Carlisle United: crucial question with Tom Piatak interest

It’s not even the how, no matter how critical that may be – the debt, the shareholdings, the supporters’ trust, the current owners, all the necessary manoeuvrings.

None of those areas are as important as the main one – the topic that sits above all else when it comes to the American interest in Carlisle United, revealed by the News & Star this week.

It is the why.

This is the one. This is what’s top of the list in the aspects that need to be interrogated like hell by everyone with a stake in this.

This is the one where the hopes and yearnings of many years need to go out of the window, or at least be placed on the shelf, and be replaced by cold, hard, passionless judgement.

Perhaps it has already happened; perhaps United, and CUOSC, are happy and settled with what they’ve seen and heard from the Piataks.

Maybe this has been probed to the full, and we just don’t know about it yet. There will be much about it that hasn’t come out, maybe never will.

Either way: much hangs on that question, everything in fact. What does a Florida-based logistics entrepreneur and his family want with Carlisle United?

Why now, why here? Why the Blues, in the summer of 2023?

The drilling on this has to go right to the bottom, right to the source. It cannot afford to miss the root of it, whatever and wherever that is.

The warm welcome, the rolling out of red carpets, can come later. Even the celebratory USA social media GIFs should go back into storage a while.

It benefits us all, as well as the club, to let enthusiasm run wild only when there are facts on the table, plans that are costed and motivations out in the open with the necessary checks and balances applied.

Carlisle United owners and directors, as well as their supporters' trust, need to play this carefully (Image: Barbara Abbott)

One imagines a club with a details man like Nigel Clibbens running affairs will not miss this particular trick. It ill behoves CUOSC, who have a crucial gatekeeping role here, to be slack in this department.

It falls to those influences and more to guide and firm the hands of United’s owners, if they see this as the way forward, the way out, the way to achieve a future that has, in other investment discussions, failed to come about.

They need to expose why the Piataks want to influence Carlisle United’s direction and its future story, as well as establishing that they have the stamina for it.

This is not just in connection with the EFL’s source and sufficiency of funding requirements. It is the necessary comfort that these people, without an apparent historical connection to the area, are going to have the club’s backs in the hard times as well as the good times.

Because Carlisle United is a story of more hard than good. And yes, the intention will be to tip those scales the right way, and that is an exciting notion.

But what about when things hit the rocks, as in some sense, some day, they will? What about the time when the questions are coming hard, the current Simmo-uplift has levelled off, expectations are different and there are decisions and events going awry?

Will they be as steadfast as Andrew Jenkins – an owner who, for all the criticism that has come his way down the years, can never be said to be someone who vanished in hard circumstances?

All this may sound pessimistic in tone, but no apologies for it. It is the realism United have to carry into this situation. It cannot be all ‘welcome to Brunton Park’ and fruit salad shirts and pre-season friendlies and tours of the ground and the play-off trophy and directors’ box status at promotion-winning games and whatever grand or medium-level plans are in mind.

If those occasions, and the general raising of United’s tone under Simpson, has attracted the Piataks, then all good. Maybe great. The club’s potential has undoubtedly been laid out with a dusting of glitter these past few months, and that is in a large way down to supporters.

Carlisle fans have highlighted the club's potential in recent times (Image: Richard Parkes)

Yet that potential must also be upheld when things aren’t going so well, and there isn’t a 10,000 crowd, and there is disgruntlement, and motivations and competences are being questioned.

That’s when you get the measure of people running football clubs. If they are up for that, they and we will have a chance.

These principles are not about the Piataks particularly. It’s how we should regard anyone with designs on a football club. United, among others, have learned the hard way that saviours are scarce in the game.

This American family have not publicly projected themselves as such. They have not yet said anything in the open about their interest. Until they do, let us also do them the decency of not loading them with our thirstiest expectations. We can dream, yes, but not to the point where reality vanishes for the hills.

Beyond this, it does not matter so much that they are from Jacksonville, Florida, not Denton Holme or Upperby. England hardly has the preserve on ideal owners, and we can probably all think of good American ones, as well as bad ones.

If their sincerity, commitment and transparency check out, then the next step of thinking what could unfold at Brunton Park can be taken regardless of postcodes or ZIP codes.

And goodness knows, the place needs it – needs a boost, needs something fundamental, needs the means to move into more modern and ambitious times, needs the vision to bring this about, needs the thrilling splash of the new, needs to build on and not squander the recent fiesta that had Tom Piatak and his family cheering and dancing in the directors’ box at Wembley.

For the rest of us to join in that jigging now, the hard yakka needs to be good, and those currently charged with protecting and furthering Carlisle United have to play this right.

So much hangs on it. Let them use our faith with the greatest care.