Underdog Stories / Football history

What Happened to Bury FC? How Fans Saved the Club

What happened to Bury FC? Expelled in 2019, rebuilt by fans, and back climbing the pyramid. Here's the story of the club that bought back its own home.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · July 22, 2026

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On the day Bury Football Club was expelled from the league, around 400 fans turned up at Gigg Lane carrying mops and buckets. The club had asked for help cleaning the four stands and their 11,640 seats so the ground would be ready for Saturday's match against Doncaster Rovers. The stadium was left gleaming, but the game never took place.

So, what happened to Bury FC? The owner could not show he had the money to finish a season. A last-minute takeover collapsed, and on 27 August 2019 the English Football League threw the club out. Supporters then built a new team, bought the ground, and merged the two in 2023. It is the story Chris Horwedel tells in "Bury FC: The Club That Had to Buy Back Its Own Home" on Why We Love This Club.

What happened to Bury FC in August 2019?

Start with the pronunciation, because Chris does. It rhymes with berry. Say it like the thing you do to a body, and a local may correct you, politely, depending on the local.

The club had a good year and a terrible summer. In the 2018-19 season, Ryan Lowe's side played bold attacking football and won promotion from League Two. Businessman Steve Dale had bought the club in December 2018 for a fee of £1. After due diligence he said the finances were worse than he'd expected, and there followed months in which players and staff went unpaid.

Chris lists what came next: creditors, winding-up petitions from the tax authorities, and a company voluntary arrangement meant to manage the debts. The club began the season with a 12-point deduction after that arrangement was approved. Six of its games were called off.

The league's position was simple. It said that despite repeated requests, Dale never provided evidence of how the club would meet its financial commitments. A buyer, C&N Sporting Risk, appeared. One hour before the deadline, it said no agreement could be reached. EFL chair Debbie Jevans called it "one of the darkest days in the league's recent history."

Bury were the first club expelled from the Football League since Maidstone United in 1992. The timing was cruel. The players had done their job and won promotion. The club behind them could not collect the prize.

One more detail from that week. Bolton Wanderers, Bury's traditional rival, faced the same deadline. Bolton were not expelled and carried on in League One, because a consortium agreed a deal to buy them. Two clubs with the same problem got two different endings.

How good was Bury before it all fell apart?

Better than most people under 60 would guess. Chris is firm on this. In its early decades Bury were not a charming provincial underdog. They were one of the strongest clubs in England.

The club joined the Football League in 1894 and, by the episode's count, spent 17 consecutive seasons in the top flight. They won the FA Cup in 1900, beating Southampton 4-0 at Crystal Palace. Three years later, in 1903, they beat Derby County 6-0, the biggest cup final win ever until Manchester City equalled it in 2019. Ten goals in two finals. None conceded. Chris notes, dryly, that efficiency is much easier when you never lose the final.

The 1903 match ball survives in the National Football Museum. Bury's best league finish was fourth, in 1925-26. Then the slide. They went down from the top flight in 1929 and never came back.

After that came ordinary life in the lower divisions. Chris argues that this was the real identity. Most fans don't live through cup finals. They inherit a club, complain about the players, travel to odd places, and hand the habit to someone younger. Colin Bell started here in 1963, and Neville Southall and Kasper Schmeichel passed through. In 2005 Bury became the first club to score 1,000 league goals in each of England's top four divisions. It is, as Chris says, a very Bury record. It takes success, failure, and a great deal of time.

What is Bury AFC, and how did fans start again?

Two rescue projects began, and they didn't start out as one.

Bury AFC was a phoenix club owned by the Shakers Community Society, and it began in the tenth tier, the North West Counties League, for 2020-21. Chris dates its formation to December 2019. It couldn't play at Gigg Lane. It shared Radcliffe FC's 4,000-capacity Stainton Park, about 2.5 miles away. It won promotion in March 2022.

“Supporters weren't debating a logo. They were deciding what survival looked like.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

The second group went after the old club's assets. In February 2022 a fans' group called Est.1885 completed the purchase of Gigg Lane from the administrator. It also acquired the Bury FC trading name, history and memorabilia, and later became the Bury Football Club Supporters' Society. The episode adds that money came from the Community Ownership Fund, Bury Council and supporters.

So the town now had a team without a ground, and a ground without a team. When Bury AFC asked to rent Gigg Lane, the Supporters Society turned it down in April 2022 as "not feasible". That is a fan-owned ground refusing a fan-owned team. I'd call it the oddest line in the whole saga.

Why did the first Bury merger fail?

Everyone agreed Bury needed football at Gigg Lane. They didn't agree on how the new club, the old name, the debts and the history should fit together.

The October 2022 merger vote needed 66% from both societies. The Shakers Community Society voted 94% in favour, but the Supporters Society reached only 63%. From outside, it looked like fans squabbling over an obvious fix. Chris disagrees. The questions were real ones. Was Bury AFC a replacement or a continuation? Who should control the ground? Could a merger protect fan ownership? Could an old club's identity just be handed over?

I'd go a step further than the episode. Nobody has a signed letter proving a hasty merger would have gone wrong. But a rescue where nobody argued would have been a rescue where nobody was asked.

The second vote came on 5 May 2023. It passed with 90.1% of the Supporters Society and 97% of Bury AFC members. Gigg Lane as home was approved by 97%, and Bury Football Club as the playing name by 92%. A merged club also qualified for a reported £1.3m in funding, £450,000 of it from Bury Council. On 5 June 2023 the FA confirmed the name "Bury Football Club" could be used in competition for the first time since August 2019.

How did Bury FC go on today? The climb since 2023

If you came for a live score, the club runs a "MatchDay Live" Twitter feed with team news and half-time and full-time updates. I can't see today's result from here. What I can give you is the shape of the last three seasons.

2023-24 was the first back at Gigg Lane. Bury finished third and lost the play-off final to Wythenshawe Town on penalties. Then the climb sped up.

On 19 April 2025 Bury beat Burscough 4-0 on the final day, in front of 8,719 supporters, and went up as champions. That was the ninth tier. They set club records of 109 points and 131 goals in the season. Chris points out how odd it was to see crowds like that below the professional game.

In 2025-26 they stepped up to the Northern Premier League Division One West. Anthony Johnson, born in Bury, took over as manager in February 2026. Going into the last day, Bury led Avro by two points. Then came 25 April 2026 and a 3-0 win at Atherton Collieries, which sealed the title. The home club's ground was sold out, with its biggest competitive crowd since the 1920s. Bury finished on 90 points from 42 games, by the episode's numbers. Back-to-back league titles, the first in more than 130 years, and the record bears that out: Bury won the Lancashire League in 1890-91 and again in 1891-92.

The 2026-27 season began away at Ashton United on 8 August, in the seventh tier.

Can a club really outlast its owners?

Chris's answer is yes, with a warning attached. A company can fail, an owner can leave, and a league can remove a membership. A club survives if enough people still feel they owe each other something and will do the dull work of turning memory back into a Saturday afternoon.

The warning is that this is not a fairy tale. The Football League is still three promotions away. Gigg Lane is, in Chris's words, both a wonderful asset and an expensive responsibility. And fan ownership takes away the comfort of blaming a distant owner. If ticket prices rise or the budget tightens, the row happens inside the community that owns the club. Chris says the conflict was part of what made the rescue legitimate.

I agree with him, and I'd add that nobody should pretend it's tidy. Even the new revenue is mundane. In July 2026 the club announced a stadium naming-rights partner, Salford Van & Car Hire.

The seats were scrubbed for Doncaster in 2019. The first game back at Gigg Lane came on 8 July 2023, a friendly against Bradford City, who won 6-0. That is almost four years later. If you want the full version, with Chris's telling, it's on Why We Love This Club.