Chairman on 20 years at Walsall

EXCLUSIVE

Jeff Bonser is celebrating 20 years at Walsall where he now stands supreme as the great survivor, and senior statesman, of the region’s football club owners, writes Martin Swain.

His contemporaries from an era of challenging fortunes and sparse success in the West Midlands, Villa’s Doug Ellis and Wolves’ Sir Jack Hayward, have handed on their empires and retired to less stressful ways of filling their days.

And, although much their junior at a mere 64, Bonser wouldn’t be human if he wasn’t thinking of following suit.

“One day the club has got to move on; it’s got to,” he says.

“And maybe I’ve been here too long. It’s something Roy Whalley and I often talk about. Have we been here too long?”

Bonser recognises the demands of this new age, its impatience and unquenchable thirst for success even at homespun Walsall, where a young team challenging for a place in the Championship is still not enough to satisfy some crusty elements of the Saddlers fan base.

But as quickly as the self-doubt arrives, the answer follows.

“We don’t think so,” he says.

“If what we do is not glamourous enough for you, if you want to risk bankruptcy and receivership, well I’m not your man.

“I’ve already gambled £1.8m and that could have gone wrong. But I have confidence that the club will repay me.

“And I don’t want someone coming here, changing the culture overnight and putting everything we have built at risk.

“Some of the people who work with me have been here 20 years or more. They rely on this club for their livelihood.

“I’ve come here, worked every day and it’s a bit like selling your house.

“You want to sell it on in better condition than you bought it. But you want the people who buy it off you treat it the same.

“People have approached me to take it on but I’ve not been convinced for the right reasons. I think it’s always for sale but only for the right reasons.

“One day someone will come along, a much younger man than me, who I will be confident to hand it on to.

“But I think the last 20 years, inarguably, have been successful and I don’t want to throw that away.”

Bonser has enjoyed a prickly co-existence with some of his club’s supporters down the years.

At one stage, he became so incensed with their criticism, he put the club up for sale only to withdraw it when no willing purchasers emerged.

He has been accused of too eagerly breaking up developing teams by selling its best players to which his answer is always that he deals in the realities of Walsall’s profit and loss columns and not the fantasies of the “buy-now, pay-later” generation.

This is only to be expected from a man who, as a lifelong fan, stepped on to the board with the club in deep peril in 1988.

“The club was over £1m in debt and losing £12,000 a week, playing in a dilapidated stadium with very little car parking space,” he recalls.

“The place was falling down; we would never have got a safety certificate these days. It was the Centenary year and it seemed to me that it had spent much of its 100 years stumbling from one financial crisis to another, nearly all of them spent in the lower leagues.

“The great sadness about Walsall was that all anyone had to talk about from the past was that one occasion – beating Arsenal in the FA Cup in 1933.

“There was bugger all else to celebrate. That seemed very sad to me.”

The key to Bonser was the ground-breaking move to Bescot, an expansion of the income streams which brought markets and conferences to its new stadium and a prudent, live within-your-means existence.

Further crises came and went, notably the infamous collapse of the ITV Digital deal which took him as close as ever to taking the club into administration.

But he plunged his own money into the Saddlers and backed his business acumen to lead it away from the receiver’s office.

He has no time, as a result, for those who have chosen a different path.

He says: “Over 40 clubs have gone into administration in recent years; that’s a fair amount.

“And I’ve got no sympathy with them at all or the people who run them and certain amounts of people who support them.

“They end up in that mess through total mismanagement, weakness in the face of supporter pressure; they have got to learn to say ‘no’ regardless of the pressure from the fans.

“But clubs that spend money they haven’t got are effectively cheating. They are trying to achieve success by spending someone else’s money.

“We’ve had the opportunity to go into administration. I seriously considered it after the ITV Digital deal collapse put our future in doubt.

“Most of the money we needed I put in there, interest free, because I backed my judgement to trade out of it.

“I think £1.8m in all. I’ve still got over £1m in there. I’ve never taken a penny out in wages; but I might take a bit out of the Scotty Dan and Daniel Fox deals and frankly why shouldn’t I?

“I’m 64, and I’m not going to take it with me when I die am I? That’s human nature.

“My responsibility here is to 300 people, 100 full-time staff and 200 part-time. Now, it’s their livelihood which is at stake.

“I’ve been in industry all my life and we’re a big employer here with a responsibility to our employees and the local suppliers.

“They have got to have confidence in you. People want to do business with us because they know they are going to get paid.

“Walsall will never go into administration because I will never allow it. I think what happened at Leeds, for example, was disgusting. And Leicester and Luton.

“How on earth are they allowed to get away with it? The year Leicester went into administration they got promotion.

“But what happened to all the folk they owed money to? You just don’t do that.”

Now he takes great pride in Walsall’s soon-to-be-opened new training ground, it’s thriving off-the-pitch commercial revenues and resourceful ability to punch above its weight.

“You wrote an article criticising me many years ago about not giving the fans the chance to ‘live the dream,’” he tells me.

“You were partly right. But I don’t like the dream; I’ve got to deal with the reality. And we’ve got stronger as a club in the last 20 years.

“In the last 10, we’ve enjoyed more years in the Championship than we did in the previous 110.

“And I am ambitious to get to the Championship because I think we can compete more effectively; we can stop there and not be a yo-yo club. We stayed there for three years don’t forget.

“I’m confident we can get there again. We might not make it this year although we can at least make the play-offs.

“Realistic supporters would settle for that but the problem is the bar gets raised; if we missed out everyone would be disappointed in what would for me still have been a terrific, progressive season.

“We’ve already had more success this century than the whole of the last one. But I do want to give it something else to celebrate other than that game in 1933.”