Following a multi-million-pound takeover, Bath City FC has entered a new era. Simon Horsford meets Executive Chair Andrew Stalbow to talk ambition, community and Twerton Park – and discover how the club plans to unlock its long-held potential. (Photography courtesy of Bath City Photos/S Howe)
Which team in Bath holds the record for the highest attendance? Bath Rugby? No, it’s Bath City, with 18,020 in January 1960 for a third-round FA Cup tie against Brighton & Hove Albion. It’s significant because it shows the kind of potential that led to an investor group, headed by former mobile games entrepreneur and football fan Andrew Stalbow, buying the club in a deal – initially worth £6.3 million – that was recently overwhelmingly approved by the shareholders and supporters of the former community-owned club.
Bath City may have had its ups and downs since those heady days and currently languishes in the seventh tier of the English football league – Southern League Premier South – but the future has surely rarely looked brighter. And before anyone gets carried away, no-one – at least for now – is talking about, or expecting, a Wrexham-like rise from non-league to the Championship in three seasons, one that was documented by Disney and kick-started by Hollywood pair Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney). This is more to do with investing quietly and sensibly in a club which, despite struggling of late both on and off the pitch and being overshadowed by its rugby counterpart, remains a hugely important part of the community in Twerton – and Bath itself. And yet the amount of money being put into the club is a major signifier as it represents the biggest ever single investment in a non-league club. As Stalbow sees it, “this can be a football and a rugby city”.
Here too is a club that epitomises the roots of football, one which in recent years has literally been propped up by donations from some of its supporters. It’s the kind of team too that succinctly captures Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s claim – made during Fifa boss Gianni Infantino’s World Cup stake-selling fiasco – that football “belongs to the people who fill the stands and who stand on the touchline week in, week out, rain or shine.”
It’s such attributes that caught Stalbow’s attention, and it’s soon apparent after we meet in one of the club’s function rooms that he has an eye for a good thing. Stalbow, who grew up in Watford and now splits his time between Los Angeles and Bath, had an early stint as a journalist/researcher at The Telegraph, before in 2008, he says, “I moved over to LA to work for Fox [Entertainment] and my job was to take their TV content like The Simpsons or Family Guy, or film content like Avatar, to mobile phones and I started doing that before the iPhone came out.
“I had the worst office on the lot as no-one thought mobile [entertainment] was going anywhere, but then it took off and we did some really big deals. Then [the film] Rio came out around the same time as [the video game] Angry Birds – which was created by 10 people [at Rovio] in Helsinki – and I thought ‘why don’t we mash them up together’ and we got this Angry Birds/Rio game and marketed it like it was a movie but it’s just an app and it worked well.”
Stalbow went on to work with Rovio when mobile gaming and entertainment was becoming an increasingly important media platform before co-founding another mobile games company, Seriously, with the aim of creating the “Pixar of mobile”. It soon developed into “a business that was generating $500,000 a day with two million people around the world playing our game [Best Fiends] for an hour a day.” The company was turning over annual revenue of more than $100 million when it was sold in 2019 with Stalbow continuing to work with the new owners for a short time before he branched into teaching entrepreneurship at UCLA. A couple of years ago, his focus turned to football.
“I thought I wanted to do something because there are a lot of tailwinds in football. In a world of AI, football and human competition are going to be increasingly important. I’m a massive fan and I love the connection of going to a game, the big occasion. I loved following England and Watford – unfortunately for me. I was born in the hospital next to the ground and it was the ultimate community club because they went on a journey from the Fourth Division to the First Division. My Dad’s great but Graham Taylor [the manager at that time] was like a father figure to me,” he laughs.
It wouldn’t take much for this stadium to be rocking.
So how do you get from Watford and LA to Bath City? At the start of the process, Stalbow had about 10 clubs on his list and then “about 15 months ago, I got a phone call from a firm representing Bath City saying they were wanting to raise some money, would you be interested? And I thought ‘yes, of course’. Bath City is obvious – if you don’t have your football hat on, it sounds big.
“I’ve always been attracted to projects where it’s kind of David versus Goliath. I remember when I first came down and people said ‘oh it’s a rugby city’ but actually if you go back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it was a football city.” The club dates back to 1889 and at different points featured Stan Mortensen and Tony Book and were even managed by Malcolm Allison. Aside from that record high in the cup against Brighton, it also attracted a crowd of around 7,000 in January 1994 for another third round FA Cup tie against Stoke City.
“I knew a lot of CEOs of other mobile game companies and investors and people that love football and they wanted to be part of something. So I needed [a club] that was accessible internationally because they were from around the world. I also wanted a strategy as good as the mobile games one and I figured I wanted to work with a smaller club and follow their story of trying to get up [through] the leagues.” It would also, he says, be somewhere where the fans and the community were entrenched right in the heart of it “because that’s what I’d grown up with at Watford and where this thing could be a pillar of the community. I quickly realised it had to be here.
“It’s close to London – like a short commute in LA – and it’s a beautiful city, the backdrop to period dramas with an amazing history. I can see football and tourism growing a bit.”
Bath City became a community-owned club in 2017 but Covid hit hard as the pandemic shut down the non-league teams from playing “and so revenue streams were turned off,” adds Stalbow, “and many of the fans had to loan the club money” to help them to keep going. “They had some unbelievably well-qualified volunteers across the board and actually attendances went up but it just got to the point where the club was losing money every year…and they were saddled with over a million pounds of debt.” The result is that it became increasingly hard to be competitive.
“So,” says Stalbow, “we structured a deal where the idea was to raise a minimum of $6 million and then target $8 million and that will be enough for us to make a difference. Then if we do well we think there is a lot more capital that will come in here. We actually raised $8.5m (£6.3 million). It’s still a community club, it’s just got a different ownership structure. I see myself as a custodian. We just need to live within our means and have to be super-smart about how we allocate [the money] but we want a competitive budget for the team.”
“It takes a village too do this,” he adds, The board is headed by Stalbow as executive chairman and includes various high-profile investors [from an investment group of around 50] with experience in technology, sport, games, venture capital, consulting and, notably, the Bath-born co-founder of Tears for Fears, Curt Smith (now based in LA), who will also be an ambassador for the club. “I know the power of what a wonderful football club can be for the community of Twerton and the city of Bath and I wanted to be a part of that,” says Smith of a district that has frequently been ignored. “My grandmother lived a stone’s throw from the ground, so I’ve got a lot of fond memories of Twerton. I even played here for Percy Boys club.”
This can be a football and a rugby city.
There will also be a representative of the Supporters Society on the new board, and a Community Share and Protected Rights Deed, which gives the society prior consent rights over aspects of the club, such as club colours and the use of Twerton Park.
What’s telling is that when the idea of investing was first mooted last season, the club were mid-table in the National League South but then endured their worst-ever run in the division – 14 games without a victory – before eventually being relegated. Stalbow, who took the disappointment as providing “more of a challenge” as it would now take more time and money, found his fellow investors similarly enthused “because they want to go on a journey.” He has talked of hoping to get the club “league ready” maybe in the next five years.
Stalbow’s deft handling of the lead-up to the purchase ensured support came from both former chairman, David McDonagh, who described it as a “momentous occasion” (he is now the Supporters Society representative on the board) and Ian McKay, chairman of the Bath Supporters’ Society, who pointed to the new owners’ understanding of “what makes this club special.” Even Bath City’s most high-profile fan, the film director Ken Loach, ‘applauded plans which are well considered, ambitious and exciting for supporters.’
The stadium is surely key to any improvements. It may be likeably old school but the investors’ surveyor described it as being “end of life”. There was the mooted re-development [in 2020] but that got rejected by the council. “Our view is this is a sports, entertainment and community hub right on the heart of Twerton,” says Stalbow.
“We haven’t built the plans yet but the stadium does need work. We want to make it a place where people would come at 12 o’clock and stay after [a game] as a great place to hang out as we could potentially offer other entertainment.” He mentions restaurants and music. “Our job is to build a football experience for the fans” and as Stalbow intimated in a letter to shareholders that means keeping costs “seriously low” from season tickets to beer. “We also hope to show young players that this is a great place for them to come and start their career.” They are also committed to the women’s team and want to invest there too.
What about increasing the size of the ground? “I think we have to earn the right. Last season’s average attendance was about 1,100 and the season before 1,400 or 1,500. So right now we don’t need to increase because we have quite a lot of capacity to fill.”
He adds that the club definitely needs a better playing surface where drainage is an issue [at the moment there isn’t even a full-time groundsman], while “we also need to modernise the changing rooms and have better recovery facilities. We are also [going] to work on a data science platform” to enhance player performance.
At the time of writing, the club had made an erratic start to the season – although they did win the “A4 derby” – 2-0 against Chippenham Town (attracting a crowd just one shy of 1,700). And showing continuity is a key factor, Stalbow is genuinely supportive of manager Scott Bartlett. “My assessment is that he’s actually done it before by taking Weston-super-Mare from the seventh tier to the upper echelons of the National League. In terms of my conversations with him so far and the way he handles himself, I think he’s got what it takes to be a Football League manager and I’ve talked a lot about wanting this club to be Football League ready.” Hardly surprising then that Bartlett is relishing the challenge of these “ambitious and exciting plans”.
Ultimately, the aim, stresses Stalbow, is that he and his fellow investors “will bring the resources and the ambition to Bath City. Everyone knows they should be a football league team and it’s our job to unlock that potential in partnership with the community and the fans. It wouldn’t take much for this stadium to be rocking.”
It promises to be quite a journey.