Supporters’ trust buys back club’s ground after 11-year campaign

The deeds were signed at 4.15pm on Friday in a solicitor’s office above a bakery in a small West Yorkshire town. By 5pm there were 300 people in the car park at Mill Lane, drinking tea from the clubhouse urn and taking photographs of a padlocked turnstile that, for the first time in more than a decade, belongs to the people who use it.

The Holmefield Athletic Supporters’ Trust has completed the purchase of the club’s ground from a property company for £1.4m, ending an 11-year saga that at one stage saw the sixth-tier side face a move to a council pitch 12 miles away. The money was raised through a community share issue that drew 2,140 investors, a £350,000 grant from a sports facilities fund and a 15-year loan from a regional ethical bank.

“I’ve lost count of the number of times we were told it was over,” said Angela Burrows, 58, the trust’s chair, who has been involved since the ground was sold out from under the club in 2015 by a previous owner to clear his debts. “We had a planning application for 64 houses on this site in 2019. We had a developer who wanted to put the club in the car park of a retail park. We just kept turning up.”

Mill Lane holds 3,200, with one covered stand and a terrace behind the goal that the trust intends to re-roof before Christmas. The club itself has been fan-owned since 2017, when the trust bought the playing side for £1 from an administrator; it has never, until now, owned the ground on which it plays, and has paid rent that rose from £22,000 a year to £71,000 at its peak. The trust says the loan repayments will cost less than half the most recent rent.

The deal is the latest in a quiet wave of supporter purchases below the Football League, where ground ownership has long been the fault line between clubs that survive and clubs that disappear. A spokesperson for the national supporters’ organisation said that 14 non-league grounds had passed into community ownership since 2020, compared with three in the preceding decade. “Mill Lane is the model,” she said. “Patient, boring, well-governed. Nobody got rich and nobody got clever.”

The club’s manager, Craig Dewhurst, who played for Holmefield as a teenager, said the news had lifted the dressing room before Saturday’s home match. “Lads who’ve been here two months get it,” he said. “You can feel it in the town. People stop you in the Co-op.” His side won 2-1.

The trust’s first act as owner was practical rather than symbolic: it has commissioned a drainage survey of a pitch that has flooded three times in two winters. “The romance lasts about a week,” Burrows said. “Then it’s drains.”