For the
love
of the
game
David Botttomley couldn’t say no when
the football club he’s supported since he
was a boy asked him to be chief executive.
He talks to Shelina Begum about his
business career, life at Rochdale AFC
and the search for a £14m investor
D
avid Bottomley
admits it’s not
always easy to
separate his
feelings as the CEO
of Rochdale
Football Club and
that of the diehard supporter that he is.
After famously spending a record-
breaking 36 consecutive seasons
playing in the bottom tier of the English
League, opposition fans used to refer to
League Two as ‘the Rochdale division’.
“When we got promoted in 2010 the
fans started singing ‘it needs a new
name, it needs a new name, this
Rochdale division, needs a new name’,”
he recalls with a smile.
“Very famously most clubs used to
sack their manager after losing to
Rochdale. It was one club you could
never lose to if were a manager on a
bad run.”
The new 2019/20 season marks a
record-breaking sixth successive
season in League One for a club that
proudly remains debt-free after 112
years in a sport where several clubs
have gone into administration.
“I remember last season we missed a
late chance in a Checkatrade Trophy
match and all I could think was ‘that’s
just cost us five grand,” he recalls.
Every penny counts for a club with
monthly costs of around £350,000.
The 59-year-old is not your typical
football club boss. His ambition to win
promotion to the Championship and
build their own training ground is
tempered by a dose of realism forged in
a career in business.
Bottomley spent more than 30 years
working in the toy industry, most
noticeably at the world’s largest toy
company Hasbro, which is responsible
Continued overleaf Rochdale FC CEO David Bottomley10 BusIness AUGUST 2019
The big inTerview