At the height of the Gate Money saga, a group of National League club chairmen and executives became engaged in a frenetic email exchange.
These men, and they were all men, had kept their clubs afloat during the early months of the pandemic. They subsequently agreed to begin the 2020-21 season behind closed doors because they were promised a grant would cover their lost gate receipts, only to find themselves in the hole because the League had decided to divide the £10 million lottery grant they were given using a secret formula.
As they discussed their options, Wrexham AFC’s Spencer Harris, signed off a contribution with the bilingual signature “Kind regards - Cofion Gorau”.
The director of a northern-based side replied, saying “Hi Cofion. Pardon my ignorance, but I can’t see anyone called Cofion listed as a director on your website?”
Harris politely pointed out that his name wasn’t Cofion and also omitted to mention he was poised to sell Wrexham to Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. This was a pity, because what the aforementioned director lacked in cultural sensitivity, he more than made up for in his love of Hollywood action movies.
Perhaps in lieu of an apology, he replied: “There’s a great line from Gladiator at the beginning of the film when the Roman army is lined up against the German hoards (sic). As he surveys the scene Russel (sic) Crowe tells his right hand: ‘A people should know when they are defeated. When I give the word unleash hell’.”
Yet the National League were more resilient than the German hordes. And around a thousand emails later these men realised that unleashing hell was going to cost them more than they could possibly hope to recover.
If their own lawyers were advising them their chances of successful legal action were only around the 50 percent mark, the risk of expensive defeat was too much to take and this merely compounded the collective, impotent rage.
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Welcome to the almost Maoist world of non-league football, a world which was into permanently-evolving chaos well before it became fashionable in British political circles.
When the story that inspired Gate Money broke in October 2020, I’d become so desensitised by procurement scandals, defective PPE equipment and lockdown violations that it barely registered with me.
I was there, as a six-year-old Maidstone fan, when the Alliance Premier League was born in August 1979 and, like an elder brother who’ll always see a child in a fully-grown adult sibling, it always felt non-league to me, even as it evolved into a multi-million pound business.
I’d seriously underestimated just how much anger the saga had unleashed.
Around a year after the news first broke I found myself on a Zoom call with a Dutch film director called Jasper Spanjaart, who’d previously made The Unknown Torres and was now looking to tell an altogether different kind of story.
The anger hadn’t dissipated. Clubs were not “moving on.” Questions remained unanswered.
Why did the National League ignore the government’s explicit statements that the £10 million was to cover gate receipts? What happened in the three days between the announcement of the award and the news of the distribution? Why did the league then ask David Bernstein to investigate their conduct and why did they then bury his report? Why did no one plan for COVID’s return? And why did clubs end up getting fined for failing to fulfil their fixtures when they’d run out of money?
For the next eight months we tried to investigate what had happened and our enquiries touched all sorts of nerves.
The most co-operative clubs weren’t exclusively those who had monetary axes to grind, although three of them, Chester, Dulwich and Maidstone had all lost out to the tune of around £300k between them.
Other clubs were reticent. We spoke to an ex-Chairman who had been an extremely vocal critic of the league but who was reluctant to say anything on camera because his club wanted to “move on” from the saga. The Chief Executive of another side, one of the biggest losers, emailed us to say he was happy to be interviewed. 13 minutes later his press officer emailed us to say the Chief Executive had changed his mind.
The league didn’t want to talk at all. They were civil, but they declined multiple invitations to put their side of the story and refused us permission to film at their AGM.
I wish we hadn’t had to cut the “Hi Cofion” scene, because Gate Money is not a film that will make you laugh. It may well make you angry.
The trailer was watched by 50,000 people in the first 12 hours after it was released. We were swamped with messages, emails and DMs from fans, directors and well-wishers.
It seemed that if you really wanted to piss off an Englishman, all you had to do was go after his football team.
The first screenings took place at Maidstone and Tonbridge on Friday November 18th, at 7.30pm. One normally docile source said: “I’m livid,” after watching it. Another said, simply: “Fucking hell.”
It was then shown to a sold out cinema at Chester’s Storyhouse, after which Chester FC’s manager Calum McIntrye opened up about his own struggles during lockdown, saying just how thrilled he was to learn that clubs had been building new clubhouses while he was forced to drive a delivery van because he had only £7 left in the bank: “On the first day I backed into a wall. On the second I took off a wing mirror.”
A subsequent screening at Dulwich drew an equally apoplectic reaction and the film will now go on general release this Wednesday, November 30th, (just after the conclusion of Saudi Arabia v Mexico).
If you’d like to find out whether or not we unleashed hell, you can watch the full documentary on YouTube from 9pm.
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