Morecambe facing National League expulsion amid financial woes
In a short statement, the league said its Compliance and Licensing Committee had met on Monday afternoon to debate Morecambe's ability to start the season.
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The club have been in football's Emergency Room for years but the crisis has deepened in recent weeks after a protracted takeover by London-based sports investment company Panjab Warriors stalled and a new potential buyer emerged.
With Morecambe already under a transfer embargo, the National League announced on Friday that it was effectively giving current owner Bond Group Investments until noon to sell the club.
But that deadline came and went, giving the league no option but to suspend the club until August 20, which means their first three fixtures of the new season — away at Boston United, home to Brackley Town and away at Scunthorpe — are postponed. Whether they will ever be rescheduled is now up to Bond Group Investments owner Jason Whittingham.
'The club will also remain under embargo ahead of the new season,' the National League statement added. 'Morecambe will also be removed from the National League Cup for the forthcoming season.
'The committee will meet again on Wednesday, August 20, to determine if outstanding items have been satisfied, and to decide the club's ability to retain membership in the competition.'
That last sentence is particularly ominous as it is the same threat Bury FC received from the English Football League (EFL) when they were prevented from starting the 2019-20 season in League One. They were expelled from the EFL on August 27, 2019, becoming their first team to suffer that fate since Maidstone Town in 1992.
Bury went into administration a year later, with some fans forming a phoenix club. However, the original club was revived in 2023, after a merger with the new team, and they are now back in the seventh tier of English football.
The fate of Macclesfield Town is another worrying precedent for Morecambe fans, as the Cheshire-based club were relegated from League Two in 2020 in the same state of financial disarray as Morecambe have been in but were not allowed to start the National League season and soon collapsed. A local businessman bought the assets later that year and restarted the club as Macclesfield FC in the ninth tier in 2021. They have now climbed back to the sixth tier.
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Morecambe fans will be hoping they can still avoid having to take this journey but the prospects do not look good.
Bond Group Investments bought the club in 2018 but has been missing payments to players and the taxman ever since 2023, which was a year after their rugby union club Worcester Warriors went bankrupt.
Whittingham has repeatedly said that he wants to sell the loss-making club but spent almost a year trying to sell it to a Birmingham-based businessman called Sarbjot Johal, before moving on to Panjab Warriors.
Unlike Johal, they were approved by the EFL in June and have been funding the club via loans for most of this year.
But, having missed several deadlines to complete the takeover, Whittingham reneged on the deal. Panjab immediately announced it was taking legal action against him and both sides appear to be dug in for a long fight.
In the meantime, Whittingham announced that he was in talks with a new group led by a British businessman called Jonny Cato. The Athletic has attempted to find out more details about this individual with no success.
However, it now seems that even Cato has got cold feet, as Whittingham issued a statement via the club to say that he cannot get in contact with Panjab Warriors and adverse publicity has scared Cato's group off.
The club's supporters and local politicians have no doubt as to who is to blame, though, with Whittingham being public enemy number one. The Athletic has asked him for comment on a number of occasions but without reply.
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