The Piataks are “not messing about”, we are told. They’re clearly serious if they can break Carlisle United’s transfer record after less than a month in the building. Good on them. USA, USA!
Yet any rich owner, newly at the controls, can spend hundreds of thousands on a centre-forward. Some do so wisely, some do so recklessly, some do for an ego-hit, some do because it’s needed.
And yes – Carlisle’s outlay on Luke Armstrong represents a strong initial statement. But it’s in other areas where the club’s new American rulers will demonstrate their actual seriousness. Encouragingly, they’ve also “not messed about” there, either.
Take disabled facilities. No big headlines or Instagram graphics for those. No soaring web numbers or memes. If you’re wanting a PR win, if you enjoy the dopamine hit of lots of people posting amusing gifs in gratitude towards you, that wouldn’t be the obvious place to start.
Yet as a source of seriousness, don’t look anywhere else. Plans to improve Brunton Park’s stands were revealed by the Piataks and fellow directors at Monday’s fans’ forum. Amid the visuals of shiny new boardrooms, lounges and hospitality boxes was the key involvement of new disabled facilities attached to an improved Warwick Road End.
“Finally”, many who use and need such facilities must have felt like saying. The plans for that end of the ground, said chief executive Nigel Clibbens, “link into disabled facilities we’ve been talking about endlessly, and never got there with.”
And that, in its own way, is at the crux of this. Football clubs are good at doing certain things, good at spending money they have or haven’t got on strikers, but sometimes less good at spending it on those jobs and initiatives that won’t necessarily see an instant return on popularity, position or minute-one revenue.
A club with total commitment to its people, its facilities, will always take these aspects with them, not leave them behind. Carlisle, under the previous ownership, were never super-wealthy but there were still many things which didn’t require “talking about endlessly” before they got done.
Spending on the team, at certain stages, for instance. The writing of generous bonus clauses during a particular period. Overhauling certain offices and rooms at a manager’s behest. But never, to the fullest, making Brunton Park’s disabled facilities truly good, truly enviable.
This on its own won’t enable the Piataks to own the north, but it will say far more about them as custodians than whether Luke Armstrong scores a dozen goals to keep Carlisle in League One, and whether they break that transfer record again in the pursuit of prolonged third-tier status.
It will say they’re here for the detail, as well as the top line. It will say they’re putting their money into foundations as well as what’s on prominent display.
Proactivity on the East Stand, meanwhile, has been a long-elusive matter, other than the post-flood renovations of 2015/16, and so the owners’ vision here is another source of undeniable seriousness.
In the main, since its 1996 construction, that building has been an emblem of a past and fleeting United: one of so much sugar, not enough core. Imagine, after all, if today you were making a new stand yet its hospitality boxes, for one thing, would remain empty – and properly, breezeblock-empty – for another 27 years? Imagine putting something together with further internal space which is only captalised upon minimally, and in lots of ways not at all?
Imagine, also, doing so in a lopsided sense, the whole stand considerably out of line with the rest of the ground, with a vague idea of shifting the rest along but never managing to do it?
The East Stand, raised during Michael Knighton’s era was, like that particular owner, a matter of vision without enough following substance. It has been a shell, with solutions beyond the grasp of future owners.
Dealing with it always required the wherewithal that could not be put up by the most recent regime. “The problem," former chairman Andrew Jenkins told me in 2016, the stand’s 20th anniversary year, “is that it was never finished. So any time I tried to get a grant to do something, we were told we couldn't have one.
"We've had a number of people look at it over the years. There was a time people were looking at putting casinos in football grounds. I had a man round and said, 'You can have the lot if you like'.
"We've tried the NHS, even the Cumberland FA, but nothing's ever come of it. It's a pity, because it's a big, fine building."
A club unable to govern its full destiny, one incapable of maximising its assets, will always be as limited as United have been for much of the recent past. Thankfully now there seems the will as well as the finance to get properly stuck in – a combination of the Piataks’ fresh eye, the logical idea of making the most of what the club has, and the vision of turning Carlisle’s home into something fit for modernity, not an apologetic version of the past.
These initiatives, all in all, are what will give not just the Blues but their ownership true status, true staying power. “The club has to sustain itself,” Tom Piatak snr said this week. “We have to make sensible investments.”
You can probably think of many an owner, here and there, who has eschewed those in favour of insensible ones: big transfer fees, massive wages, lots of treats for everybody and no mention until it’s too late of the tab that needs picking up down the line.
If this is of the other page – actual investment on the sober stuff as well as the party bags, and not simply throwing money at what will overjoy a captive audience straight away – then it will point indeed to Carlisle being in properly proactive hands. And be the very opposite of messing about.
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