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In the shadow of one of the UK’s largest abattoirs, a heady concoction of anger and apprehension hangs uneasily as a warning is delivered to those who fear their football club’s fate echoing that of the animals over the road.
“I fully appreciate there is a lot of passion running around the room tonight,” announces the evening’s master of ceremonies. “If there is any personal abuse, anything that is not tolerated, you will be warned, and we do have Tony and the team here to remove you if necessary.” Standing by the entrance door, two burly men in black overalls and security armbands give a nod. “Please remember to keep yourself dignified,” reiterates the host.
With every seat occupied inside the Bedford Town clubhouse, supporters line the walls, seeking answers at this specially arranged fans’ forum. Most are regulars, some for decades, colouring the room with the club’s distinctive royal blue worn as a pointedly outward display of devotion.
Scattered among them are a handful of Real Bedford diehards, identifiable by the club’s yellow and black paraphernalia on this foray across enemy lines.
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Bedford Town, known as the Eagles, have been playing at the Eyrie since 1993. Photographs: Martin Godwin
Given the animosity between the two clubs’ supporters, on any other occasion the interlopers might be described as brave or foolish. But tonight foes have been brought together to hear the prospect of not only becoming friends but being adopted into the same family; two football clubs – unthinkably, in the eyes of many in attendance – merging into one, an initiative driven by Real Bedford’s co-owner and chairman, Peter McCormack.
For more than a century, Bedford Town have been the town’s dominant non-league force. Not even the incomparably close proximity of Real Bedford’s various predecessors prompted much concern. Since moving to their neighbouring sites on the town’s eastern outskirts three decades ago, with a shared fence and single line of trees separating their respective corner flags by barely 20 metres, natural sporting hierarchy dictated the two sides coexisted peacefully, largely occupying different footballing spheres. Then McCormack’s grand plans changed everything.
It is a couple of weeks before the fans’ forum, and there is a hum of excitement in the Real Bedford clubhouse, where mismatched furniture evokes a ramshackle church function room.
There are two hours until table- topping Real Bedford kick off against Leverstock Green and the sound of heavy metal in the changing rooms provides a raucous backdrop to the hive of pre-match activity.
News of the potential merger between Bedford’s top two clubs has only recently emerged, hastily announced ahead of schedule after rumours began circulating. For fans of Real Bedford – a baby compared with their Bedford Town great-grandparent next door – there is general enthusiasm at the opportunity that lies ahead.
A black 4×4 pulls up and McCormack starts unloading crates of beer. An unexpected bumper crowd for the win over their title rivals Berkhamsted a few days earlier means the bar has run dry. McCormack’s official title is club chair but, frankly, he is Real Bedford. His black Rage Against the Machine hoodie helps explain the heavy metal in the clubhouse, the club’s skull and crossbones logo, and their Pirates nickname.
McCormack is part of non-league football’s new wave which includes increasing numbers of celebrities, entrepreneurs, social media gurus and foreign investors throwing their weight – and cash – behind clubs. The catalyst for many was the success of the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who have helped take Wrexham from the National League to the verge of the Championship, injecting some rarely seen glamour into the lower reaches of England’s football pyramid. Attendances in non-league’s top four tiers have risen more than three-quarters over the past decade.
Unlike his Hollywood counterparts, McCormack is local, Bedford born and bred. By his own admission he “knew nothing about non-league football” until this project. A university dropout – “the course was rubbish” – he worked as an advertising executive before launching and hosting a popular bitcoin podcast having first encountered the cryptocurrency to buy recreational drugs online, inauspicious beginnings that he is understandably keen on consigning to history.
His success allowed him to make a recent pivot as a counterculture interviewer. “I’m someone who dislikes authority,” he says. “I’m not a royalist, I hate the government, I hate bureaucracy.” It also provided a platform and the financial means to attempt an ambitious quest to buy a local club and take them into the Football League. “I thought: ‘I’m in this bitcoin world, why don’t I make us this freedom and liberty bitcoin club?’” he says. “A little bit punk, a little bit anarchist. We’re going to have a ‘fuck you’ attitude. It’s natural for me.”
Back then, in 2022, a team known only as Bedford – by far the smaller of the two clubs on the Meadow Lane site – were in the Spartan South Midlands League Division One, the 10th tier.
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Peter McCormack (right), the chairman of Real Bedford, congratulates his manager Rob Sinclair after the 3-1 victory over Enfield. (Right) The Real Bedford trophy cabinet.
McCormack bought them and immediately added Real to their name, a decision that cost him £1,000 when he belatedly learned he would need to buy it off the local organiser of a Sunday League team who played under the name. “Obviously I didn’t make out how big a deal it was because he could have rinsed me,” McCormack says with a laugh. “If he’d said £10,000 I’d have had to do it.” The club’s badge features the bitcoin logo alongside the words “est. block 712003” in place of the usual founding date, marking the first Real Bedford trace on the blockchain.
The triumphs – on-field and financial – have been instant. The club made £500,000 in sponsorship last year, including a five-year shirt deal with the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini worth an annual £100,000. Approaching the end of their second successive promotion early last year, McCormack secured a £3.6m investment – the largest ever in non-league football – from the Winklevoss twins, founders of a forerunner to Facebook and cryptocurrency billionaires. “Thankfully, my co-owners are worth 10 or 20 times what they [Reynolds and McElhenney] are,” McCormack says.
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Lee Watkins, the Real Bedford captain, chats to friends after the Southern League Division One Central match between Real Bedford and Enfield at the Ledger Stadium.
Top of the tier-eight Southern League Division One Central, Real Bedford have already made serious headway into McCormack’s stated aim of the men’s team joining the Football League within a decade – although the American brothers have tasked him with reaching the Premier League – and the women’s (who are undefeated in the fourth tier) playing in the Championship within five years. “Our club is unstoppable with what we want to do,” he says.
Back at the fans’ forum, as the crowd waits, the two clubs’ owners ready themselves in the adjoining directors’ suite, where sepia-toned highlights of Bedford Town’s past adorn the walls. A programme recalls their 2-2 draw against Arsenal in the 1956 FA Cup third round, a few years before they beat Newcastle United 2-1 in the same competition.
It is this history that Bedford Town fans dread may be lost, part of the reason why the club’s primary owner, Jon Taylor, sent McCormack packing when he tried to buy them three years ago. Taylor’s personal connection runs deep. A former Bedford Town reserves player, he was first-team manager when he bought the club with his father, David, in 2018. A year later, David collapsed and died in the club car park.
For McCormack, it made perfect sense to target the region’s biggest non-league club, a side who were about to gain promotion to the seventh tier, watched by more than double the next highest average attendance in the division.
“I sat in the meeting and it was absolutely incredible,” the former Bedford Town chairman Mike John says. “He [McCormack] just treated us like idiots. He said he didn’t want anyone connected with the club to be involved if he bought it: ‘I don’t want your expertise or knowledge of the game. I know it all.’”
Relations further soured when McCormack instead bought the neighbouring club and launched Real Bedford. Looking back, McCormack understands Taylor’s rejection: “I sounded like a fucking idiot, and Jon, rightly, thought I was an idiot.”
Taylor, a quietly spoken figure, publicly uses the terms “raw”, “fractious” and “annoyed” to describe a situation that left him significantly unhappier in private. It became unpleasant and personal, particularly online. If the merger is approved, and legalities confirmed by the deadline at the end of March, McCormack will become the owner and chairman of the club, some of whose fans were dishing out that abuse. McCormack says of once referring to Bedford Town as a “shithouse club”: “I had two years of being harassed online, people lying about me, making accusations about me. All I’ve ever tried to do is good stuff for Bedford. If people are going to be a shithouse to me, I’m going to stand by that statement.”
For Taylor, and his fellow shareholders, the decision to accept McCormack’s latest offer is driven in part by proof of his capabilities next door, in part because of increased financial demands they suggest they cannot meet, and in part by fear of what might become of their club if, or when, Real Bedford surpass them.
Their push for promotion to the National League North or South belies a meagre wage budget that is about half their division’s average. The increased travel costs of a higher tier could be disastrous.
“We’re honest enough to say that the money we’ve put into the club is as far as we can go,” Taylor’s co-owner Ben Banks tells the assembled supporters. “This is sleepless nights for the people sitting up here. Trying to make the right decision to make everyone happy and have everyone onboard is a very, very big burden to bear.”
Which leaves McCormack, a figure of contempt to many in the room, facing the unenviable task of attempting to bridge a yawning divide. It will be too vast for some. Amid sincere talk of respecting Bedford Town’s “rich history” and both clubs making necessary compromises, he admits he will lose fans. “So be it. I can’t bring everyone along. I will have to make decisions that will upset people.”
His grand ambition for the town is bigger than either individual club. “I am unapologetic about wanting to make Bedford a better place,” he says, pointing to numerous philanthropic schemes he has launched through Real Bedford.
A few weeks earlier James Edmunds, while setting up the Bedford Town Supporters’ Club tea hut for the last home game before the emergence of the potential merger, had flippantly pretended to spit on the floor at mention of their noisy neighbours. “They are probably the Man City of this level,” he says. “Objectively, they should be successful. But if the price of having that here is that it’s no longer Bedford Town, the badge has changed, the colours have changed, it would be a different club, it’s not worth it.”
As he speaks, the Real Bedford skull and crossbones flag flies conspicuously just beyond the perimeter fence. Next season, that barrier will likely be gone, Bedford’s awkward unification ushering in a non-league football revolution.
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