Her beloved Scunthorpe United had moved to the edge of the abyss under the ownership of David Hilton; in a death roll with more than £1.2m of debt, facing a winding-up petition from HMRC and eviction from their Glanford Park stadium, which remained in the hands of Hilton’s predecessor, Peter Swann. It was the subject of a bitter dispute between the pair.
Now, as the club counted down to the home game against Brackley on 7 October 2023 in the National League North – English football’s sixth tier – there was another problem and it surely spelled the end. The players were about to go on strike.
“They wouldn’t play for him [Hilton] because he wasn’t paying them,” Harness says. “ That was the club finished that day. It was when I went back to him and said: ‘How much?’”
Harness is Scunthorpe-born and bred, a lifelong fan of the Iron, who were formed in 1899 and elected in 1950 into the Football League, where they stayed until their relegation from League Two in 2022. They would go down again from the National League in 2023.
Harness, a local businesswoman who had worked as the club’s commercial manager from 2000 to 2015, joined Hilton’s board in July 2023 and, as such, was on the ground as it threatened to subside. Hilton had taken over from Swann in January last year, although he was unable to come through on the £3m purchase of Glanford Park during a period of exclusivity that lasted until May.
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