You get some real ‘characters’ taking over non-league football clubs, none more so than Glenn Tamplin. His ownership of Essex club Billericay Town was of particular interest to me as I lived there when I was at secondary school.
Now Tamplin is a wanted man: he is on the run from police
after twice failing to show up in court last year.
Tamplin, a born-again Christian who made his
multi-million-pound fortune in steel, was due before magistrates last year over
allegations of cocaine possession and failing to comply with a community order.
After his no-show at the hearings, his mugshot was circulated
by Hertfordshire Police on December 14, who said “extensive inquiries” were
being carried out to find him.
Billericay’s football club were pretty unremarkable (although they did win the FA Vase) bobbing
along in the Isthmian League Premier Division (the seventh level of English
football) when Tamplin bought them in December 2016, after first trying to take
over at nearby Dagenham & Redbridge, then of the fifth tier.
Craig Edwards, the club’s manager for the previous seven
years, quit within three months, citing too much interference from Tamplin, and
the owner took his place in the dugout.Billericay broke their transfer record
to sign goalscorer Jake Robinson from Hemel Hempstead Town for £24,000.
Robinson, who started his career at Brighton, would go on to score 123
goals in 161 games at Billericay. He
was on the sort of money he would have earned at an EFL club.
In the summer of 2017, he built two new stands and a
clubhouse at their New Lodge Stadium, paid around £200,000 for a new pitch,
which needed relaying after less than a season (Billericay now have a 4G
pitch), and had the home dressing room decorated with an enormous lion mural.
On the outside wall of the main stand, there was another mural — of Tamplin in
bed with his wife, Bliss, receiving a message from God.
In total, he claimed to have spent around £3million on his
Billericay venture.
He declared: “We will get back-to-back promotions and then
it will take two to three years to get out of the National League (the fifth
tier). A lot of people have had a go at me on Twitter and I feel sorry for
them. But I don’t care. In five years, when we are in League Two or League
One with gates of 10,000, they will see that I walk the walk.”
They finished comfortably as champions with 99 points, won
the Essex Senior Cup (a knockout competition between the county’s biggest
clubs) and Isthmian League Cup (contested by the 82 sides who make up the four
divisions of the Isthmian league) and qualified for the FA Cup first
round.
Players were told to refer to Tamplin as ‘Daddy Pig’ and
fines were given to those who called him ‘Gaffer’.
Essex Police launched an investigation in early 2018 after
it was alleged Tamplin had written a message to signing Elliot Kebbie the
previous October, saying he “did not want to get gangsters involved”. It was
claimed death threats had been made to Kebbie’s family. The player began legal
action and the case was settled out of court.
Tamplin eventually put the club up for sale. Tamplin eventually stepped away in September
2019, a day after naming O’Hara as player-manager, replacing Wheeler. The club
was taken over the following month by businessmen Greg Lake, David McCartney,
Alex Morrissey and Nick Hutt.
It did not take long for Tamplin to return to football. That November, he arrived at Romford, 13
miles (20km) west of Billericay and then bottom of the eighth-tier Isthmian
League North, as their main investor. Tamplin
immediately set to work, sacking manager Paul Martin and the coaching staff,
appointing himself to run the team, holding trials for a new squad and signing
21 new players. Players with EFL pedigree were drafted in.
However, all dreams were put on ice when Covid-19 struck in
March 2020 and football everywhere was suspended. A year on, with the football season still
disrupted by restrictions related to the pandemic and Tamplin by then living in
Dubai, he called time on his Romford tenure.
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