At Blackpool, a football club that retains a seaside air of old-school dash despite its modern disgraces, an end to the current turmoil lies just over the horizon, not yet in sight. Having recently mourned the passing of their former captain Jimmy Armfield, universally celebrated as one of English football’s most upstanding gentlemen, Blackpool today are a testing ground for the rules determining who is a fit and proper person to run a professional football club.
Owen Oyston, the club’s long-term owner, and his son, Karl, were ruled by a high court judge in November to have taken out £26.77m in an “illegitimate stripping” of the club following their 2010 promotion to the Premier League, which was lauded as romantic at the time. They were ordered to pay the minority shareholder Valeri Belokon, whom they missed out while taking so much money for themselves, that sum, £26.77m, plus the £4.5m original cost of Belokon’s shares, his very considerable legal costs and interest.
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