As crowds of Fleetwood Town fans swarmed on to the pitch to commemorate their impressive success over Premier League champs Arsenal on Tuesday night, the regional millionaire who had actually made it all possible wasn’t there.

Sharp-elbowed business owner Andy Pilley, who purchased the small Lancashire club for buttons when it was so broke it could not pay the gamers’ salaries, was 14 miles away– in His Majesty’s Prison Kirkham.

Sources inform me he was allowed to listen to the match on the radio, and ‘danced around his cell’ as 19-year-old Conor Haughey scored the charge that sent out the magnificent Gunners, whose team expense ₤ 1.16 billion– 500 times more than Fleetwood’s– to among the unlikeliest beats in football history.

It was a shock so seismic it even made headings in The New York Times.

Without wanting to rain on the parade of a blighted previous fishing port whose 26,000 souls are frantically in requirement of something to raise their seasoned spirits, it deserves stating why Pilley, 56, is serving a 13-year prison term, bied far at Preston Crown Court in 2023.

The wheeler-dealer who when offered inexpensive football t-shirts on Fleetwood market advanced by establishing BES Utilities, a business that supposed to provide competitively priced electrical power and gas to small companies.

It turned into one of the town’s greatest companies and made him an approximated fortune going beyond ₤ 100million. It was with this that he had the ability to till ₤ 40million into changing his cherished club.

The court heard how he covertly utilized representatives positioning as independent energy consultants to cold-call possible customers, before fooling them into signing prolonged rip-off agreements with BES.

In painful individual declarations, 28 of his victims– who ran coffee shops, beauty parlor, a dog-grooming parlour and even a kids’s cancer charity– informed how they were driven into financial obligation by Pilley’s ‘inhumane’ rip-off.

Some stated their marital relationships had actually separated under the stress, and one was on the verge of suicide.

As Judge Graham Knowles informed Pilley: ‘Yours might have been an amazing story of redemption, success, regional heroism and philanthropy. Rather, it is a sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and scams.’

Considered that he caused such torment, we may have anticipated Fleetwood’s mostly blue-collar fans, the salted ‘Cod Army’, to be well rid of him. And yet, absolutely nothing might be even more from the reality.

Their Highbury arena still shows a huge poster revealing him kissing one of the prizes Fleetwood won under his stewardship, and before every match the fans sing his applauds to the tune of Winter Wonderland, replacing ‘sleigh bells sound’ for ‘there’s just one Andy Pilley’.

In the club store, where sales of reproduction red-and-white t-shirts and headscarfs are expanding on the back of Tuesday’s win, I satisfy Charles Kellett, who started slipping over a boundary wall to view Fleetwood nearly 70 years earlier, and has actually followed them since.

‘Everybody here enjoys Andy, despite the fact that he’s away on his “holidays” at present,’ he winks. ‘The very first time I satisfied him, on an away journey to Torquay, he remained in the bar with us, and he shook my hand and purchased me a pint. He’s a millionaire, however still among the kids.’

Gesturing to the 5,300-capacity arena, stylishly restored with Pilley’s millions (albeit that embittered Arsenal fans are groaning the pitch was ‘too little’ for their spoiled stars), Mr Kellett included: ‘Without Andy, none of this would be here. Did you see the state of this location before?’

Well, as it occurs, I did. For I was raised in Morecambe, 14 miles north, as the seagull flies, along the coast, and throughout the late Sixties, when Fleetwood’s aspirations extended no more than beating my home-town club in the county league, I ventured there.

If Arsenal’s super stars felt they had actually been plunged into a Stone Age bearpit on Tuesday, it was absolutely nothing compared to the febrile environment at the Cods versus Shrimps derby.

In those days, Fleetwood’s ground looked like an allocation. They used a cabbage-patch pitch surrounded by an obsolete speedway track, and we fans collected underneath a corrugated iron shed which we would kick consistently, sending a deafening metal echo that enhanced our earthy chants.

After one match, when I had to do with 12 years of ages, I was set upon and head-butted by another kid as I made my method to the coach.

For the gamers, conditions were no less neanderthal. Stuart Murdoch, who ended up being Fleetwood’s goalkeeper aged 18, in 1968, remembers being ‘paid’ with fish from the regional docks when there were inadequate funds for his ₤ 5 match cost. ‘We handled to consume for a week, if absolutely nothing else,’ he chuckles.

Today, the team are fairly well-paid experts; at that time they consisted of a postman, a window cleaner, and– undoubtedly in a town whose fishing market used 9,000 individuals– numerous dockworkers and trawlermen.

Murdoch states his contemporaries admire the woozy heights they have actually reached under Pilley and his 29-year-old kid, Jamie– who prospered his daddy when his scams conviction required him to give up ownership, and took control of BES Utilities, rebranding it Ruby Energy.

‘If you ‘d stated to anybody of my age that Fleetwood would one day beat the champs of the First Division, as it was then, they would have stated ‘generate the males in white coats’, he states.

So, however at least then the town was good-looking and flourishing. Developed by Queen Victoria’s preferred designer, Decimus Burton, who organized its streets like a semi-circular fan, it boasted a great pier, manicured gardens and equaled its gaudier neighbour, Blackpool, as a traveler resort.

Fleetwood likewise housed a huge ICI chemicals plant, and however on a peninsula surrounded on 3 sides by water, it had excellent transportation links, with a mainline train station and a traveler and vehicle ferryboat service to Northern Ireland.

Its wealth came from its 120-strong fleet of deep-sea trawlers, which transported in 180,000 loads of cod, haddock and hake from the North Atlantic each year, making it the greatest fishing port on England’s west coast at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.

Throughout the Second World War, when eastern ports such as Hull and Grimsby were under blockade, Fleetwood’s catch nurtured the country.

The dreadful decrease started in the late 1950s, when Britain ended up being involved in the very first of 3 ‘Cod Wars’ with Iceland, whose federal government challenged our trawlers ransacking their valued fishing premises and set out a 200-mile exemption zone.

Fleetwood’s old seadogs still talk of the skirmishes they combated with Icelandic warships in the gale-lashed Arctic Circle.

As the Icelanders rammed their boats and attempted to cut their trawl webs, they would try to frighten them off by playing ‘Rule Britannia’ over their speakers.

When that didn’t work, Fleetwood’s finest utilized harder techniques, among which, from 1973, has actually entered regional folklore.

When a warship steamed menacingly towards the trawler, Wyre Victory, skipper Tom Watson utilized a wartime gadget called a ‘fog buoy’– a heavy wood pallet hauled by a thick rope– to tangle around the opponent’s prop and sheer it off, disabling its engines.

Amongst British trawlermen, Watson’s bravery and resourcefulness made him a legend. In Whitehall, nevertheless, it was viewed as precariously intriguing, so he got a telegram summoning him home and buying him not to expose the event to journalism. He responded with 2 words: ‘Get f *** ed.’

Had our federal government revealed comparable defiance, Fleetwood may still have a fishing market today.

In 1976, under pressure from the United States, who wanted to calm Iceland due to the fact that it harboured 2 tactically important Nato bases, Labour prime minister James Callaghan acceded to the exemption zone.

The treaty he approved successfully sank Fleetwood’s whole deep-sea trawler fleet, and with it the town’s success.

That it has actually never ever recuperated appears when you take a cable car trip along its tatty high street, and from social stats putting it amongst the poorest, unhealthiest and most crime-ridden of British towns.

Modern-day Fleetwood has no pier, no train station, no ICI plant, no fishing boats beyond a couple of little inshore ones, and for many individuals, no hope.

Paradoxically, among the couple of successful services is Lofthouse of Fleetwood Ltd, makers of Fisherman’s Friend, the lozenges developed to safeguard the trawlermen of the past from colds and influenza throughout long and freezing weeks at sea.

The company’s creator, 19th-century Fleetwood pharmacist James Lofthouse, offered his menthol and eucalyptus oil solution as a cast to be rubbed into hurting joints, the lady who turned it into the strong pastille exported around the world (with a ₤ 79million income in 2025) was his daughter-in-law Doreen.

A marketing whizz who sent out tubes of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges to prominent figures such as Margaret Thatcher, the Prince of Wales and Ronald Reagan when she saw them cough or sneeze on television, Mrs Lofthouse developed the company whose factory ignores the docks.

They sponsored Fleetwood Town’s t-shirts at one time. Her love for the club were irreparably harmed in 1985 when they won the FA Vase, a cup objected to by little groups.

On the eve of the last at Wembley, an unnamed club officer chose to capitalise on the event by dumping Lofthouse of Fleetwood in favour of a higher-paying sponsor, whose logo design changed that of Fisherman’s Friend on the group t-shirts.

Doreen Lofthouse was not surprisingly livid, and– in spite of Andy Pilley’s duplicated overtures– ‘Mrs Fleetwood’, as she was passionately understood, cleaned her hands of the club.

A club source informs me that when she passed away, aged 91, in March 2021, and Fleetwood Town remembered her with a minute’s silence before a home match, her household decreased to participate in.

Debates such as this appear to swim around the Cods.

In between 2018 and 2021 they were handled by Joey Barton, presently remanded in jail as he waits for trial for a supposed attack which triggered a male– major eye injuries.

And their captain versus Arsenal was Ched Evans, now 37, who was imprisoned for raping a 19-year-old lady in a Rhyl hotel in 2012, however had his conviction quashed on appeal 4 years later on. Ever since he has actually combated to restore a when flashing profession.

Established in 1883, Fleetwood have actually been eliminated and reformed 5 times and, as just recently retired vice chairman Phil Brown informs me, their story has actually been among ‘boom and bust’, with big highs and dismal lows.

Andy Pilley was likewise imprisoned for 4 months in 1998 for taking from a post workplace where he worked as a counter clerk. By 2004 his energy organization was growing, and the previous Sunday league supervisor set his sights on owning his regional football club.

At the time Fleetwood had not paid its gamers for weeks, and Mr Brown, a regional RBS bank supervisor and longstanding Cods stalwart, appealed for assistance by means of a piece in the Blackpool Gazette.

Pilley, who was among his bank customers, stepped forward, initially with a modest sponsorship deal.

As he later on remembered, the ground was so shabby that when he attempted to open a window throughout a conference, the sash snapped off.

Rather of spending for the repair work, a main laughingly recommended that he may too pay a couple of thousand and purchase the entire club– so he did simply that.

This story might be apocryphal however according to experts the basic thrust holds true. Moving ‘like a whirlwind’, within a brief time Pilley had actually purchased out other investors and taken complete control.

Mr Brown, who left RBS in 2007 to work as head of industrial for BES Utilities, applauds Pilley, stating his inspiration for buying Fleetwood Town was borne simply out of his desire to assist the club and the larger neighborhood.

‘There are no negatives as concerns to Andy Pilley where Fleetwood Town are worried. What he provided for the club was rather amazing,’ he states, including that he has a hard time to think Pilley devoted the scams offenses, seeing him as ‘simply a sharp entrepreneur who was a simple target’.

You typically hear this rosy view in Fleetwood. Whatever the fact, there is no rejecting Pilley’s effectiveness as an owner. In a 10-year duration they won 6 promos, making long-serving gamer Nathan Pond (who played in 7 various departments and is now assistant supervisor) a location in the Guinness Book of Records.

When Pilley got here, they had simply 80 routine fans; there are now around 3,000. He likewise developed an outstanding ₤ 8million training school opened by Sir Alex Ferguson; and Fleetwood’s youth academy is on a par with those of football’s elite.

Pilley even got wed on the Fleetwood pitch, and his other half Gemma served in the club store.

He has actually explained his football enthusiasm as ‘practically a compulsive condition’– though when he appealed versus his scams conviction previously this year, arguing that his ADHD had disadvantaged him throughout his trial, this entreaty stopped working to encourage the court.

Today, Fleetwood Town were at discomforts to tension that his offenses were a private matter absolutely unassociated to the club. This was explained throughout the trial, they stated.

Whatever they have actually accomplished these previous 2 years accumulates to the huge fortune Pilley tilled in, and the club owes nearly ₤ 50million to business now run by his kid. The ₤ 400,000 benefit from the Arsenal match will make hardly a damage.

Next up, in the Carabao Cup quarter last, Fleetwood will deal with another giant in Everton– and as Pilley is enabled out of Kirkham on day release, possibly he may even be allowed to go to.

If so, the Cod Army will cheer their returning hero to the rafters.

For though this complicated character’s chicanery drove his victims to destroy and anguish, his kindness has actually brought back pride and intend to a long-forgotten town.

Extra reporting by Tim Stewart