The vice-chairman of Tranmere Rovers Football Club has revealed she is aware of a British football club where women aren’t welcome in the boardroom.
Nicola Palios said that while the sport has seen various improvements in terms of diversity, problems still remain.
She spoke exclusively to BusinessLive about Rovers’ recent roller coaster story, the club’s finances and how inclusive football really is, with the club having kicked off their League One campaign at the weekend.
Earlier this week, BusinessLive revealed that plans for a new Tranmere Rovers stadium are 'on the 'drawing board'.
And Nicola, 52, said that despite years of campaigning by equality groups such as Women in Football, shockingly, there is still a British football club where women “still aren’t welcome in the boardroom”.
She wouldn’t say which exact club it was, only that they play in the English Football League.
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Thankfully, Nicola said she’s not experienced any open sexism since she and husband Mark took over the club in August 2014.
She said: “By and large, it hasn’t been an issue for me - even though I expected it to be an issue when I came here.
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“You expect to get a certain amount of ‘what do you know about football? You’re a woman’, but I’ve never had any type of comment like that made to me, which I’m pleasantly surprised about.”
So is football too male-orientated, or has there been progress in getting women into top roles, like Nicola at Rovers, and Denise Barrett-Baxendale, Everton’s CEO?
“I think it’s very common now to see women involved in senior roles in football clubs. It tends to be more on the business and community side rather than the playing side.
“That does happen too, but it’s unusual. One of our physios is female, for example.”
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She said she’d like to see more women becoming football managers and coaches, adding: “I think there’s an unspoken barrier to that happening, but it’s not a great surprise, I suppose.
“In terms of at Rovers, I don’t get involved on the player side - that’s Mark. He is a former player himself so that makes more sense. People don’t have an issue with women getting involved in the business side.”
Nicola has quite a past. A trained barrister, she spent most of her career practicing commercial law, before later becoming the non-executive director of governing body British Rowing.
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From 2010 onwards, she also began taking on consultancy work, spending much of her time in France.
Nicola explained how came to take on the role of Rovers vice-chairman.
She said: “Tranmere was not on the agenda at all at that stage. It happened almost by surprise.
“It wasn’t a long-held desire - more a reaction to a set of circumstances.
“We saw the club getting into difficulty, and it was good timing in that Mark and I were at the point in our lives where we had spare cash and some time.”
Born in London and raised in the North East, Nicola said her knowledge of Tranmere and the Wirral before taking over the club was mostly through local legend Mark, who she married in 2009.
“Mark is completely steeped in the club. Brought up in Wallasey, he played for them for 13 years.
“After we met, we would come back from time to time to visit his old mates who worked here.
“I had been here on half a dozen occasions, that was the extent of it.”
Rovers have had a roller coaster few years under the leadership of the husband and wife team.
Together, Nicola and Mark walked into the club at a difficult time, with the club relegated to the National League at the end of the 2014/15 season.
That was the pair’s first full season in charge, and meant an end to the 94-year stay in the Football League.
But instead of admitting defeat, they stuck at it and made a number of changes, with the club almost winning promotion straight back at the first time of asking.
Getting out of the National League proved difficult, and the next season they lost the play-off final to Forest Green.
However all Rovers fans will remember the day Rovers, led by Micky Mellon, won back their place in the Football League on a balmy day at Wembley in 2018, with victory over Boreham Wood.
And that elation was followed by even more success this year, ending with another successful trip to Wembley in May. Rovers, something of a surprise package, secured back-to-back promotions after finishing sixth and beating Newport County 1-0 in the League Two play-off final, with a Conor Jennings 119th minute winner.
“It’s really satisfying to see it all come to fruition as it’s definitely been harder work than I had envisaged,” Nicola said.
Reflecting on how bad the club’s situation had become after dropping down to the National League, she said: “When clubs get relegated, it’s quite easy for it to turn into something of a spiral. That losing mentality and downward motion can become infectious quite quickly.
“We were making losses of £1m a year. Everything was declining. Gates, morale, the budget, the very fabric of the place. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy - it was all getting worse.”
She described how the owners decided to pump money into the club even before relegation came about.
“We had to take the decision to be brave and take the plunge, investing money into the fabric of the place to stop the rot - literally and figuratively.
“That would have been fine and simple, but for the fact that in our first season, we got relegated. That certainly wasn’t part of the business plan, and made things a lot harder.
“It had significant financial consequences for the club, meaning we lost all central and academy funding. That made it so much harder to turn things around.”
But despite what she described as the “lowest point in the club’s history”, something unique happened that summer. Nicola and Mark took what may have seemed like an unusual business decision, seeing as the club had just dropped out of the league.
“There was understandable hurt that fans were feeling - we had gone out of the league for the first time, but despite that fact, we put season ticket prices up, and we actually ended up increasing the number of season tickets sold.
“There was a really strange mood around the club that summer. Despite the worst having happened, there was a sense of optimism. I think sometimes you need to have that ‘burning platform’ for change.
“Getting relegated to the National League had been a wake-up call, that if we just carried on doing things the way we had done them, there was always going to be one outcome.
“So fans were surprisingly open to us coming in and trying to change everything, and even putting season ticket prices up. We had conversations with supporters saying we could cut the prices again, but not if we wanted to build a squad capable of getting out of that division.
“The good will we got was something that money literally couldn’t buy.”
According to Nicola, on the day Rovers were relegated to the National League, she and Mark went over to the 800 fans who had travelled to Plymouth for the match, and the reaction they got shocked her.
“We got a standing ovation - it was just the most strange but touching thing, really.
“What they were saying to us was that despite the worst having happened, they were going to back us to try and put it right.
“It’s enormously satisfying a few long seasons later to be back where we should be.”
Despite that relegation, Mark and Nicola still see the club as being on track for their initial target they had when joining the club back in 2014.
She said: “We thought it would be very doable to be in League One and pushing for the Championship within a five-year timeframe. That’s where we always wanted to be.
“When we were relegated to the National League it started looking like a much tougher ask as it’s a horrible division to get out of.
“So to get back up to League One in that time frame began to look difficult, but we’re so thrilled we’ve managed to do it.”
So which promotion felt better? The Boreham Wood game or the Newport game?
“[The Newport game] felt a lot less pressured than the previous year as the financial consequences were much more material to the club.
“There was a consequence that if you stayed down [in the National League] for too long, the goodwill of the supporters may not stay for much longer. The novelty wears off of being big boys in a smaller league.
“During that match, the pressure was enormous. It was the most extraordinary day, with drama, sendings off and the rest of it.
“This year, while it was amazing, it would not have been the end of the world if we had missed that final step. I think most of our supporters would have said at the first time of asking to get to the play-off final is a pretty decent achievement.
“I was so relieved it didn’t go to penalties. If it had, my blood pressure would have been through the roof!”
So what’s new for this season?
“We have kept a lot of the spine of the squad - Scotty Davies, Connor Jennings and Manny Monthe, but we’ve also made a fair few changes. There are some players who have made the journey all the way through from the National League, so it might be a bit of a stretch for them to be competitive in League One,” Nicola said.
“Mark always likes to keep a third of the squad in tact. That’s been one of the most defining things about Tranmere teams over the past two or three years. It’s a cliche but they do fight for each other right until the very end.”
Good examples of that were the two play-off final wins, one of which saw Rovers play with 10 men for almost the entire match against Boreham Wood.
Nicola said that a third promotion in a row would be a “tough ask”, adding: “You’ve got some teams with pretty serious budgets in League One. Sunderland are still getting parachute payments from their Premier League days, for example.
“But I absolutely believe we can be competitive in this league. We’re not just there to make up the numbers.
“My feeling is that similar to last year, if can make it into the play-off places, that would be a pretty good outcome.”
Despite the rapid success of achieving two consecutive promotions, the club is not yet reaping rich financial rewards.
Nicola said: “We have got things to a position where the club just about breaks even, maybe makes a small profit.
“Keeping a competitive playing budget is much more of a challenge this year.
“By going up from League Two to League One you get about £500k more in central funding, but the average squad budget is a lot more than that.
“Because you’ve got these big players in there, you must try to strike a balance between giving Micky the tools he needs to compete - while not overspending.
“You’ve seen too many clubs hitting the wall unable to pay wages because they’ve given into the temptation to pay too much.
“We are trying very much to make things sustainable, but we have still got a debt hangover from the National League. That will clear over a period of time, but it’s an increasingly rare thing to be on an even keel.”
Promotions and a successful club are not only good news for fans, but also the wider community, Nicola explained.
“When we got out of non-league, there was a palpable shift in atmosphere when out and about in Wirral. It gave a lift to a lot of local people, even those who aren’t football fans, who were pleased to get a bit of pride back in the area.”
Rovers have always been big in the Birkenhead community, something the Palios’ pledged to do when taking over back in 2014.
For one, they have expanded community initiatives including those helping people who have dementia and a college education programme giving opportunities to people in deprived areas.
“There’s good business sense to it as well, as it becomes a virtuous circle. If you are involved in the community and they understand it benefits the community, they are more inclined to come to games and your fan base expands.”
Do Rovers compete with Liverpool and Everton for fans?
Despite Tranmere’s considerable recent success, the club is in one of England’s football hotbeds - and still living in the shadows of one of the world’s most successful teams, and another hugely decorated top Premier League side.
But does that mean Rovers competing with Liverpool and Everton for a share of Merseyside’s football fans?
“It’s an interesting question,” Nicola said, “but I don’t think we really compete with them - I think in some ways they are symbiotic.
“There are a lot of people who follow Liverpool but can’t get tickets for the game or can’t afford to take the whole family. Quite a few of those people will also support Tranmere - that’s where they get their live, affordable football fix.”
She said the two levels were quite different, so fans didn’t automatically compare the two - but Rovers do have something their Premier League counterparts lack.
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“It’s almost a slightly different thing. We are not competing at the same level - we can’t compete with the glamour of Champions League winners, for one.
“But what we can offer is something they can’t - a real closeness between the owners, fans, players and management - which is one thing our supporters would say they’ve seen over the years of our recent promotions. When the players were celebrating those, they were partying with the fans, something you just wouldn’t get with Man City or Liverpool - they would be waving at them from on top of a bus, or a balcony. It’s different.”
But any fans wanting to split their allegiances between Rovers and one of the Premier League sides are more than welcome at Prenton Park, in Nicola’s eyes.
“Tranmere used to play on a Friday night quite a lot, so many Liverpool and Everton fans would come and start their weekends off here.
“Some [Rovers fans] do get a bit precious about people who support both Liverpool and Tranmere, but I’m not.
“They are welcome and I’m delighted to have them here.”