Notts County

A Middle Eastern consortium completed their takeover of Notts County last week.

Peter Trembling has been named as the club’s new chairman and chief executive with Peter Willett alongside him on the board of directors.

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Trembling told BBC Radio Nottingham: “Our plans are very straightforward. We want to bring success back to Notts County Football Club.”

He added: “We have already voiced our plans for the next five years, and that’s very clearly to get us into the Championship.

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He said: “It’s going to be a careful and considered investment and we will be running the football club as a proper business.”

Notts have finished in the bottom half of League Two every year since 2005, but Trembling says there is enormous potential.

“The appeal of Notts County,” he said, “is that this is a club with great heritage and tradition.

“It’s a club that’s been a sleeping giant for far too long, it’s a club with it’s own stadium on a long-term lease from the council.

“It’s a club with a very loyal fan base, in addition to a dormant fan base that we believe we can get back to Meadow Lane, and it’s a club that sits in the great city of Nottingham.”

Trembling also admitted that the tag of the ‘world’s oldest league club’ is one he hopes to exploit.

In a post in December 2007, I had said:

Why do these foreign/wealthy investors/consortia want to spend silly money on Premier League clubs?

They’d get much better value with one of the Sheffield clubs, or Nottingham Forest or Leeds Utd …

So it’s the other Nottingham club, Notts County, but the principle remains the same – unless you have money to splurge on a Premier League club, you’ll get better value outside of the Premier League, and even the Championship.

Notts County may well be the oldest professional football league club in the world, and founder members of the Football League in 1888, but they’re hardly “sleeping giants”.   Winning the FA Cup in 1894 (as a Second Division club) is the only major success they have had, and they have spent only 30 of the 111 seasons since 1888, including only 4 seasons since 1926, in the top flight.

However, they do have the potential to rise above city rivals and two-time European Cup winners, Nottingham Forest, who are currently in the Championship.

With the other two major East Midlands clubs, Derby County and Leicester City, both recovering from a period of decline, Notts County do have the potential to be the biggest club in the East Midlands.  (As an aside, four former directors of Derby County were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment on Monday for their financial dealings while in charge of the club.)

The new owners have followed up by today appointing appointing former England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson as director of football.

The club’s website said Eriksson would be “joining his long-term assistant Tord Grip who will assume the role of general adviser.”

The club added that his remuneration would be determined by the success of the team on the pitch.

Eriksson will take up his new role with immediate effect and will also be a shareholder in the club.

What may also capture interest is the link with Juventus.

The Italian football club Juventus F.C. derived its famous black-and-white striped kits from Notts County. Juventus have played in black and white striped shirts, with white shorts, sometimes black shorts since 1903. Originally, they played in pink shirts with a black tie, …, but continual washing faded the colour so much that in 1903 the club sought to replace them.  Juventus asked one of their team members, Englishman John Savage, if he had any contacts in England who could supply new shirts in a colour that would better withstand the elements. He had a friend who lived in Nottingham, who being a Notts County supporter, shipped out the black and white striped shirts to Turin.

It will be interesting to see how Notts County do next season.