SEND IN THE CLOWNS
Quick, name all 50 Premier League clubs since the start of 1992-93. You forgot about Oldham, right? Guessing the 72 current Football League teams would likely bring the same result. Still, most Latics probably didn’t care if outsiders had forgotten them… until now.
In 1990, Oldham Athletic reached the League Cup final and FA Cup semis under Joe Royle, drawing 3-3 with Manchester United before losing the replay in extra time. A year later, they played top-flight football for the first time since 1923. Today, Royle’s name adorns Boundary Park’s North Stand with unfortunate irony, as it’s emblematic to fans of what’s tearing the club apart – but more on that later. In the intervening three decades, the Latics’ gradual decline went largely unnoticed, until a soporific existence was enlivened in the worst way.
Now outsiders are paying attention, as they would when matches are interrupted by pitch invasions, tennis balls, aeroplane banners and coffins outside the ground. As Oldham flirt provocatively with a first ever plummet to non-league, fans are publicising their plight under Abdallah Lemsagam’s ownership. Obscurity is no longer an option.
“It’s easier to keep believing that the club is fine, but it’s not,” says Matt Dean, host of The Boundary Park Alert System! podcast. “The situation now is an accumulation of the apathy that’s rotted the club. I was there when we won the Division Two title, and at Wembley to see the League Cup final, and at Maine Road to play United – but that was 30 years ago. I’m sick of talking about it.”
How did we get here?
UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB
In most tales, dizzying highs become dismal lows. Oldham’s fall was less dramatic:
