It’s fitting that the best day of Swindon Town’s season came after their own league campaign had ended. On 11 May, Abdoulaye Doucoure scored for Everton and Sheffield United broke Swindon’s 30-year record for goals conceded in a Premier League season.
The comfort won’t last – now Swindon supporters are worried about another record falling. In 2023-24, Swindon Town finished in their lowest ever position since the move to a four-tier league pyramid. They see no obvious cure. Swindon could become the second ever former Premier League club to fall into non-league after Oldham Athletic.
Summer is supposed to provide respite for the weary supporter, a chance either to replenish hope or distract yourself from its absence. In Swindon, they don’t feel able to move on for fear of what they might find when they traipse back into the County Ground in August.
Last month, Swindon Town’s official supporters’ trust published an open letter to the club’s leadership about their deep concerns over its strategic direction (or lack thereof). They declared that they had “lost all confidence and trust in the leadership and ownership” and accused them of treating constructive feedback with “a consistent level of denial and a version of reality which does not relate to the facts”.
Some issues have been apparent to casual observers. Swindon have had eight managers in under four years. There was a plan to recruit young players, develop and sell but that hasn’t really paid off and has fuelled the slide down League Two – this is the fourth consecutive season of a lower league finish. Charlie Austin, released last month after a second spell, subsequently said the club “wasn’t trying” to move in the right direction and that players were treated “unprofessionally”.
“The contents of the open letter aren’t anything that we haven’t already said to the owner on many occasions,” Tom Paris, the trust membership secretary, tells i. “It was designed to bring into the public eye that there are issues that need addressing.
“The results of a fan survey, with a number of respondents equal to around 25 per cent of an average home crowd, were damning. Fans are not happy about what has been produced on the pitch, but also – and more importantly – have lost confidence in the leadership of the club and in its strategic direction.
“From the results of that survey, it’s not out of the question that season ticket sales may fall by as much as 45 per cent. That is the number of supporters who said that they were undecided or unwilling to commit to buying a season ticket next year.”
Morfuni reacted to the open letter, stressing that he didn’t “fully agree” with the concerns raised and talked up an “open dialogue and collaboration with our fan base”.
“While we value the feedback from the Supporters Trust and the wider fan community, we would like to mention that we do not fully agree with all the points raised in the open letter,” Morfuni said. “Our team has already taken steps towards addressing some known issues, as we sat down together during my recent visit and started working on solutions.”
You might think that a group of supporters, even those who are organised, are overreaching a little by expecting an open dialogue with an owner about the future of the club. But it becomes relevant at Swindon for two reasons. Firstly, the supporters’ trust own 50 per cent of the County Ground after a landmark joint venture with the club. That purchase was made possible by a significant donation from Nigel Eady, a lifelong fan who passed away and left the club a legacy so long as they used it for the long-term benefit of the community. That is why supporters crave investment in the club and its facilities and crave too to see a plan of action for it.
But Swindon supporters are also scared by historic pain and thus guarded against mistreatment. Their club has repeatedly suffered financial difficulties and the humiliation of wayward owners. They had three separate takeovers in 13 years. They have been in administration twice and they were only able to begin the 2006-07 season when funding was found to pay the wages. This stuff keeps you on your toes, a landscape of red flags and early warning systems.
What we are really discussing here – no pun intended – is trust. When Clem Morfuni, the Australian businessman who owns Swindon Town, took over in 2021, he preached the gospel of transparency and vowed to take the club away from this magnetism towards self-inflicted chaos. There was promise, not least amongst a fanbase who recorded the highest average attendances since the Premier League in 1994.
And then promise and trust ebbed away again. Morfuni had stated that he was the complete owner of the club, but a Companies House document revealed in August 2023 that a significant percentage of his shares had been transferred to third parties. The failure to inform the EFL (or supporters) earned Morfuni a £10,000 fine.
Subsequently, concern from fans – including the trust – about the club’s cash flow position were realised when Swindon were charged with making late payments to HMRC and to third-party clubs for transfers. Swindon, it transpired, had been operating under a three-window transfer ban later reduced to two on appeal. Transparency never lasts long here.
“It’s those sorts of things that erode trust and have a lasting impact on supporters,” Paris says. “It’s multiple things that pile on top of each other. All we ever want is a credible owner. And all we will ever do is hold every owner we have to account, because that is our responsibility.
“Over the last 10 years we have had Lee Power and all the circus that brought. We have had Jed McCrory and now we have Clem. He bangs on about how the club has been badly run for the last 30 years, and to some extent he’s right. But he might be the owner that takes us to the National League.”
The great tragedy here is the farcical wastage, the grand chasm that exists between Swindon’s potential and their current malaise. Go south from Swindon and you don’t hit a Football League club until Bournemouth; go west and it’s all the way to Bristol. This is the only professional football club in Wiltshire and the county is home to more than half a million people.
That is the great frustration that fuels the resentment and demands the scepticism of supporters. They are tired of worrying about the worst-case scenarios when they should be dreaming of the best. They are sick of their club being tied down by weights. “Part of owning a club is a commitment to selling hope,” says Paris, and he’s absolutely right. That should never be asking too much.