It’s match day in Blackpool, and the Armfield Club is preparing for a busy one. The venue is close to the football stadium and, in recent years, has been turned into what is perhaps best described as part pub, part shrine to Blackpool Football Club. The Armfield’s pool table is the same tangerine colour as the team’s kit. So are its chairs, window blinds, the handrail on the stairs and the bunting lining the upstairs bar.

“You must be looking for Raggy,” a customer calls over. “You don’t look like a lady that would normally come in here.” Fair enough. Though I grew up just an hour away and am no stranger to pubs on match day, I work for the Financial Times in Hong Kong these days and have lost at least some of my accent. Raggy is a grinning, baby-faced Blackpool FC devotee in his early forties, who helps run the Armfield and who will almost certainly never lose his.

When he greets me, he does so in a voice so uncompromisingly northern — with its flat U’s and missing H’s — that if I heard it anywhere else in the world, I would stop to ask where exactly the speaker was from. His full name is David Ragozzino. Besides his day job as a food hygiene manager at a local biscuit factory, Raggy is a key figure among the Muckers, a Blackpool FC fans’ group. As such, he has insights on Simon Sadler, the club’s owner since 2019.