“CLEARLY, something has gone drastically wrong there and it’s never been adequately explained how they came up with that formula.”

So said journalist Fred Atkins when reflecting on the £10 million that was distributed across the Vanarama National League during the coronavirus pandemic.

Released earlier this week, Atkins presented the documentary ‘Gates Money,’ which explores how that sum of money was allocated.

In the documentary, Duncan Hart presents a spreadsheet he had created that worked out what subsidies the clubs should have been given.

“We’ve always said that it wasn’t an exact science when you crunch these numbers, there are a lot of variables you can take into account,” noted Atkins.

“Would you count the average over two seasons, or one season? You could have made a case to say certain costs were the same like, for example, COVID protocols.

“They would have been the same for every club regardless of how many people they have in, so you could have made an adjustment for that, for example.

“But it was the stated intention, in Parliament, that it was going to be to cover gate receipts.

"When it happened, you look at the numbers on that particular version, York (City) ended up getting about 10 per cent per fan that Boreham Wood were getting.

“Clearly, something has gone drastically wrong there and it’s never been adequately explained how they came up with that formula.

“Without having the numbers in front of me, I think it was around 10 times the size per fan.

“When it broke, I didn’t really think it was that much of a story at the time.

“It happened around October 2020 and at that point, in the pandemic, I’d become a bit desensitised to everything that was happening, because it seemed like there was a scandal happening every single day.

“PPE scandals, people paying for equipment that didn’t work. I didn’t really think that something involving non-league football was going to cut through.

“Over the next few weeks, it became obvious just how furious people were about it. It came out of that tapping into a well of anger, if you like.”

With the system devised by the National League, some clubs benefitted greatly, up to 10 times more so than other sides.

With a 60/40 split, the majority was allocated to the fifth tier, whereas the 40 per cent was to be shared across the two sixth-tier divisions.

“To be honest, it’s not like there was a huge amount of investigating to do,” reflected Atkins.

“Most of this stuff was a matter of public record. It wasn’t as if they’d hidden the amount of money that they gave the clubs, they couldn’t have done that anyway.

“What they never revealed was how they came up with that formula. It was a drip of anger over the months, but I think the biggest problems with it was that it was so short sighted.

“In my opinion, if they’d stuck to one of the formulas that everyone seemed to be arriving at independently, they would probably have had a very good case to get an extra £10 million when that money had run out.

“It was all hinged on the fact that COVID was going to be over by that winter. It seemed optimistic at the time and it just seems rash in hindsight.

“If the money had run out and they’d distributed it accordingly, if streams had been working okay which apparently they were, if you imagine a situation where, at the end of that period, they could quite easily have turned round to Camelot and said, ‘Well look, can we have another £10 million?’

“I think they would have looked on it quite favourably, or they would have found another source of money for it to come from.

“It was public money that was paying these footballers to play football. When that money ran out, that initial grant, some clubs had no choice but to furlough their players.

“Other clubs decided to find alternative sources of funding, but in a lot of cases, that would have involved clubs getting into a huge amount of debt.

“What happened was they put them into the furlough scheme. So, the Government is still paying these players’ wages, only now, they’re not playing football.

“Beforehand, at least they were playing football, people had something to watch, things to get wound up about.

“Now it was basically, they were paying them to sit indoors when they could have been playing.”