Damson jam

SOLIHULL MOORS

In 2024, a team from the football backwater of Solihull, only created in 2007 by the merger of Moor Green with Solihull Borough, jostled its way to the front of the throng of Midlands clubs with two Wembley finals inside a week. Despite losing both on penalties, it felt like the start of something special. As I write, they sit bottom of the National League, with dwindling crowds and a goal difference resembling a Championship points deduction. What happened?

In the main stand at Damson Park for Solihull Moors’ opening home game of the season, I couldn’t help but notice the dusting of paint flecks from the peeling roof lying like new-fallen snow at my feet. The metaphor was almost too perfect – a veneer of shiny professionalism applied over a hastily-built structure, crumbling in an ill wind. This 1,200-seat stand, opened in 2019 by local royalty Karen Carney, was a statement of intent by chairman Darryl Eales; in 2026 our matchday gate barely half-fills it.

Eales grew up in suburban Birmingham watching Moor Green with his dad, and after four years as chairman of Oxford United in 2018 has brought significant improvements – not just the new stand, but overhauling commercial and bar areas, resurfacing an Apollo landing site of a car park, building up an award-winning Community Foundation and investing heavily in training facilities. A well-heeled town of around 125,000 in the hinterland of Birmingham, Solihull has no real football culture of its own and long-settled outside allegiances – there is often as much Birmingham City merchandise on show in the stands as blue and yellow scarves. But high-profile games such as a sell-out FA Cup tie against Wigan in 2021 aside, home gates have remained stubbornly below Eales’ target of 2,000. A half-season ticket offer extended to our Wembley ticket holders for August to December 2024 seemed to fall largely on deaf ears.

In 2018-19, the season Eales arrived, Moors came a strong second in a division where only eventual champions Leyton Orient, Barnet, Wrexham, Chesterfield and Halifax had League pedigree. In a parallel universe with sensible numbers of National League promotion places, Moors would already have reached the EFL and reaped the resultant windfall. However, we remain in the fifth tier, with declining on-field quality leading to declining attendances, and over £12 million in debt. Compared with teams with the resources of Carlisle and Southend, and even derby rivals Tamworth, recently buoyed by significant investment, Moors look increasingly adrift. Teams of modest means like Boreham Wood and Hornchurch, currently flying high, are a stark reminder of what Moors could be.

A successful private equity manager, Eales is wealthy, generous and well intentioned, but we may now be seeing the limits of his ability or desire to prop up Moors – a commercial brochure for the club appeared a couple of years back, reading like a thinly-veiled offer to sell up. Many of his original board members and investors have departed, and it’s clear that the value of investments in football can go down as well as up.

Under Eales, Moors have changed managers nine times, with the most sustained success coming under the longer tenures of Neal Ardley, who took us to a previous play-off final in 2022, and mastermind of our Wembley visits Andy Whing. Current manager Chris Millington, who arrived from Halifax in October 2025 with an at best mixed record despite winning the FA Trophy, has won only a third of his games. Previous squads contained quality players like Andrew Dallas, Ryan Barnett and Callum Maycock, all now playing League football, mostly replaced by journeymen and short-term loans. The expensive tenure of Ireland international Stephen Ward as director of football (a post mostly unknown at this level) had little impact on player quality, and only three players from that Wembley squad started this season. Most contentiously, midfielder Jamey Osborne, widely regarded as the club’s best ever player, mysteriously switched to Southern League Alvechurch in August. Even at 34, most fans still regarded him as an asset, or at least thought ten years and nearly 300 games deserved better than an unheralded move down two steps. Eales belatedly responded to fan disquiet with an effusive public “thank you” to Osborne.

Watching our Wembley opponents Bromley reach the third tier, I ask myself – could that have been us? With the transformative cash injection which comes with a League place, perhaps. But since that play-off shootout in 2024, Moors have been caught in a spiral of poor results, thwarted aspirations and fan apathy. It will take more than a coat of tarmac on the car park to fix it. Nick Drew