A brilliant sun is high in a fabulous blue sky across the Potteries and the white replica shirts of Bolton Wanderers flooding into the streets around Port Vale’s ground demonstrate the club’s extraordinary and enduring support.
It is the stadium announcer inside Vale Park who serves a reminder about risks of the unexpected. ‘Please beware of flying footballs. There are multiple footballs in use at any one time,’ he tells fans as players warm up, in what sounds like a new front for health and safety. Wanderers are about to experience some unexpected pain of their own against League One’s bottom side.
The pace of Vale’s 24-year-old wing-back Jaheim Headley seals a goal from which Wanderers do not recover, on one of the EFL’s worst surfaces. The 1-0 defeat last Saturday erased their slim remaining automatic promotion hopes.
Almost certainly, it will now be through a third play-off challenge in four years that they pin their hopes of a return to the Championship, seven years after relegation from it.
Standing third in the table all season – an accomplishment for most clubs – feels like a disappointment for Wanderers, though captain Eoin Toal tells Daily Mail Sport that no one in the squad views that interpretation as harsh. ‘You expect it. Something is riding on every game because this is such a big club. It comes with playing for Bolton, you know? You know you’ve got to produce.’
Wanderers’ average 21,497 home crowds are the best in the division, giving rise to a sense that they belong a tier higher up. But the desperation for promotion is tempered by the history of financial overreach which sits heavy on this club. It was 10 years ago this spring that they narrowly avoided the prospect of liquidation amid a mountain of debt, with relegation from the Championship coming all the same a few months later.
Bolton fell to a 1-0 defeat at Port Vale last weekend despite the best efforts of Mason Burstow (pictured), a major blow in their hunt for automatic promotion from League One
But boss Steven Schumacher knows what it takes to get promoted via the play-offs and insists the club shouldn’t ‘panic’
That disaster was borne of gambling on big wages to get back into the Premier League and though Bolton’s new financial landscape includes Swiss-based metals firm Trafigura – whose investment and shareholding has significantly increased in the past 12 months – the core of travelling fans don’t want big risks taken to cross the next frontier.
At The Vine pub near Vale Park, fan Ralph Ellison insists: ‘We’ve been down the road to ruin before. You have to learn from your history.’ No one has forgotten the events of 2019, when the club was deducted points and almost wound up, adds fan Sheila Petre. ‘Don’t let spending get out of hand. That’s nearly killed us before.’
It’s a delicate balance to strike. With that average home attendance – which is bigger than 10 current Championship clubs – Wanderers’ would see their annual turnover stretch to £30million if they were promoted. They are far more likely to thrive in the Championship than, say, Oxford United, who beat them in a play-off final two years ago, yet command half Bolton’s home gate and are destined to be relegated back down this spring.
But many third-tier clubs have been pushing the boat out. A study of League One’s promoted clubs by football finance expert Swiss Ramble shows that their average operating losses were a record £10.3m in 2022-23 and £18.8m in 2023-24. Bolton’s own losses in the first of those seasons were £5.2m and £11.2m respectively. They are a well-funded club, with the fifth biggest wage bill in the league, but are not staking the house on this.
Pitch-side after the Vale defeat, manager Steven Schumacher gazes out at the mud-caked surface with a pained expression on his face. He is impressive in defeat. Carrying himself in a way which makes you feel that his observations will land with players. Unflinching in his critique of why the midfielder he had hooked at half-time, Rob Apter, hadn’t been doing it.
Schumacher is a good man for an Easter football programme when the pips are beginning to squeak – as they are for Bolton, with Bradford City a point behind them, a relentlessly tough impending run of six consecutive fixtures against clubs in the top nine, and a home game against Stockport County on Easter Monday which now looks pretty monumental.
Schumacher cites first-hand knowledge of getting Plymouth promoted to the Championship three seasons ago, which came on the back of an early spring blip, in which Argyle were thumped by Bolton in the EFL Trophy final, then lost at home to Lincoln. ‘Everyone said the wheels had fallen off,’ he says. ‘We didn’t panic. We stuck to the plan that had got us into the position.’
His task at Bolton has been more complex than he initially thought after taking over in January last year from Ian Evatt, whose ‘Pep-ball’ style – ‘sideways and backwards, everywhere we go,’ as the frustrated Wanderers faithful had started to sing – wasn’t taking them over the Rubicon.
Bolton have come a long way since 2019, when the ruinous ownership of Ken Anderson saw them fall into administration and a points deduction
Now the club feels united on and off the pitch, with their average attendance of 21,497 the highest in the division
There had been a genuine belief of automatic promotion inside the club, 12 months back, until a horrible midweek defeat to Bristol Rovers and subsequent home loss to Stockport proved the turning point. They finished eighth.
‘That brought a realisation of how ingrained Evatt’s system was – and the need for a radical personnel change,’ says Marc Iles, of The Bolton News, who has superbly mapped every inch of the club’s rocky road to recovery in the past decade or so. A total of 20 players have been brought in across the past two transfer windows, with the reduction in the overall wage bill illustrating the financial balancing act.
Schumacher has brought an attractive brand of football, particularly at home, with wide men Amario Cozier-Duberry, on loan from Brighton, and Derby County loanee Corey Blackett-Taylor both flourishing. Cozier-Duberry’s beautiful late winners against Cardiff and Huddersfield had showed his promise before he sustained knee ligament damage in January.
The side have been one of the most creative in the division, with one of League One’s highest expected goals (xG) figures and the 5-1 win at Exeter last month demonstrated a capacity to tear teams apart. But they haven’t converted enough of their huge volume of chances and, despite the third best defensive record in the division, have drawn too many to shatter the dominance of Lincoln and Cardiff at the top.
Yet for all that, there are reasons for optimism. Cozier-Duberry’s possible return for the run-in, as a supply line for striker Sam Dalby, who having been injured in the pre-season has 10 goals to his name, could potentially have huge significance.
That impending sequence of fixtures against most of the league’s best sides – Plymouth, Stockport, Cardiff, Stevenage, Huddersfield, then Bradford – should serve Bolton, too, given that they have proven to be far better against the top six or seven than those weaker sides who drop deep, intent on not losing.
There is a mental resilience. This team’s comeback to win 3-2 at Wycombe Wanderers earlier this month, having trailed 2-0 on 88 minutes, is the latest turnaround of its kind ever recorded by Opta. The spectacle at Vale Park was not typical, with Schumacher asking his players to go for a long-ball game because, to his mind, the shocking state of the pitch rendered the usual passing game impossible. ‘We won’t be having to do that again,’ he says.
Skipper Toal was criticised in some quarters this week for seeming to suggest in the aftermath of the defeat that the hope of automatic promotion had gone, though our conversation elicits a different response. ‘You never know,’ he says. ‘Football’s a funny game. But yes, if it is the play-offs, we have to address that.’
Loanee Corey Blackett-Taylor has had a positive impact since arriving from Derby in January
Captain Eoin Toal was criticised in some quarters after suggesting automatic promotion is out of the question, but now says anything can happen
Iles sees a comparison between the expectation at Bolton with that facing Sunderland in 2019 when they sought immediate promotion to the Championship after back-to-back relegations into League One. The Black Cats lost three League One play-offs before promotion in 2023.
Bolton seem to be further along the road than Sunderland did back then. They have lived through League One play-off heartbreak twice – Barnsley doing for them in 2023 before Oxford the following year – and have resided for five years in the third tier, longer than any of the division’s current members bar Lincoln and Burton.
They have sold 15,000 season tickets for next season and will have an encouraging piece of statistical history on their side if they maintain third place: four of the last seven clubs promoted via the play-offs have finished third.
‘Let’s be positive, eh? And not too down on ourselves,’ says Schumacher before walking away from the muddy field in the Potteries. ‘We can attack our last seven games because there is a huge carrot at the end of it.’
