Charles Bannerman - Nairn County cash crisis raises wider football questions
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THE mysteriously sudden announcement that the Mackintosh family were ending their substantial financial support for Nairn County sent shock waves through the Highland League club last week.
Once again Station Park has become overshadowed by the spectre of a bygone era of poverty and lack of direction.
Long-serving manager Les Fridge resigned and crisis meetings were arranged for this week, with the future of the 102-year-old football club hanging in the balance.
A couple of years ago I met Peter Mackintosh, who until Tuesday was club chairman. Although this had nothing to do with football, the conversation still inevitably turned to Nairn County.
The real surprise came when, in contrast with just about every other football benefactor, Peter told me that the family’s input didn’t entail any hard-line insistence on a string of trophies. Contributing to the community through backing the local club was at least as important.
That’s a very altruistic view – especially if a recent report is even remotely accurate in its claim that over 20 years, through Narden Services, they’ve contributed around £1 million.
During the period of Mackintosh patronage, some on-field progress was certainly made and Nairn’s status as perpetual whipping boys disappeared.
Successes ran to three North Cup victories and one in the Highland League Cup where Nairn were also runners-up to Brora this year.
However, in the league itself, the club’s one and only Highland League title remains its 1975-76 triumph.
Even finishes in the top three or four gave way to eighth place in each of the last two seasons.
Nairn were therefore unable even to come close to the play-offs for a place among much less well resourced rivals in League Two.
Arguably that’s not a huge return even for such understanding benefactors who, it’s commonly said, have facilitated an extremely generous Station Park wage structure.
So generous, in fact, that not only did other Highland League clubs find it impossible to compete with Nairn for personnel, so allegedly did League Two neighbours Elgin City.
That brings me back to when I recently questioned the value for money the Highland League gets relative to player effectiveness and input.
There’s now an online funding site running in an attempt to keep paying part-time footballers well above what their ability and place in a realistic market should dictate. So should Nairn’s well-paid players have won more? Probably, notwithstanding the decidedly dove-like approach the club’s former money men say they took.
Nairn’s likely return to the subsistence of previous decades is an object lesson in the fragility of anything founded on benefactor generosity rather than economic fundamentals.
It’s fine for as long as the benefactor is there, but when the plug is pulled, the real market place reasserts itself and the entire edifice of economic unreality comes crashing down.
Hopefully the club had always realised the obvious – that the Mackintosh family would not be there forever – and has a damage-limiting exit strategy in place.
I just wonder how many other football clubs will now be looking at what’s happened at Nairn and realising just how insecure their own futures may be.
Meanwhile, human nature is bound to intervene. Remembering all the private grumbles I’ve heard over the years about Nairn’s money, there will now doubtless be much cynical rubbing of hands within the Highland League.
