HOME TOWN HERO HEADS UNITED BUY-UP
HUGH SULLIVAN
A year of increasingly bitter conflict between the owners of Hastings United football club and Hastings Borough Council (HBC) came to a seemingly inevitable conclusion last week with the sale of the club to fresh investors. The majority of the shares previously held by a partnership of two directors, Daren Burney and Peter Sherlock, have been bought by a local consortium headed by former captain, manager and current director of football at the club, Dean White.
United celebrate promotion, April 2022
The names of others involved in the purchase have yet to be revealed as this newspaper goes to press. However, White has been associated with the club at many different stages of his long football career, and his active involvement in its new era will be welcomed by many supporters and well-wishers.
Born and raised in Hastings, and playing his early football with Junior Club Tackleway, White went on to a professional career with Chelsea, Millwall and Gillingham. He came back to captain and manage Hastings Town (the forerunner of the current United club), became head of recruitment and then assistant manager at Brighton & Hove Albion, and later took other recruitment roles at Sunderland, Hull City and Spurs before being appointed as director of football at the Pilot Field in June 2016.
He and his consortium partners have inherited an almost wholly new management team and playing squad since the departure of Gary Elphick, most of his first team players, and former CEO Billy Wood at the end of last season. Of the 11 starting last Saturday’s game at Dulwich Hamlet, only Craig Stone, now assistant manager, remained from Elphick’s last selection, barely four months before. However, not only early results but also supporter enthusiasm for the new-look side have been encouraging (see our report on page 23).
The era of Burney and Sherlock, which started with their arrival at the club in 2015 and their buy-out of majority shares from previous owner Dave Ormerod the following year, will be remembered positively both for on-the-field successes and for the setting-up of the football academy which has produced several excellent and now maturing players.
Their go-ahead young manager, Chris Agutter, guided United to the top of the South-East Division of the Isthmian League in 2019-20 and again in 2020-21, only to be robbed of promotion by the suspension of each season as a result of Covid lockdowns and social restrictions. When Agutter left precipitately in October 2021, Elphick took over: his team won the divisional title in April 2022, and achieved a top-half finish in the Isthmian Premier League last season.
But the overriding ambition of Burney and Sherlock, who are also in business together as professional property developers, was to relocate the club from the Pilot Field to a proposed new stadium at Tilekiln, the cost to be financed by selling off the former ground for housing. In a parting statement issued last week, they made it clear that it was HBC’s rejection of this project which drove them to quit.
The former owners went on to warn: “The club now finds itself in a position where it needs to find a new site to relocate to or incur substantial costs for the Pilot Field refurbishment and redevelopment which runs into millions of pounds. Maintenance costs there rise year on year to achieve basic health and safety standards. The Council have not offered any alternate site, and publicly say they want to help and assist, yet no meaningful dialogue or proposal has been made. With the Council perilously close to expending their remaining reserve funds, we remain doubtful any assistance will be forthcoming.”
That meant no foreseeable prospect of attaining their other ambitions “to grow and challenge for promotions to the Football League, as well as providing facilities for all local clubs and the several hundred youth, women, children and disability teams that play under the club banner.”
However, the statement ended positively with an offer to “try to assist the new ownership through the initial transition”, and a wish for the club’s continued on-field success. “Hopefully, now that the club is in local ownership, there may be a way for the club and council to work constructively together in whatever form that may be.”
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