YellowBelly Red
Viv Anderson
Keep the faith. We need grassroots football still, despite the gloomy outlook on the football pyramid.We had a nice little (ageing) ground in a nice town centre location (next to a river).
We developed one new stand that held almost 4k, overall ground capacity was limited to around 7k (although had held 10k+ previously). The other 3 sides were old and needed developing.
When successful we got crowds of around 5k at best, with some big games selling out.
The land the ground was on was owned by the cricket club, but was ours for as long as we wanted it - sporting covenant type thing with very low rent.
Building the new stand put us into a bad financial position, ITV Ditigal collapse, poor ownership, usual lower league stuff. Reynolds came in and did save us financially and backed the team, which boosted attendance. He always was a clown, trying to sign Gascoigne and Asprilla (I was there the game he was paraded around the pitch - madness).
All that was needed was a modest rebuild to get Feethams to 10k. But he then decided to build a massive out of town stadium to "get us to the Premier League". If he had build something that could be expanded in the future then fair enough, but 27000 capacity.
Suffice to say it bankrupted us and him in the process. That shows how mad he was, spending all his money on a vanity project that lost him his house.
The ground got sold out from under us (or taken off subsequent dodgy owners). The costs to run it were far too high for us, and any extra income was no where near enough and as tenants I am not sure we saw any of it anyway.
Worse than that the atmosphere was atrocious, less than 10% full was embarrassing and didn't help us at all.
We finally went truly bust and have started back at the very bottom, but have paid off all of debts we had.
We now ground share with a different rugby club and talk often turns to shouldn't we move back there and share with Darlington Mowden rugby club.
For me personally it is just is totally soulless and doesn't represent who or what Darlington Football Club are. It also represents the worst times as a supporter. We would never ever prosper there. Oh for a time machine!
Always liked calling off at Darlo for north-east games. Seem to remember a dirt cheap pub outside the station, which football fans frequented. Seem to remember one Saturday when we were at Newcastle, and Chelsea were at Boro.....and we all had the same idea to drink in Darlo!