‘I have a brain tumour that is going to kill me,” says Graham McLennan, founder of the fan ownership group engaged in a race against time to keep Greenock Morton in business. “It is terminal and the oncologist told me straight. This will kill me.”
McLennan, 55, was diagnosed with a tumour after a seizure in February 2020, undergoing a craniotomy, radiotherapy and chemotherapy at The Beatson Cancer Centre in Glasgow.
The father of three now volunteers for the Beatson and the Brain Tumour Charity but spends most of his waking hours centred on the survival chances of the football club who, despite their trials and travails, come a close second to family in his affections.
With no benevolent sugar daddy to prop them up, Morton could run out of money soon unless they find a way to fill a £320,000 black hole in the budget.
A Fighting Fund set up to keep club afloat has already raised more than £42,000 and McLennan has now joined club legends John McMaster and George Anderson in securing election back on to the board of Morton Club Together, the body he steered towards full control of the Championship club five years ago.
Sipping a coffee in a Greenock hotel, he looks and sounds healthy enough to address an obvious question. With problems of his own to deal with, why concern himself so closely with the welfare of Morton?
“I’m quite straight up on this,” he says. “The tumour is going to kill me, it is going to start to grow back.
“The oncologist says to me straight, ‘Graham, this is the thing that will kill you, we just don’t know when’.
“I could be sitting in the garden sipping tea and reading books. But that’s not my scene. It’s not my scene at all. I have a beautiful family and beautiful kids and I do try all that stuff.
“But there is a phrase that the late Australian spin bowler Shane Warne used when he said, ‘I don’t want to die wondering’.
“That’s why I am back involved. I love Morton, I love Inverclyde, I love the community. The oncologists say to keep using my brain as much as possible.
“I need to keep it working, but because I have epilepsy as well now I need to just watch myself.
“That is why I have surrounded myself with fabulous friends and people like George Anderson and John McMaster, who also passionately care about our football club.”
He founded Morton Club Together in 2019 in response to a previous crisis and would introduce himself to people in football as “the guy to blame for MCT”. He was only half joking.
Golden Casket, the Inverclyde confectioners owned by the late Morton chairman Douglas Rae and son Crawford, decided to stop funding the club’s unsustainable losses in 2019. Fan ownership and a debt free future offered an attractive solution to the problem. After all, no one cares more for the fortunes of a football club than the supporters.
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“We had to do something,” recalls McLennan now. “You can’t just assume that someone is going to ride in on a white horse and give you lots of money.
“I remember sitting in a room at a meeting and thinking, ‘Maybe we have to do it ourselves’.”
A conversation with Bryan Jackson, the footballing firefighter who played a key role in the salvation of Hearts, made up his mind. “It was Bryan who told me that community ownership was the only game in town.”
By 2021, Golden Casket had agreed to write off £2.3million of debt in return for washing their hands of the football club and placing financial responsibility in the hands of MCT.
A year later, the club signed a record three year commercial tie-up with Dalrada Technology, a US company run by Morton fan Brian Bonar.
Dalrada’s deal will lapse at the end of this season and recently they have struggled to make scheduled payments, leaving Morton to fill a £320,000 black hole in the budget. For a Championship team, it’s a huge sum of money.
Estrella Football Group, a Dutch operation established by former PEZ Zwolle CEO Xander Czaikowski and business partner David Dwinger, offered a potential lifeline.
Estrella wanted to add the club to a horizontal ownership network already featuring lower league clubs in Portugal and Italy and provide £600,000 plus an estimated £400,000 worth of data, player recruitment and operational support in return for 35% of the shares and two seats on the board.
A Memorandum of Understanding was drawn up and due diligence completed before MCT members delayed a vote to approve the partnership at a stormy AGM last week where McLennan, McMaster and Anderson were elected to the board and members were informed of an alternative approach from a consortium of 10 local businesses.
While Inverclyde’s billionaire brothers Sandy and James Easdale have been asked to lend their support, details of the group’s blueprint have yet to be made known to MCT’s 1150 members or, it should be said, to the newly elected directors. Any deal which passed the club and stadium back into private hands and out of the hands of supporters would be a hard sell.
Born and raised in Port Glasgow, Anderson played for the Ton over two spells between 1970 and 1987. He made 374 appearances in total, placing him ninth in the club’s all-time list of appearances. Part of the legendary Cappielow team which topped the Scottish Premier League under Benny Rooney for a time in the late 1970s, he is 72 now and feels saddened by the club’s plight.
“The club was in good hands when I played here,” he tells The Fixture. “There was a good board of directors who knew what they were trying to do.
“It was the owner Hal Stewart who pushed for the Texaco Cup back in the day and brought Scandinavians into Scotland long before that was the norm.
“I was lucky to go from cheering on goalkeeper Erik Sorensen to being in the same team and for me that was the dream.
“The club only works if everybody is pulling in the same direction. If that doesn’t happen, the club will go down.”
An Aberdeen legend who won a European Cup Winners’ Cup, a European Super Cup, three Scottish league titles and three Scottish Cups, Morton were McMaster’s team when he was growing up in Greenock’s Gibshill. He served the club as assistant manager for a decade.
“We used to kick a ball around through the week then on a Saturday it would be down to Cappielow to duke in or be punted over the turnstiles with 20 other boys,’ says the man known to former team-mates as ‘Spammer’.
“We would go and see Alan McGraw and Joe Mason when there were buses and trains leaving for Glasgow to go see Celtic and Rangers. That was when Inverclyde was thriving.
“It’s in your blood really. My boys are Aberdonians and I have a big affection for Aberdeen after everything I did there. But it all kicked off for me with Morton. And we need to get our act together quickly as a club.”
Before the diagnosis of the brain tumour came out of the blue, McLennan was known to work colleagues as ‘the honey badger’.
Fiercely aggressive mammals renowned for their fearlessness when cornered or defending their territory, he now applies those characteristics to saving Morton and supports any proposal which might help the club out of an ‘unnecessary emergency’. He would stop short of backing any consortium which wanted to take the club back into private hands or seize ownership of Cappielow.
“Fan ownership is still the best model. Morton have just not been doing it right. Some say there is not enough people to make community ownership work for Morton.
“But on March 11, 2024, the team were narrowly beaten by Hearts at Cappielow in the quarter-finals of the Scottish Cup.
“There were 7143 people there that night. And they were not all Hearts supporters by any means.
“In season 2022/23, we were challenging to win the league and 3-1 up against Dundee at Dens Park after 90 minutes.
“We drew the game 3-3 and it was painful. Near the end of the season, we had a penalty against Arbroath and if we had scored it and held on at Dens Park, Dundee would have won the league by a single point.
“We would have had 61 points and finished second in the league. So, for me, community ownership has delivered benefits for Morton. It’s just not working anymore…”
One of the main reasons for that is Dalrada’s issues with meeting scheduled payments. Taking the view that the money they put in before should have been optimised to much greater effect, McLennan feels some sympathy for the company’s plight. Whoever fans choose to blame for recent events, Morton will run out of money before Christmas unless Dalrada’s money is either paid or replaced soon.
While the club have moved to play down claims from manager Ian Murray that a lack of players could force them to forfeit league points, McLennan sees a patient in intensive care in desperate need of some TLC from friends and family.
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“Whatever transpires, I think that Cappielow is the biggest asset that MCT members have,” he said.
“Lose Cappielow and we will lose everything. I will fight to the death to ensure that Cappielow remains entirely in community ownership through MCT.
“I would also urge members to hold on to community ownership. Hold on to your club.
“We are in an emergency right now and who is ultimately responsible for what happens at Greenock Morton?
“Is it the manager? No. The club board? No. The MCT board? No. The supporters? No.
“There are 1100 plus members responsible for what happens at MCT. And future of the club lies in our hands.
“I called it Morton Club Together all those years ago for a reason.
“What makes me sad and annoyed right now is that I have heard people calling it Morton Not Together.
“We need to change that now or our club will be gone.”
