In 1997 the club owed £4.4m and lost all its directors except for two. At the end of a match, Trevor Watkins approached the vice chair and said: 'If you need some legal work I’m a fan and I work for a major law firm.' He continued: 'Two weeks later I got a call asking me to meet the two remaining directors in a seedy two-star hotel in Bournemouth.'
Pinsent Masons
Three days later, he was faced with the task of raising £300,000 to prove that they had enough funds to see them through to the end of the League's season. They managed to raise a little under half of it - some £35,000 of it brought in by a collection in buckets at the team's ground. Eventually Mr Watkins set up an innovative supporters' trust which kept the club going. He became chair for a while and also moved to Pinsent Mason where he heads the sports unit.
Fairy tale ending
Promotion for the team is all but guaranteed. For them to be held back, an unlikely sequence of events must occur including Middlesborough scoring some 20 goals in its last match of the season, against Brighton. The current chair of Bournemouth called the expected promotion the 'greatest fairy tale since Hans Christian Andersen wrote his last one'. Source: Financial Times
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