Are Peterborough United and Darragh MacAnthony really about to part company?

MacAnthony has mentioned leaving London Road so many times in the recent past I initially treated Thursday’s comment on his impending departure with an indifferent shrug.

After all this is man who appears to thrive on the attention owning a football club brings. For such a relatively small club he’s become a very high profile presence with regular appearances on national media, who lap up his quick-thinking, fearless comments and gift of the gab.

But his departure from Posh will come true one day and his tone during the latest edition of his ‘Hard Truth’ podcast suggests that day could well arrive when the current season ends.

In the past his comments re moving on have been accompanied by caveats on the lines of ‘if that’s what fans/partners want’, but not this time. This sounded final. This sounded like a man who’d made his mind up, although it was delivered to people who failed to point out we’ve heard similar comments many times before.

Anyway he’s done enough, and worked hard enough, for the club to deserve to be taken at face value and if he leaves he should go with our best wishes after providing so many outstanding memories. His reasons for leaving are strong. Family should always come first. Certainly over something as relatively trivial as football.

MacAnthony’s family relationships are important to him, no-one should doubt that. He’d hardly blurt so much personal stuff out on a popular podcast if he didn’t mean it, at that precise moment anyway.

But as recently as April he told the club’s own media channel he would put his family before football at the end of last season, but there he was again in the summer, front and centre, at the pre-season training camp in Portugal and whenever signings he’d helped negotiate were announced. He was still here, still doing his best for the club no matter what you think of his methods and results.

He’d also said on his ‘Hard Truth’ podcast in February he’d take a step back from player recruitment in the summer if that’s what his co-owners wanted and he’d walk away entirely if they wanted to buy him out.

Presumably they wanted neither as he was still heavily involved in signing players and he’s still here. The chances of Dr Jason Neale and Stewart Thompson wanting to buy him out now seem remote as their own personal relationship is going through a rocky patch.

It’s actually easy to announce you want to sell, but far harder to actually do it.

It’s a situation complicated by only having 50% of a club to sell and by the football club not owning the stadium. The three current co-owners of the football club also own the stadium and adjoining land through their London Road Properties company. Is an interested party going to want to buy a club that doesn’t own its own ground?

Negotiations are going to be tricky and the fact MacAnthony appears set to leave the club at this point suggests the proposed new stadium is not arriving any time soon.

There’s also a lot of football club debt, much of it owed to the owners.

Do I want him to go? Well that would depend of course on who bought the club from him. There are those who fear Posh would instantly return to the dismal days of the 1980s if MacAnthony sold up and walked away, but then who could have foreseen a brash 30 year-old muitl-millionaire Irishman emerging from nowhere 16 years ago to add turbochargers to a club going nowhere fast?

I must confess I wasn’t entirely convinced the intentions of a man who appeared to have his own security detail were honourable. At best I fancied a couple of exciting years before a new owner was sought.

But first impressions were unreliable. He’s bankrolled the club throughout 16 rollercoaster years. He’s contunually bounced back from disappointments on and off the field (relegations, the shenanigans of rival clubs during the Covid season), and with the help of partners to shoulder the financial burden, he even managed to steer his club to a fourth promotion in his time, and third to the Championship in 2020-21.

So to answer my own question, I’d rather he stayed. Better the devil you know and all that, and not just because of the copious amount of top-notch newspaper copy he provides.

In 2017 I wrote Posh fans should be careful what they wished for and much of that article still stands true now.

Seven of the top 10 Football League finishes in Posh history have arrived in the MacAnthony era.

Posh have spent four seasons in the second tier of the Football League in the current chairman’s 16 years at the club. They’ve spent two seasons in the second tier in the other 46 years spent in the Football League.

Posh are currently enjoying their longest ever spell outside the bottom division. It will be 15 years and counting at the end of the 2022-23 season barring a major disaster in the coming months.

The top 12 transfer fees paid by Posh have all been signed off by MacAnthony including six in excess of £1 million.

But has it been the best time to be a Posh fan? It’s appreciated more by older fans who can remember the 1980s and Barry Fry’s managerial struggles in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the back-to-back promotion seasons under Chris Turner’s management were bigger achievements given the financial constraints he worked under compared to Darren Ferguson, the one manager, so far, to achieve success under MacAnthony.

But it’s surely been the most exciting era in the club’s history, albeit one that includes three relegations as well as those four promotions, although dropping out of the Championship, frustrating as it always is, is understandable if you’re capable of ignoring the hype and bluster that usually preceded it.

If MacAnthony does go he should be rememberd more for the vision to see Ferguson’s managerial potential and the superb, free-scoring football they unleashed together, the promotions and the celebrations, the despatching of huge clubs like Leicester City and Leeds United and the positive publicity he helped bring to the club rather than his flaws regarding other managerial appointments and recruiting players good enough for the Championship.