how Frank Rothwell turned Oldham Athletic's fortunes around in 12 months

"He's the reason that we've got a club this season," sing the Oldham Athletic fans to owner Frank Rothwell. And they're right.

Twelve months ago on Friday, Rothwell and his family completed the long-anticipated takeover of the beleaguered club. Oldham had just been relegated to the National League, becoming the first side to drop from the Premier League out of the English Football League completely.

Fans had taken to boycotting Oldham games and invading the Boundary Park pitch in protest at the ownership of former football agent Abdallah Lemsagam. The Moroccan's controversial tenure had been plagued with controversies from unpaid wages, scores of players arriving, a high turnover of managers, banning fans, and off-the-pitch legal battles that saw Oldham drop from League One to non-league.

After the protests finally persuaded Lemsagam to walk away, fans were hoping for someone to come along and save their club. For a time, nobody did, until Rothwell and his family stepped in, investing a reported £12m to buy the club and the land. A year on, Oldham couldn't be in a more different position.

"Supporters were hoping someone like me would come along and the chances of that happening were very small," Rothwell tells MEN Sport. "I'd been in discussions with other business people talking about forming a consortium, about helping the club out from the situation it was in, but there was never any enthusiasm at all. Really, if we hadn't done what we did, it was extinction time. It was going to be the same outcome as Bury. Luckily we were able to do a deal with both parties."

Uniting those parties was crucial in saving Oldham. Lemsagam owned the club, but not Boundary Park or the newest North Stand which holds conferencing and hospitality facilities. Former owner Simon Blitz owned the stadium and surrounding land, and Lemsagam was locked in legal battles to try and argue that the club should benefit from those facilities rather than Blitz.

Rothwell recalls: "Simon Blitz said to us: 'I will not sell you the stadium and adjacent land until you own the football club. I do not want to be the man responsible for the downfall of Oldham Athletic.' The man stuck 100 per cent to his word. That allowed us to save Oldham Athletic from extinction."

With the takeover completed late in July, Oldham began their first-ever National League campaign shortly after, with Rothwell and his family leading a brass band down Sheepfoot Lane before the opening home game of the season followed by thousands of fans. Oldham won in front of 8,400 fans and the TV cameras present. Oldham fans had their club back - in true Oldham fashion.

"They're not fans, they're supporters," the chairman insists. "Every time someone calls them fans, I correct them. Everyone who comes to Oldham Athletic is supporting the club, just like the Rothwell family is. A supporter is a higher level than a fan. They sing my name but it's even better when they sing my wife's name. I didn't expect that at all."

Despite the return of the feelgood factor at Boundary Park, results weren't following the trend, and club legend John Sheridan departed to be replaced by former Everton player and coach David Unsworth. At one time, Oldham were in the National League relegation places.

"I didn't think we would get relegated but I was frightened it could happen," Rothwell admits. "When we first bought the club I thought we'd get in the play-offs. We went down to Bromley, a small club, they ran rings around us. I thought 'goodness gracious, this is not quite what I expected'. Any hopes I had of winning or possibly getting into the playoffs diminished at Bromley."

That Bromley game was Unsworth's first match in charge, ending in a 3-0 defeat, before an encouraging home debut against eventual champions Wrexham that saw the Welsh side steal the three points with a 96th-minute Paul Mullin penalty. Unsworth recently told the Boundary Park Alert System! Podcast that he had a similar realisation soon after taking the job that Oldham simply had to survive their first year in the division, parking any promotion hopes.

A steady overhaul of the squad saw Unsworth slowly turn fortunes around. From New Year until the end of the season, only Wrexham and Notts County (who both secured promotion) had a better record than Oldham, raising hopes of a promotion push this year.

"I've been in business since 1979," Rothwell says. "During that time, we've had a series of recessions and difficult periods. In the early-90s the construction industry went flat and we couldn't sell our product at all. That was difficult, but since 1979 every year the business has made a profit. In football, we're losing money from day one.

"It's important that our supporters know that it's not a case of who will you buy, you've got to survive. I treat it like a business. When you're in a difficult situation, my view is we've got to survive the situation we're in. Once you've survived you have to consolidate and then you can look to grow. Growing is promotion. At the moment we did more than survive, we finished in the top half.

"When you own a club and wake up at 2am you can't get back to sleep because you're thinking 'What am I going to tell the Athleticos [fan group] because we got relegated?' It's frightening. It's difficult, I'm thinking we're going to fail. Luckily we finished 10th. On Tuesday we drew with a team who finished 10th in the division above in a friendly.

"We'll be seen as the team who is everyone's cup final. We're playing Oxford City next season, they get 600 supporters. We get 7,000."

In that friendly Rothwell talks about, at Barrow of League Two, the chairman bought £20 of raffle tickets and handed them to a family in the away end.

"I gave them to a little girl with her grandma. She only won £287!" he jokes. "She comes back asking if she can keep it. I say course you can. She's going to buy her grandmas something special. It's special isn't it, that's what I see a football owner as. Someone people can associate with, not someone sat in the nice comfy seats. I want to be part of the fraternity, everything."

Rothwell serenaded fans with his trademark song, 'The Wanderer' after the takeover, and has made sure to spend time with as many supporters as possible, often joining them in the stands. Perhaps most significantly, he helped secure a £1m grant from Oldham Council for a new hybrid pitch that will see rugby league side Oldham Roughyeds return to Boundary Park next year, having also returned the stadium and facilities back under the same ownership as the football club.

A new fans' bar has opened, hospitality facilities have improved, and Rothwell can regularly be seen filling in potholes or doing work around the stadium to help out. He even had time to unwittingly spark a good-natured online war-of-words with Wrexham owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney after claiming he had never heard of the Hollywood pair.

In typical fashion, Rothwell walked around Boundary Park with a cardboard cutout of a key, wrapped in foil, to celebrate the purchase of the ground when it was completed. 12 months ago, he spoke of ambitions to row the Atlantic solo for a second time, extending his world record for the oldest man to complete the feat. Health issues postponed that plan, but he now aims to set off in December for five weeks to raise money for Alzheimer's UK (and get that new World Record).

In addition to the charismatic persona, though, he is also looking for every opportunity to give Oldham an advantage on the pitch.

Rothwell says Oldham have relocated away fans to the side of the pitch for small followings to remove the advantage of having them behind the goal (and save money on stewarding). He also had an eye-catching Plan B for the Boundary Park pitch as he seeks a return to the Football League: "If Oldham Council hadn't made us this grant for a new playing surface, I'd have ripped it up personally to have a plastic pitch to improve the odds of us getting promotion.

"I think the advantage to playing on a plastic pitch is at least 10 per cent for the home team. That would have been the way forward. Everyone says I'm wrong, it's bad for players' knees, you won't get the players you want, but there's a number of clubs who've been promoted because they've been on plastic. Harrogate, Sutton."

After 12 months of significant progress off the pitch, Oldham have built a solid squad over the summer and they are not afraid to aim high for the second year under the Rothwell family.

"It's got to be promotion, hasn't it," he says of the plans for the future. "I think a club the size of Oldham Athletic and the passion that's here and the enthusiasm and commitment of the players - this year, next year or the following year, we will be the team that goes up. We will now be the biggest or second-biggest club in the division.

"I'm walking round the stadium now and all the seats are clean, we had volunteers come to help clean all the seats. It's looking really smart. We've got the new pitch, all the seats have been cleaned up.

After the protests, boycotts, relegations and threat of extinction, Oldham fans couldn't have hoped for a better owner to save them than Frank Rothwell and his family. From 'becoming the next Bury', Oldham fans can finally dream again.

"If you're our supporter and under 45 you can't remember Oldham Athletic winning anything," he says. "To win something or get a promotion, this year next year or following year, that will be special for an awful lot of people."