Dear Oldham Athletic

Hello Steven Brown, or whichever poor member of staff (not that there’s many left in there now) has been given the arduous task of reading through your emails for you,

I was a new season ticket holder this season. I wanted somewhere to be able to watch football inside a stadium, after feeling uncomfortable handing over money to the club I support, Manchester City, after they joined the European Super League. I felt I could no longer trust the ownership at Manchester City to have my best interests at heart as a fan, certainly off the pitch at least (this is what is known as foreshadowing).

And so, with some reservations, I swapped the Etihad Stadium for Boundary Park. I’d heard and read about the various issues Oldham fans have with the current ownership, and frankly agreed with much of the criticism, however with my girlfriend’s family being willing to spend £200 on a season ticket, a genuinely great deal, I felt that was the pass I needed to do so myself.

To say this season has been a rude awakening would be an understatement.

Manchester City’s board made a fatal error, one which was so huge that I’ll probably never be able to fully forgive it. However this is nothing compared to the day-to-day calamity and incompetence of the board at Oldham, who’ve seemed intent on making incorrect decision after incorrect decision throughout the year.

The season started brilliantly, with multiple players signed onto contracts which, due to limitations placed on the club because of an EFL loan Abdallah took out (which, to the best of our knowledge, remains unpaid to this day), meant that Keith Curle went into the season with two or three players fewer than he should have because the sporting director, none other than Abdallah’s brother, Mo, either did not understand these rules or did not know they existed, both of which are hilariously stupid mistakes and would see anybody who wasn’t related to the owner of the club sacked on the spot.

From that point onwards, a litany of talkSPORT interviews and Club Statements have ensured that the relationship between the fans and board has rarely — if ever — been as bad as it is now in the club’s history. From Adam Morallee taking a break from the set of The Inbetweeners to tell Jim White that, by peacefully protesting to demand new ownership, the fans are “killing the club” to the recent re-hiring of Barry Owen, a man who is about as popular in the stands of Boundary Park as Margaret Thatcher is at Anfield.

It has been made abundantly clear in my brief time at Oldham that there is complete disregard, bordering on genuine contempt, towards the fans from the club’s board.

This has been showcased as early as pre-season when allegations of racial abuse were brought forward against a fan, allegations which were later completely dropped due to no witnesses being able to corroborate any abuse took place, despite the fact said abuse was alleged to have taken place in the middle of a crowd in a football stadium. This same fan, along with two others (one of which is a board member on the Oldham Supporters Trust) were then inexplicably banned for reasons that no two people inside the club can give the same answer to, only to be overturned when Abdallah himself went on national radio and admitted he had absolutely no idea what the bans were about.

These bans were YOUR doing and were nothing more than a pathetic attempt to do what you did at Blackpool and silence the dissenting fans. We all know how that ended at Blackpool, don’t we?

There are plenty of other things I could go into. Three managers, the first two of which were sacked far later than they should have been, the claim that Abdallah is looking to sell the club which has been followed by nobody picking up the phone to any potential suitors and now the utterly ridiculous and overblown bans which the club is planning to hand out to anybody who dared to enter the pitch when the club’s relegation was all but confirmed. The club didn’t seem to have an issue with pitch invasions in 2020, what’s changed?

But these are all big picture things. These are issues which there are fan groups trying to manoeuvre, with the Supporters Trust and Push the Boundary both doing their bits to try and rid the club of the poison that is the current regime.

I wish I could say that my weekly visits to Boundary Park were a great experience and, honestly, if it weren’t for the opening of the OEC before each game (which is absolutely sod all to do with any of you because you don’t own it) then it would be a disaster.

Has it been entertaining? In a small way, yes. Bi-weekly pitch invasions earlier in the season were undeniably hilarious, it’s been a bit like watching a very slow motion car crash.

Toilets don’t have running water. There’s one food kiosk in the main stand. Half the stadium is rotting or falling apart. I went to watch a Carabao Cup game earlier this season and my plastic seat genuinely broke towards the end of the game. My own seat, which I had a season ticket for, has not had a “Reserved” sticker on it all season despite multiple attempts to contact the club from my girlfriend’s mother and brother to have this rectified. Boundary Park is not a stadium which is fit for purpose.

It’s funny that your Safety Advisory Group supposedly deemed the prohibition of alcohol at the stadium to be a necessity in order to ensure people’s safety on the final day of the season (although we now know that this was the doing of yourselves rather than the SAG) because the stadium would fail most basic health and safety checks with the current state of things. It’s just as well you don’t own the North Stand, because it’s the only one that’s actually functioning.

Still, you don’t have to worry about my seat needing a “Reserved” sticker on it because the last thing I’ll be doing is putting another penny into a regime which is, in the words of Adam Morallee, killing the club. The sooner Oldham Athletic is rid of the Lemsagams’ ownership and interference from the likes of Barry Owen, the better.

Not that any of this really matters, because it appears that currently nobody is able to buy a season ticket even if they actually did want one.

My hope is that anybody who this email is actually relevant to isn’t at the club long enough to be able to actually do anything about it and that Abdallah swallows his not-inconsiderable pride and packs his metaphorical bags, as his actual bags have only seen Oldham once this season. A real sign of an owner who cares about his club.

I know that, even on the off-chance you read this, you definitely won’t reply, so this is farewell, forever.

Joe