It’s not every day one of Britain’s richest men knocks on your door to say hello, especially in Rochdale . Sir Peter Ogden’s impromptu doorstep in Percy Street met a typically unvarnished response delivered in flat Lancastrian: “You’re not trying to sell me summat are you?” If the Ogden family are selling anything it is dreams. Giving, not selling, is the real game here, giving back to the community, to the town and to the club that means so much to its people.
Since the Covid torpedo hit four years ago Rochdale had been fighting a desperate rearguard against a fiscal hammer bashing them inexorably towards oblivion. And then in March, through the saloon doors walked billionaire Sir Peter, who not only picked up the £2m tab to maintain the National League club as a going concern, but pledged investment to fund a utopian future on and off the pitch. This marriage of local boy made good and the town’s most significant identifying feature after Gracie Fields is one of the game’s great romances.
Love was, however, slow to surface on the last day of August when Sir Peter chose the home match against Woking to celebrate ownership of his boyhood club with members of the extended family and to revisit with them his modest roots, including No 3 Percy Street, where he was raised. Son Cameron, who assumed the role of co-chairman and describes himself as born southerner, bred northerner, recalled the family’s re-entry into the Rochdale atmosphere. Read Next Blackburn Ro.