In the spring of 1995, Gillingham Football Club were at crisis point – then a man who made his fortune through a photocopying business arrived.
The question now is whether that same man’s long association with the club is about to end as he faces a vote which could see him kicked off the board. Paul Scally’s days may be numbered.
His era as owner was a rollercoaster ride of incredible highs and depressing lows. But as much as you may have disagreed with some of his decisions, without him Gillingham FC may no longer even exist.
Nearly 30 years ago, the club had been stuck in a rut – struggling in the bottom division of the Football League, finishing third bottom by the time the full-time whistle on the 1994/95 season was blown. Of greater concern was the financial situation off it.
The accounts for the club in 1993 had started with the stark description that it had been “one of the most difficult periods the club has experienced in its 100-year history both on and off the pitch”. It was £1.5 million in debt and the situation didn’t improve over the next two years.
Previous owner Tony Smith had ploughed more than £1m of his own money to keep the club afloat but inherited debt from his purchase of the club seven years earlier saw it ultimately fall £2m in arrears. As Smith decided to put the club up for sale, it found itself in an untenable situation. The club called in adminstrators.
They, in turn, tried to reach what’s known as a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) – a last-gasp move to ease the debt burden. Those the club owed money to were asked to accept a mere 26p for each £1 they were owed.
All this as seven weeks of intense negotiations played out with a certain curly-haired South London businessman.
On June 1, 1995, a deal was finally reached. Scally had agreed terms with Smith which would see the club become his.
He paid £1 – and inherited its financial strife. Fortunately, the CVA was agreed a few weeks later and the Scally era began in earnest – now out of the hands of receivers.
Had creditors voted against the proposal, said Tony Burton, one of the receivers appointed to stabilise the club, “the club will be folded and everyone will walk away”.
Its position in the league for the following season was cemented by Smith’s parting gesture of donating the £200,000 bond required of clubs to the league as a guarantee should the club fail to complete the upcoming season.
A departing Smith – who died at the age of 79 in April last year – said at the time: “Unfortunately, the inherited debt of £1.3m, plus the ongoing financial debt, have proved too large a burden for me to carry without prejudicing the financial security of my family, which I’m not prepared to consider.
“The truth is that I cannot afford to throw any more money at the club. This has been an emotional and heart-searching time. Had the club experienced a modicum of success then maybe I could have stomached the ongoing financial problems. On reflection, I acted as a fan and not as a director of a company. Too many times I let my heart rule my head. That’s a big regret.”
It was a sage lesson for his predecessor.
Scally was just 39 when he completed the club takeover. He’d made his fortune by selling Metronote, a company through which he sold and serviced photocopiers.
Quite how much he earned from the sale of his business – thought to be back in 1991 – remains unclear, but it gave him the seed money to fund a number of different ventures before he settled on a football club. Among them wine and aviation.
But it was with Gillingham the self-confessed Millwall fan would make his name. And fans would come to sing his name in celebration and to demand his head on a plate as his nigh-on 30-year career with the club ran its course.
Yet his successes – in those first years at least – are precisely what the club’s new US owner Brad Galinson is now dreaming of emulating. You may have tired of Scally, but he delivered glories the likes of which the Gills had never seen before or since.
He even managed to overhaul the dilapidated Priestfield and turn it into a modern arena – unrecognisable from when he first arrived.
His first key appointment was to put Tony Pulis in charge of the first team. His previous managerial experience had been limited to two years in charge of League 2 side Bournemouth. The results were mixed, but he had an uncanny knack of spending little on players and making big profits through transfers.
Little wonder he attracted the eye of businessman Scally.
Within Scally’s first season, the club started strongly and didn’t fall out of the promotion places for the entire season – eventually finishing, much to the delight of fans, in second place.
Elevated to what is now known as League 1, the club’s success also fuelled a boost in attendance figures. Having averaged a little over 3,000 in the last season under Tony Smith, the start of the Scally era saw that more than double to in excess of 7,000. Priestfield was rocking again – more importantly, revenues were increasing too.
Remarkably, within three years of taking over the reins, the club was turning a profit – something it had failed to achieve for many years.
After two seasons consolidating their position in the higher league, they went a step further – finishing fourth and securing a play-off berth.
Which, of course, is where they came face-to-face with Manchester City at Wembley with both clubs seeking a place in the Championship. It is a game few Gills fans will forget. Worth noting is that the Gills had finished just two points behind City over the course of the season.
Leading 2-0 with less than 10 minutes to go, and fans already rejoicing in the stands, City hit back once and then again in the fifth minute of added time to tie the score. It went to penalties and City emerged triumphant. A case of the Gills snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Undeterred, the following year they were back at Wembley and this time won – beating Wigan Athletic. It came after a difficult year for Scally who was mourning the loss of his son Elliott in 2003, at just 16 weeks, from a heart defect.
But it was Peter Taylor as manager which guided them to the Championship. After the play-off defeat, Scally had sacked Pulis citing “gross misconduct” amid claims he’d been courted by two rival clubs.
The marriage over, it ended, as they so often do, in a bitter courtroom battle with Pulis claiming he was owned money from bonuses and his share of player sales.
His claim was for £400,000 against the club. Pulis eventually settled out of court for £75,000.
The pair’s relationship didn’t heal over time either. In 2016, Pulis was hit with a £3.7m bill after he was found guilty of misleading the Premier League Managers’ Association over a £2m bonus he had received from former club Crystal Palace.
On hearing the news of how much Pulis was going to have to recompense Palace, Scally said: “I am not vindictive or malicious, I have never been and I don’t take any joy in other people’s pain, but Tony Pulis is an exception and he kind of got what he deserved.”
But Scally could be like that. He had a short fuse for anyone who, he perceived, of being critical of the club. There was a long list of Kent newspapers and journalists – more often than not devoted to covering a club they held dear to their heart – who found themselves banned for some misdemeanour. Ditto dedicated supporters who dared to publicly stand up to him. Any previous goodwill holding little sway.
While all the progress on the pitch was on-going, Scally was fixing up Priestfield too. It certainly needed it. The club is a classic football ground – surrounded by residential streets offering almost zero opportunity to expand outside its existing footprint. But as it struggled to make the sums add up, investment in its crumbling stands had been low on the list of priorities. Scally, however, changed that. He knew that if the club’s financial position was to change it needed revenue-creating facilities.
The new Gordon Road stand opened in 1997 – costing £2m.
It may surprise some fans, but at the time a vote was held of supporters who wanted it called ‘The Paul Scally Stand’. In a rare fit of modesty, Scally dismissed the name and declared in the club programme: “I felt rather uncomfortable and embarrassed by this situation, hence the request from me for a revote.”
Two years later, the home fans’ Rainham End saw terraces replaced with a new all-seater stand and, in 2000, the Medway Stand was unveiled. Comfortably the most modern-looking of the new facilities, it featured corporate hospitality boxes among the other necessary modern bells and whistles.
Granted, when in 2003 the away end was pulled down, the ‘temporary’ stand which replaced it – the Brian Moore Stand, named after the legendary ITV commentator and Gills fan – then stood for a number of years. In fact, 21 years and counting as it’s still there – stretching the description of ‘temporary’ to a whole new level. Away fans have a seat rather than terracing…but no cover.
As one reviewer on TripAdvisor put it: “Just hope the weather is good when you visit – on a wet, windy day there can be no more miserable place in the country to watch league football.”
It was around the time of the club’s rise to the Championship (or Division One as it was still called back then) that I started talking to Scally on an almost weekly basis for the newspaper I was working on at the time.
Perhaps surprisingly, he’d always take my calls and almost without fail would respond to pretty much any story I put to him. He was a delight as he waged war against the likes of Charlton (who he accused of stealing ‘his’ fans by running coaches to The Valley from across Kent), constantly spoke about wanting to build the club a new stadium and never relented in his vision that the club could elevate itself to the Premier League.
You had to admire his confidence, if not always believe wholeheartedly in it.
But when they consolidated in that first season in the Championship, and given their rapid rise up the leagues, while fanciful, his dreams somehow seemed achievable.
Financially, the club had long bid farewell to the administrators. It had also seen some money-spinning FA Cup runs (think a thrilling 5-2 defeat at Arsenal in 2002 in front of 32,000 fans at Highbury in the fifth round or back-to-back seasons where they faced Chelsea, one as they sought (but failed) to reach the semi-final).
During the club’s five seasons in the Championship, average attendance had rocketed to more than 9,000 in the first season and still in excess of 8,000 by the time they fell through the relegation trapdoor by the end of the 2004-2005 season.
To this day, they have never reached such heights. And Scally was masterminding it all.
He remained wedded to the desire to see the Gills move to a new purpose-built stadium – capable of generating revenues to fund on-field success. In 2003, he’d declared “there was no future” for the club at Priestfield.
In 2008 he sold the stadium in a debt restructuring move to a company in which he was the sole shareholder – leasing it back to the club for a peppercorn rent. By 2011 it was back under the club’s ownership in a deal Scally declared was something of a business masterstroke.
For the next 20 years, though, the Gills toiled, unable to dig their way any higher than League One. After just three seasons from dropping out of the Championship, they plunged all the way back to League Two. Since then, they have been something of a yo-yo club, bouncing back and forth between the two lowest professional divisions.
Managers came and went – Stan Ternent, Neal Cooper, Ronnie Jepson, Mark Stimson, Martin Allen, Justin Edinburgh to name but a few.
Scally remained – still talking up the club but, increasingly, finding his relationship with the fans under increasing strain.
The supporters had seen their club rise to unparalleled heights in the club’s history and football fans are, traditionally, nothing if not fickle. Where once they cheered his name, now they were booing it.
To his credit, Scally had always insisted if the right deal came along in the club’s best interests he would sell up. It, like building a new stadium and reaching the Premier League, had been one of his mantras.
The reality, though, was that a lower league club so close to London was always going to struggle to entice anyone with deep pockets and in search of the proverbial ‘sleeping giant’.
Until, that is, US investors starting taking a closer look at English professional football clubs. As the Premier League saw foreign investment transform the fortunes of a number of teams – the Gills’ former foes Manchester City being a prime case in point – so the canny started looking further down the pyramid.
Wrexham’s takeover by Hollywood’s Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney proved what a punt on a low-level club could deliver.
So when Scally received an email in 2022 from Tampa, Florida-based property tycoon Brad Galinson and his wife Shannon, it was the start of a chain of events which would see Scally’s iron-like grasp on the Medway club finally start to ease.
For Scally it was most likely a case of a serious offer coming in at the right time. In the August of that year he’d already announced he was “taking an extended break” from the club – appointing former finance director Paul Fisher as chief executive and co-chairman.
With Fisher taking over day-to-day running of the club – and Scally spending more and more time in his home in Dubai – the curtain was not quite bought down on his time in charge, but it was certainly dropped a few feet.
The pressure, however, had been taking its toll on the long-time chairman.
In 2016, he’d undergone open-heart surgery after his arteries became blocked. Some 18 months earlier, he’d been told he may have had a minor stroke, having fallen down stairs at his home, leaving him semi-conscious and in hospital.
Potentially more painful was the increasing animosity of the Priestfield faithful. In 2019, he’d threatened to walkaway due to the level of “disgusting and disgraceful” abuse he had received – primarily on social media and then overflowing in the stadium.
He said at the time: “I feel a segment of supporter base – and I can’t determine to what level – have no regard, respect, support, understanding, trust nor any consideration for me as an individual, nor the role I perform as chairman of this club, within a football pyramid that is dominated by rich pickings at the top two levels of football.
“For these reasons, I must now seriously consider over the coming weeks whether I wish to continue my role and lead this club forward, or indeed what the consequences for the club would be should I decide to take the easy option and just walk away.”
It was, in truth, classic Scally – a shot across the bows of the faithful to remind them, possibly quite correctly, that trying to keep a club afloat and successful was no easy feat. He was banking on a ‘better the devil you know’ approach.
But the approach by the Galinsons started to drag that curtain further down. Scally said he’d been in talks with other investors, but that the Galinsons’ offer held up to scrutiny.
“I went out to Tampa twice, secretly,” he said last year. “We just walked and talked, literally that. He was a guy on his own, not part of a corporation, him and his wife, really nice people. We walked around Tampa and went to see the Tampa Bay Buccaneers [NFL team].
“He wanted to be involved in an English football club. He watched what we had been doing and really knew a lot about the club.
“We walked, stopped at cafes, sat out in the sunshine and we agreed a deal.”
With the club fighting to avoid relegation, and cash flow moving in the wrong direction, in December 2022, the final details were ironed out and Brad Galinson took over. Scally stayed on as a board member and minority shareholder.
Scally told KentOnline: “I had a difficult period between August and December [2022], I didn’t think I would be coming back to Gillingham, didn’t think I would watch football again, I fell out of love with it.
“I was under a lot of pressure, a lot of strain, it was a difficult time for all of us, supporters, staff, management, sponsors, but I was fully intending that I would find someone who would come in to give us the investment we needed to take this great club forward.”
By June of this year, Scally’s role had been reduced to that of a non-executive director – more an independent observer offering expert advice rather than day-to-day operations. He’s also not been seen at any of the club’s home games this season.
Scally turns 70 next year. He’s been at the Gills since he was 39. When he first took over, John Major was still in power. Princess Diana was giving her famous Panorama interview, the British transfer record was broken when Stan Collymore signed from Nottingham Forest for Liverpool for £8.5m, Pierce Brosnan was James Bond. The world has turned and Scally has toiled at Priestfield ever since.
Today (Thursday), he faces a meeting of shareholders in which he could be booted off the club’s board altogether.
The club issued a short statement which did little to answer the many questions posed by the proposed vote, saying simply: “The board of Gillingham Football Club have called a shareholders’ meeting to consider removing Mr Scally as a director of the club. Our investigations are ongoing and so we are unable to comment further at this stage.”
Scally, for his part, says he has been “completely isolated” from the club and that they are “trying to destroy me”.
Speaking earlier this week, he said: “”They’ve told me I’m not welcome. I came to the club because I love football not because I want to make money. It’s my life.
“I’ve been at the club for more than half my working life. I’ve kept the club going in the most atrocious circumstances and this is the way I get treated. It’s so wrong.
“I had a meeting with Brad in April which turned into a bit of an argument. That was the last time we had a proper conversation. If Brad Galinson doesn’t want me around the club, why not just come to me and sort it out? Instead, I’ve been banned from all official areas of the club and it’s very hurtful.
“My email account has been blocked and staff have been told they are not allowed to talk to me. The biggest problem is how much I miss the football.
“I’m determined to fight it. There’s some fans on social media who don’t like me and no chairman of any club in the country is loved by every fan. That’s part of the job.
“But the vast majority of fans, the sponsors and all the stakeholders in the club know what I’ve done down the years for Gillingham.”
Whatever the reasons, whatever the outcome, Scally has left an indelible mark on the club. He overhauled the stadium, delivered trips to Wembley and got the club within a fighting chance of fulfilling his Premier League dream.
But he also made a host of unpopular decisions which saw him lose the backing of supporters – and as any football fan knows, trying to regain that trust can be nigh on impossible.
This season, the club have started well in League 2. There is renewed optimism under the Galinsons. And by this evening, the curtain may finally come down for good on Paul Scally’s long relationship with the Gills.
