In the 1980s, a big night out meant my brothers and mates donning our shiny shirts, necking several pints of Tennent’s, then shuffling around the dancefloor of Pier 39 nightclub in Cleethorpes to the sound of George Benson’s Give Me the Night.
Decades later I found out that the person who wrote this song, Rod Temperton, was a former fish filleter, born down the road from that now-defunct nightspot. He also played in the band Heatwave, wrote on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album and has a back catalogue that puts him in the pantheon of great songwriters. I love the pictures of Rod next to Quincy Jones in the studios of LA or hearing his Lincolnshire accent talking about writing for Donna Summer. Despite his monumental success, he was known as The Invisible Man in the music industry owing to his low profile.
I’ve been fortunate to work with several brilliant people throughout my career who, like Rod, are more substance over spotlight, people happy to do the work to make the organisation look good but don’t require the recognition themselves. Andrew Pettit, my partner at Grimsby Town, is one such leader. When we took control of the club in 2021 we agreed that the chair role would have a three-year term. Last week we announced that my term was up. Neither of us wanted the role, but we knew what was required was to help drive cultural transformation. As I had spent a large part of my career doing this work, it made sense for me to take the first shift. Now it’s Andrew’s turn.
I had preconceived ideas of what the role might be, largely ill-informed by the oak-panelled private boardroom we inherited and the blazers and club ties that still exist for some directors today. The reality of the role is that Andrew and I have done everything together as partners, and that will continue, but the chair role is a specific job with an unusual emotional weight. The day-to-day involves working with the chief executive and head coach to build a culture of high performance while driving the board conversations on long-term strategy and investments. The culmination of activity is match day, as the team you produce is the proof point of all the weekly activity and long-term thinking.
Match days are also when supporters and commercial partners rightly want to talk to you and share ideas about the club. There is often media to do, and I always tried to walk the ground to get a chance to say hello to as many people as possible. It’s about being visible and available, come rain or shine. Win, lose or draw.
I underestimated how a lifetime of supporting the same team can be a source of great kindness and solidarity. I recently visited one of our supporters who had written me a beautifully-considered letter when results were going badly. It offered a hand to pull me up for air from the depths of post-match Twitter, or the occasionally treacherous shallows of other social media; a reminder that most people love and care for the football clubs that are inextricably entwined into the narratives of their own families, irrespective of the results. My favourite part of the conversation was when he told me that he liked the fact “I don’t care about how I dress”.
We bought the club as part of a wider project to try to be useful in helping change the narrative of the place we love: a narrative that has been backward-looking to a period of industrial decline, to one respectful of the past but future-oriented. Over the past three years, alongside the club, I am proud to have been part of the team that has raised the money to build an Onside Youth Zone in Grimsby and to have co-founded a charity called Our Future, which is focused, among many things, on building a coalition of people to make change a reality and to reconnect to all those people who are from our town, have had stellar careers and are looking to reconnect to the community. I am convinced that the football club can be a connector and conduit to improve both the prospects and the impression people have about our town.
It’s still unclear to me whether people who have grown up supporting a club should own one. The highs are intensely high, but the lows have an acuity unlike anything I have experienced. Having an entrepreneurial career helps, as the past 25 years have been about taking risks and living with uncertainty and often failure. Failure is written into the life I have chosen. I have been able to dust myself off from all of them in business, whereas failure at a football club is inconceivable to me. It means too much. The potential failure of a 146-year-old organisation that is core to my own and a whole town’s identity on your watch feels like a challenge few would consciously and willingly take on.
That said, I would, of course, sign up again for this journey in the time it takes someone to write “lefty, tofu-eating, DEI warrior”. We achieved what we set out to do three years ago by transforming the culture, re-establishing ourselves as an EFL club and had the bonus of a historic FA Cup run last year. We have the ambition, vision and a strategy for a brighter future and a head coach and chief executive to match. We have new investors in the wings and are optimistic about an independent regulator we have lobbied hard for. Two weeks after writing about how hard last season was personally, I felt energised, rejuvenated and excited about the season ahead. I am proud of the past three years and believe we are in good shape to kick on. In reality, Andrew and I will continue to work together, but he will be swapping his song writing for lead vocals, and I will grab a tambourine and move back into the lineup.
Jason Stockwood is the vice-chair of Grimsby Town
