Salisbury, my home town, is hardly a hot-bed of football. It has sustained a decent lower league soccer team since the present Salisbury City FC was formed in 1947.
Just four months ago, Salisbury City was riding high in the Football Conference, with an outside chance of reaching the play-offs to the Football League.
Today it has virtually nothing. No players, no fixtures, and no league to play in.
Talk is rife about corruption in FIFA, but there is something rotten about a game that can leave loyal supporters of a club that carries the crest of their City with no hope and no prospects.
In May, the owner of the Club decided to sell. The buyers were a ‘Dubai-based Moroccan businessman’, Outail Touzar who bought 98% of the shares for £1, and a long-standing fan, Mark Winter who was allocated the remaining 2%. Both would have been sanctioned by the FA as ‘fit and proper persons’ to take over the running of the Club. Creditors were pressing, so Winter put up £75,000 to keep them at bay. Touzar, the so called ‘money-man’, put in nothing and according to reports withdrew £4000 in cash from the company bank account.
Quite why those involved did not enter into even the rudimentary due diligence we shall never know. Suffice to say that Touzar then disappeared, but proceeded to claim via a remote website that he had set up based in the Norfolk Islands (?), that he had ‘signed’ a number of Spanish and Italian players and coaches for the new season.
A new set of directors along with the previous owner went to the High Court last month to get the sale annulled, a process that has since been challenged. Meanwhile the Football Conference had demoted Salisbury City to the Conference League South, saying that they needed to settle debts in full to stay in the Conference at all.
For whatever reason, the FA did not accept the change of ownership and refused to meet the new ‘directors’ saying that it was still not proven that they were the legal owners – and confirmed that Salisbury City was being expelled from the Conference all together.
That has prompted a torrent of abuse, much of coming from the new ‘board’. In a formal press statement, they said that they had been “. . . monumently stitched up by the FA and the Football Conference”. Adding, “The Conference board are a total disgrace governed by individuals with clear agendas against this club”. How to win friends etc!
Strange PR tactics when they still intended to go to the High Court again in order to mount another appeal to the FA over their outright expulsion.
Meanwhile via his ‘Official Salisbury City website’ based wherever, Touzar this week issued a statement saying “Salisbury City FC and its Legal Owners Mr Adyl, Mr Hassan, Mr Rachid, Mr Yahya, and Mr Outail and the others (don’t recognise any of those as Wiltshire Moonrakers) would like also to thank the FA for its brave decision to kick out and deny entry to a gang of idiots that was barking outside the FA offices and trying to force entry without invitation to an apeal hearing that they had nothing to do with and no legal authority (sic)."
Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
As things stand, within two months, the people of Salisbury have lost their Club to a shadowy chancer with no connection to the UK, Wiltshire or the City of Salisbury – and to the messed up tactics of well-meaning people who probably couldn’t organise a p… up in a brewery.
