Bolton bosses open up on personal reasons for working to save club in new documentary

The first episode of ‘Born to be a Wanderer’ premiered on YouTube last night after months of top-secret work by production company 5or6 Creative.

It documents the club’s rise following administration and near oblivion and the people at the heart of it.

Two of those, chairman Sharon Brittan and chief operating officer Andy Gartside, frankly explain their reasons for pushing through Football Ventures’ deal to save the club when the odds seemed firmly stacked against them and a grand old club of English football was staring extinction in the face.

“Did I ever want to give up? Yes,” Brittan says frankly in one of the scenes in the chairman’s suite.

“My sister died in June 2019 in the heart of the transaction, but four days before she passed away unexpectedly she said ‘promise me one thing, you’ll never give up’.

Eoin Doyle listens to an Ian Evatt team talk during ‘Born to be a Wanderer’

“I woke up one morning and I looked at my phone and I looked at the message she’d sent to me and I just got up and I knew this was the journey I was meant to go on and that I had to carry on for myself, for Anita, for the football club, for the fans, for the whole town of Bolton.”

As she outlines though, her path to the head of the Wanderers table dates even further back than when the possibility of a deal first arose.

“It sounds mad now but at 15, I remember thinking to myself ‘one day I’m going to own a football club’,” she adds.

“On reflection it’s crazy but I definitely, definitely thought that.

“In 2018 I decided I’d like to take what I’d done in business and how I run my businesses and go back to my first love of football.

“Literally three months after I’d first thought in my head ‘now is the time to go and look for a football club’, I was introduced to Bolton Wanderers.

“There was the absolute mess and the deterioration over a number of years and where the club had found itself.”

Gartside had a more obvious, familial, link to Wanderers and his return to the fold came in its very darkest hour.

The Junior Whites’ 0-0 draw with Coventry is full of fond memories for everyone connected with the club as lads plucked from the academy did their club proud. But it had an altogether different meaning at the time, as Gartside admits.

Cameras got a glimpse of Wanderers training

“I didn’t come after dad passed away for probably three years, it was the Coventry game when we played the kids,” he tells the documentary on a walk around the UniBol playing surface.

“I came because I thought that was going to be our last ever match.

“The takeover had fallen away that morning and I remember saying to my wife ‘that’s it’.

“I was toying with myself whether I could go or not and if I could handle it.

“I came and the game was what it was, three disallowed goals and the kids were unbelievable, and I remember thinking ‘if that is the last ever game for Bolton Wanderers then it’s a hell of one to go out on’.”

That of course, was far from that, and with the two-part piece touching on the reasons Bolton found themselves needing to be saved, aided by stark pages from The Bolton News, Gartside also takes the time to reflect. “A lot of people here, and this is one of the things for me with the name attachment, a lot of fans didn’t take to my dad towards the end, a lot didn’t take to him throughout anyway, but towards the end he made some decisions he probably wouldn’t have made in normal circumstances,” he says.

“But when Eddie (Davies) stopped the funding it became incredibly difficult and one of the reasons I personally became involved was to try and save the club because that’s all dad ever wanted to do. He’s in these walls.”

With John McGinlay, Ian Evatt – and a rather lively team talk, Wanderers’ media manager Paul Holliday, The Bolton News’ Marc Iles and BBC Radio Manchester’s Jack Dearden also involved in the piece, those taking part did not know it would air after a remarkable promotion to League One, but it certainly seems fitting that it does.

“Rise back up through the leagues is what we want to do, but do it in a pragmatic way, don’t do it with the same problems as before,” Gartside says.

“Player wages caused us the biggest issue and we’ve got a chance do it because being in administration effectively means you hit reset and start again.

“The aim for the board is to get back to the Championship and then assess from there.”

The second episode of ‘Born to be a Wanderer’ is expected to air in a couple of weeks.