A beautiful mural at Rochdale’s ground of Joe Thompson, the much-loved player who lost his life a year ago this month at the age of 36, proclaims: ‘Don’t live to survive. Live to thrive.’
The midfielder, and that message of his, have been very much in mind as the club head into the finale of a compelling season-long fight with York City for the National League’s automatic promotion spot, this weekend.
With both teams on more than 100 points but only one guaranteed to rejoin the Football League and the other left to fight through a six-team play-off, Rochdale must win at home to their rivals in one of the most eagerly anticipated non-League games in recent years.
Thompson’s close friend and former team-mate Ian Henderson, who at the age of 41 has featured prominently for the side these past few months, has experienced only one game with as much on it as York’s arrival at the club’s Crown Oil Arena for Saturday’s promotion shootout. It was the May afternoon, eight years ago, when Dale faced Charlton needing to better Oldham Athletic’s result to avoid relegation to League Two and Thompson, restored to the side after cancer treatment, stepped up with the winner.
‘So I have those emotions,’ relates Henderson, the oldest player in any of the top five leagues, who first arrived at the club 13 years ago. ‘I know in some ways survival was the polar opposite of what we’re going for now. But how it was done and who it was done by – my old friend – magnified the significance 10-fold. What happened back then is relevant to now.’
Thompson’s message as he contended with Hodgkin lymphoma also seems to apply to the way Rochdale have emerged from some very dark days to where they stand now: a thriving club once more, who have accumulated 105 points this season and yet it still may not be enough to be promoted.
The late Joe Thompson, a Rochdale hero who scored the goal that kept the club in League One in 2018. His close friend Ian Henderson stands to Thompson’s left
Rochdale have picked up 105 points this season but it still may not be enough to end their Football League exile, and they must beat leaders York City in a final-day shootout
Henderson with Luke Hannant after beating Wealdstone earlier this month. The 41-year-old is the club’s record goalscorer and has made more than 500 appearances
Barely two years ago they were at risk of liquidation, having fended off a hostile takeover offer and seen rival offers to buy them descend into a slanging match.
The club, relegated from the Football League in 2023 for the first time in 102 years, was lost, careworn and close to liquidation when Sir Peter Ogden – a Rochdalian IT entrepreneur – stepped in with a £300,000 loan to meet the wage bill before purchasing the club in May 2024. His son Cameron Ogden, co-chairman and one of the three siblings who form the club’s majority ownership, reflects that the family discovered a kind of ‘trauma’ amid the small, besieged workforce, with the club on the brink.
‘I think people were just exhausted mentally,’ Ogden says. ‘At any organisation that goes through those kinds of episodes where you’re left running on vapours, it hurts those staff. I think we needed almost 12 months to overcome that.’
The inadequate modest kitchen facilities, from which a single member of staff was being asked to perform miracles, seemed a metaphor for the need of greater resources. So did the often waterlogged pitch, ripped up and relaid in the middle of this season, forcing the team’s brief decampment to Accrington.
The club are losing more than £600,000 a year and the Ogden method has been to equip manager Jimmy McNulty well, but not recklessly. There’s a drive to generate more revenues from the club’s stadium as a community facility – fitting for Rochdale, birthplace of the cooperative movement. Bromley, recently promoted to League One for the first time, are something of a model.
The wage budget does not compare with that of York, Carlisle or Forest Green. ‘They’re the Galacticos of the league,’ Henderson says of Saturday’s visitors. At least six clubs in this division have spent more on wages than Dale this season.
Both Henderson and Ogden feel that the jewel in the crown is manager McNulty. A players’ coach, if ever there were one, who played for the club between 2015 and 2024 and has built a team better than the sum of its parts.
‘Someone who has a very unique ability to build players’ trust,’ as Ogden puts it. As a former Rochdale team-mate of McNulty’s, Henderson has been running through walls for him since January after returning to a prominent role following injury to Devante Rodney.
It’s three years since Rochdale’s darkest day, when they were relegated from the Football League for the first time in 102 years with a 1-0 defeat at Stockport
Both Henderson and co-chairman Cameron Ogden feel that the jewel in the crown is manager Jimmy McNulty (pictured)
Henderson, who has been through so much with this club, is the oldest player in any of the top five leagues – but isn’t ruling out coming back for another season next year
Henderson – Rochdale’s all-time top scorer with 170 goals across two spells either side of a two-year period at Salford City – is more than a year older than Brighton’s James Milner, yet hasn’t given up on the idea of another season.
‘I reflect on age being just a number,’ he says. ‘I’m still very, very physically fit and strong – and if you combine that with a desire to still play the game, then that’s a powerful combination right there. It’s simple. I just love football. I’ve always loved football.’
He brings a hinterland beyond the game, as well as a depth of experience which has made him something of a mentor as Rochdale’s No 40. Henderson has established the Hauss group of modern boutique hotels with business partners – several in Scotland and a third coming on stream in Cambridge this summer. He has another business turning properties into serviced office space and co-runs a commercial financial brokerage. He also has an MSc in sports directorship.
But none of that delivers quite the same sensation as Emmanuel Dieseruvwe’s 99th-minute winner for Rochdale at Braintree last Saturday, taking the titanic battle between the league’s outstanding two clubs into this last weekend. The footage on the Rochdale website is something to behold – with the camera almost displaced as the delirious commentator screams into his microphone.
‘I’m seeing our management team, the boys that were on the bench and not involved, sprinting towards us,’ Henderson says. ‘And it took me a few moments to actually register that the referee had blown the whistle. That’s a first for me in football.’
It was actually the MO of York, who have scored more stoppage-time goals this season than any other side in England’s top five tiers. Without their own 96th-minute winner against Altrincham, and equivalent late strikes against Morecambe and Hartlepool, the Canadian-owned club wouldn’t have matched Dale all the way to the end.
Facing the play-offs having amassed more than 100 points would be brutal for both clubs – especially York, who have accumulated 203 across the past two seasons, though this situation may not exist for much longer.
The National League’s 3UP campaign has been methodically arguing the case for three promotion spots from the fifth tier, two of them automatic, with the EFL. It was on the agenda at the EFL’s annual clubs meeting in mid-February and there is hope that it might be put to a vote next February, with a third promotion slot by the 2027-28 season. A majority of EFL clubs will need to agree.
Rivals York City have had their fair share of drama themselves this season, with a raft of late winners keeping their noses in front at the top of the National League
McNulty joined the club as a player in 2015 and eventually transitioned into the dugout after a few caretaker spells in charge
‘You can almost smell when a club is being run right and it’s unmistakable now,’ Henderson reflects. ‘That’s what will make us strong this weekend’
Both the Rochdale MP Paul Waugh, a Dale season-ticket holder, and his York counterpart Luke Charters have contributed to the campaign’s political dimension. There is a mood of quiet optimism at National League HQ, with further conversations since the EFL clubs meeting, but tact and diplomacy will be required.
Henderson is focusing on the small gestures which tell him Rochdale are reborn, such as Ogden seeking him out when he made his 500th appearance for the club in January and handing him a bottle of wine from 2013, the year he made his debut. The club are making enduring efforts to keep his dear friend Thompson in the mind’s eye, too.
‘I’ve always believed that as a professional athlete, you can almost smell when a club is being run right and it’s unmistakable now,’ Henderson reflects. ‘That’s what will make us strong this weekend.
‘I don’t mind saying what I personally believe, what the team believes, what the management team believes and what the fanbase believes – that we’re going to win this weekend.’
