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In the eyes of many Wanderers fans, she can do no wrong, but Sharon Brittan insists she will never take the responsibility of leading this town’s football club lightly.
It is coming up to four years since the Football Ventures consortium stopped the countdown clock to prevent one of the league’s founder members going into liquidation.
Virtually every aspect of Bolton had been run into the ground, first thought neglectful previous owners, then the harsh reality of a complicated and arduous administration process.
Since then, it has not all been plain sailing, but Brittan and the FV crew have become acceptable faces in an area of football which is still facing considerable challenges and attracting people with less altruistic motives.
“I will never forget the day I walked into this Football Club in August 2019,” Brittan recalled. “Devastation seems like a really powerful word, but it was devastation. People had not been paid. They were unable to pay their mortgages. They were unable to pay their rent. Their anxiety was heightened. Their mental health and wellbeing had suffered.
“I'm not sure that people ever realise quite how much goes on behind the scenes in the running of a football club – the amount of work is enormous. It’s a huge responsibility to own a football club and people need to be very, very clear on that before they do this.
“We know what happens when a club gets into the wrong hands. Here, we’re responsible custodians and I know that the EFL, because I’ve worked closely with Rick Parry, are doing everything they can to ensure the owner’s fit and proper test is rigorous.”
Turning around a club which has been driven so hard into the ground was a slow process. Relegated to League Two after starting the 2019/20 campaign on minus 12 points, then forced to spend an entire season without home fans because of a global pandemic, it is fair to say there were bumps in the road for the new owners.
Brittan has slowly built up a management team within the walls of the stadium which has also proved hugely successful in the last few years.
“When I came here, people had lost faith – the staff, the fans, the stakeholders, the community, everybody had fallen out of love with this football club. We had to come in and start from the bottom, and that doesn’t happen quickly,” she said.
“I thought the only way I'm going to earn the trust of the fans and the community is by being visible.
“They need to see me, they need to know me, they need to understand me, they need to hear me. Being an invisible owner wouldn't have worked for the journey that we want to take the football club on.
“I have a lot of communication with people in the community, with people at the university, with people at the council. This is one of the largest towns in the UK and we should be singing from the same hymn sheet. I think the fans seem to be loving it now and we’re all proud of this journey.
“You need people who are bought into the vision and the journey, because this is a business that is full of noise. We want the noise to be on the pitch, with peace and quiet off the pitch, so we can all get on with our jobs and have fun.
“Each and every component has to come together for success. One thing that is a guarantee is that there will be highs and there will be lows – we share them all as one.
“We've got a culture here. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but I feel that we have created a family at Bolton Wanderers Football Club. We certainly feel proud of it and a lot of people from within the football world and outside of the football world are talking about it, which is really positive.”
Brittan and Football Ventures have preached sustainability since their arrival, a concept that does not always marry up well with football, especially outside the Premier League.
Accounts in their time at the helm have gradually improved, albeit the club is still reliant upon owner investment to run effectively.
Whether Wanderers ever manage to ‘break even’ without playing in the top flight is a point of debate among many supporters but Brittan maintains that pragmatic progression remains the ultimate aim.
“It’s really hard work to make a football club sustainable, but it’s our duty to run the football club in a smart way. I respect everybody’s money and I want people’s investment to be well spent. I think we’ve got a proven record of doing just that,” she said in an interview with EFL magazine.
“Four years in, we are running a sustainable Football Club in an organised and responsible manner. Doing that avoids the scenario of having the huge highs and then when the owner funding stops, you collapse. That's what can't happen.
“I’ve talked to so many of our fans and I think they appreciate our approach. They’ve said to me, ‘Sharon, we want responsible owners – we don’t want the boom and bust’.
“I am a great believer, first and foremost, that while we’re on the pitch for 90 minutes, there is no-one more competitive than me. I really like to win. But outside of that, we should all be collaborating and working together to ensure the future stability of the pyramid.”
Since early 2022, the Swiss-backed BMLL Limited consortium has also invested in the club, converting £2.77million into shares in the last 12 months.
Wanderers also launched a bond scheme this summer, pitched to investors as a way to push the club towards the Championship by helping fund several capital projects and give a boost to the playing budget. It has proved a roaring success, raising £4m at last count.
“When you do initiatives like the Wanderers Bond – in order to maintain our financial position and be competitive – it will only work if you’ve got trust around you,” Brittan added. “To have raised so much in such a short space of time just completely humbles me, and every single penny of that will go back into this Football Club, every single penny.
“My original four investors in 2019 – and our wonderful Swiss consortium who joined us in early 2022 – thought I was having a midlife crisis. However, thankfully, they bought into the idea that we were going to do things differently in football, alongside creating a platform to do good.
“Suddenly, we've got people coming to us with money, because they believe in what we’re doing and they want to be part of this movement and this journey. We're fully funded for the season ahead, and it's extraordinary from where we were.
“I think the fans know me well enough now to know that I'm very driven, I'm very determined and I know exactly where we want and need to be. I have enjoyed the last two seasons, but next season, we want to start in the right way and finish in the right way.”
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