The rejuvenation of Stockport County

Stockport’s upward trajectory — they are aiming for a third promotion in six seasons — is one of football’s feel-good stories, given it is only a few years since they were sleepwalking towards potential oblivion.

Stockport are six points clear at the top of League Two 18 games into the 46-match season. There are plans to redevelop three sides of Edgeley Park, doubling its capacity to 20,000. A new training ground will also be built, with enough space to accommodate the academy and women’s teams.

But it feels like even more of an achievement bearing in mind the challenges of living in the shadow of the two giants just up the road.

Their Edgeley Park ground is six miles from the Etihad Stadium, the scene of City’s reinvention as the best football team in the country, even Europe. Old Trafford, where United used to hold that honour, is not much further on the other side of Mancunian Way.

The new owner

Stockport strayed dangerously close to slipping off the radar altogether before Mark Stott, a local businessman, launched the 2020 takeover that changed everything. In the words of club president Steve Bellis, it was the day Stockport “won the lottery”.

Stott grew up locally, as a City fan, built a property empire, the Vita Group, out of almost nothing and started to think seriously about buying a football club four years ago.

Macclesfield Town, a club half an hour’s drive further south who had been financially shipwrecked, were among the options. Stockport, however, always held more appeal for a man who was raised in Poynton, on the town’s outskirts, and knew the area was brimming with potential.

“There are nearly 300,000 people living in Stockport,” says Stott. “That’s a bigger population than Sunderland. And just look at the size of their club.”

A town on the up

A recent feature in the UK’s Times newspaper — “Why Stockport, Greater Manchester, is one of the best places to live” — named it among the 12 most desirable towns in England for first-time homebuyers.

“Stockport has engineered a remarkable reinvention from a standard former mill town into a funky, family-friendly alternative to Manchester’s Northern Quarter,” the feature read. “This is where the avocado-brunching millennials move when they have a Lejoux pushchair and are faced with the school run but still want to live a fashionable life.”

It is just a pity, perhaps, that Stockport has been let down in the past by town planners building over the River Mersey, running a motorway beneath what is an otherwise beautiful viaduct and spending £45million ($56.1m at the current exchange rate) on the Red Rock leisure hub, which in 2018 was named as Britain’s ugliest building.

Edgeley Park has also been rejuvenated with a level of care and attention that simply did not exist when Simon Inglis, the author and historian, wrote in his 1987 book The Football Grounds Of Britain that it “seemed on its last legs”.

Stockport’s descent through the divisions from that late-1990s high is a long, complex story, both in the boardroom and on the pitch, featuring back-to-back relegations to tumble out of the Football League for the first time in their history in 2011 and, worse, another relegation, this time out of the Conference, two years later.

Unable to afford a proper training ground, Stockport had to pay for hourly rental slots on local pitches, including a regular booking at St Paul’s, a Catholic school in Wythenshawe, south Manchester. “One night, the players were trying to do some set-piece practice, on a pitch that wasn’t even the right size,” says Keighren. “Suddenly this fella marches on: ‘Right, eight o’clock, you’re off!’ Wythenshawe under-11s were about to go on.”

Stockport spent six years among the puddles and potholes of National League North and, in that time, the only constant was the loyalty of the 3,000 or so fans who kept coming back, hoping for better times. 

The challenges are obvious when there are more than 20 professional clubs within a one-hour radius. But there is also plenty of evidence that many football fans want something different to the matchday experience the Premier League offers.

Edgeley Park is the only ground I have been to with my Football League and non-league club.