to be overwhelmed by the response. Sadly, on the weekend Stockport sealed the title, Oliver passed away. His funeral took place last Monday two days after the official presentation of the trophy.
Bellis made it his business to attend the service in the North-East with a fellow member of staff. “None of the other clubs responded to the initial email, and there were only eight people at the funeral, including us,” Bellis tells i.
“The family asked if we would go back to their home in Hexham, which of course we did. We chatted and gave them the memorabilia that we had promised Alan. They couldn’t believe we had made the trip on behalf of the club.
“It is those little things that we can do that Mark [Stott, owner] wants us to continue with. I have free rein to protect the club’s DNA. It is a privilege to do it and I’ve told Mark this, the minute I think we are going off in corporate direction and losing touch with that, I’m off. Count me out.”
This might be viewed as sentimental posturing were it not for more than three decades of pioneering endeavour in the community.
In the 1990s Bellis was the architect of in-school visits with players, first in the primary sector and then across the age groups, aimed at engaging kids to keep them out of the clutches of Manchester neighbours United and City.
Within five years Stockport had the lowest age profile of paying fans. The children in whom the club took an interest at school have become supporters as adults.
Maintaining connections is not an ad campaign, but a sincere expression of community love. In that spirit Bellis has invited Oliver’s family to a match at Edgeley Park next season, where a presentation will be made to honour one of their own at half-time. It might also involve another trophy.
