Paul Barthorpe has issued the following club update

To put the situation into context, we sell a handful of season tickets each year, our crowds are one of the lowest in the league and we run on a small handful of volunteers who multitask to fulfil every function of a semi professional football club.
Some clubs get weekly attendances higher than we get in two months of attendances added together. Other clubs with our gate sizes are playing on parks and out of porta-cabins. Keeping a small village club at this level is an almost impossible task for one season, never mind five in a row. Particularly while all of our local rivals who are all “bigger clubs” than us have been relagated.

Putting significant money in every year to still struggle isn’t sustainable long term, so I had a decision to make, do I stop the funding and let the club be relegated until we found our natural level, or do I invest heavily and try to make us sustainable at this level.

There have been major roadblocks from day one; delays in planning, a lot more surveys than advised, contractors and site related issues. But I have kept going because i know this is what’s best for our club in the long term.

One of the issues we have had is that the initial main contractor let us down three times on start dates (the reasons I will go into further in a later update) which knocked us back massively. It has been a lengthy process to get out of that contract and appoint a new main contractor, with the ongoing legal efforts to get back not only our payments to the original contractors but also the penalties we are due for their breaches and the necessity to make sizeable up front payments to the new contractor and legals has turned out to be a very painful experience.

There’s been no significant income since April, not many clubs or business would be able to keep trading and be competitive with no income for over nine months. It is excruciatingly difficult and the stress, anxiety, sleepless nights and headaches are a reminder daily reminder.

People saying I don’t care, I’m destroying the club, I’m not investing in the club, I have ulterior motives which clearly could not be further from the truth! This has been my life for almost six years and anyone who owns a business and commits everything to it knows the unconditional love you have for it! If my motivation was to run it into the ground I wouldn’t have kept investing to the levels I have on a weekly basis.

There is no hidden agenda at the club, never was, the site will not ever be sold to a housing developer! This has never ever been a consideration, and there are also very restrictive covenants on the land and always have been.

The league hasn’t “stepped in” because we have been working closely with them as all clubs do. When you take away all the noise, the crux of it is that in its simplest form this is a ground share agreement to which we are adhering to league guidelines.

To clarify some other points, we didn’t sell the top soil, there has never been a mortgage on the site, I never borrowed against the site when I bought it, there aren’t any issues relating to the original purchase of the club, there have been no grants of any kind whatsoever in my time at the club, myself nor any director has ever taken a penny out of this club, there never have been any divisions in our board of directors, when Pav left the club it wasn’t for any of the reasons that were fabricated on socials, we are not constantly under embargo, and I have never and will never talk to any property developers about the club or its land!

There have been accusations of a lack of information being shared and a lack of clarity. The truth is I have had a number of death threats hand delivered to my home address, I have been physically attacked, I’ve had my car damaged three times, my car tyres slashed, items thrown at my house and a number of other incidents that have happened directly after club posts or directly after other posts that are damaging and critical and as usual shared across multiple social media sites. All of this is currently under investigation and we have been therefore advised to keep our posts to a minimum, so as not to escalate these incidents.

We are also conscious of sharing any issues or problems we may be encountering, as these get weaponised and used against us repeatedly on social media.

We have however had a large number of messages of support from fans of our club and others, and our local community for which we are very grateful. But what we can’t understand is individuals claiming to be our fans hugely embellishing the negative picture of the club, calling on the league to sanction their own club, constantly referring to us as in a “crisis” for dramatic effect, phoning round our supply chain telling our suppliers to cut the club off, and reporting their own club to the council planning team based on false facts trying to get the project stopped completely. These actions are inexplicable and are direct attempts to harm the club.

Neil has come in and has only had one week with the players, it will take him time to properly assess his squad, he has however given us a preliminary list of signings which we have started to action.

We have agreed a start date for the pitch of w/c 10th feb with the FA, the National League and the main contractor. We have also agreed a completion date of w/c 24th March. This will also include significant works on the stadium as a whole. The plan of works will be issued upon commencement.

We kindly ask all supporters to please get behind us in this final stage of what has been a very difficult period, as we are looking forward to a positive future for our club!