Yeovil Town chairman Martin Hellier has said he intends to sell the club “as soon as a suitable buyer can be found.”
The owner has been in open warfare with supporters on social media in recent days culminating in a number of supporters being handed bans from Huish Park for “negative comments and remarks regarding Yeovil Town Football Club and the club’s chairman.”
This has spiralled in to abuse being exchanged from both sides and the chairman has cited this as the reason for his decision to sell in a post on his person Facebook account on Saturday morning ahead of the match with AFC Fylde.
It is not the first time Hellier has threatened to sell the club since he completed his takeover in May 2023 ending the ownership of <NAME REDACTED>, so we will wait and see how this one pans out. But, for the time being, the above post seems to be fairly black and white.
The news comes days after the club announced it lost almost £2.8m during last season’s return to the National League Premier Division.
The accounts for Yeovil Football & Athletic Club Limited show the club is being kept afloat by owner selling “assets from within a property portfolio” and highlight uncertainty about the club’s ability to continue as a going concern.
The decision to ban a number of supporters has caused a lot of conversation – to put it mildly – on social media and even made headlines in some of the national media – see here.
Here is an example of one such letter sent to supporter Jonathan Hooper:
The sooner he’s gone the better. He wants the world to act like he is a god and a saviour but he behaves himself like a child.
So he won’t be buying back the stadium & the land.
I can’t imagine who’d want to buy us, given the financial mess we’re in?
Do you really believe there was ever any intention of buying back the stadium? Talk is cheap and Mr Hellier has plenty of talk!
For someone who is all talk he had nothing to say at the forum bar a load of cliche’s. No long term plan bar throwing money at the NLS.
No I didn’t. If he had the money, he would have done it first thing on taking over.
Blaming the fans for his departure was something I predicted months ago
Don’t sell, Martin. Carry on your good work, but please stay off social media. Don’t post, don’t read it. Let the media people do the media stuff, you concentrate on the ownership stuff.
Good. Undoubtedly he saved the club last season, and bought us a title winning season (in a part time league). However, that doesn’t give you a by to be an abusive narcissist. The way he acts on social media is continually damaging the brand of YTFC, and how he can’t realise that is beyond me. The ‘fan forum’ was just an ego stroking exercise and he has taken to banning people for having a differing opinion to him, with one of his sons seemingly spending their time trawling through #YTFC on Twitter to please daddy. He is quite clearly a troubled individual who has a very problematic relationship with alcohol and other substances, (remember last season where he kept fighting people in pubs?), I have no reservations that he is (or at-least was) a somewhat wealthy individual, but he clearly isn’t fit to run a football club at any level. Please piss off out of our football club, and take that shite-laughable attempt at a rebrand-badge with you,
Am I banned yet?
Let’s face it, whoever owns this club will not satisfy those with an obsessive appetite for abuse. Martin generally did good for our club but the haters (so called fans) look to destroy. Despite recent issues, Martin was abused from the start. Who do you want for your next target of fury and negativity?
I don’t think he was ‘abused from the start’. He’s a vile, abusive, egotistical bloke, that can’t quite understand that social media is always going to have trolls, and people that disagree with him. No matter where you go in football, how well you’re doing, someone is always going to disagree with you. His fragile masculinity clearly can’t take trolls on social media, but he’s not intelligent enough to stay off it, there’s a reason you don’t see chairman’s or managers on social media, I’m not condoning abuse of any sort, from either side, but you have to realise that these sort of people exist, and be smart enough to stay away from it.