Bill Williams, 81, has seen it all at Maidstone United across his 50-year association with the club. "I was first a player here back in 1972," he tells ESPN. "I've been here a long time, but I've been a player and a manager since we made it to the Football League in 1989. I've been general manager, chairman, the chief executive, and now I'm director of football."
Back during his playing days as a combative centre half, Williams played for Portsmouth, QPR, West Brom and eventually Maidstone, and he remembers facing George Best and Jimmy Greaves. "They ran rings around me," he chuckles. As he celebrated his 80th birthday in August 2022, he was handed a record of his entire playing career and was reminded that a young Brian Clough once scored a hat-trick against him. "I must have had a dreadful day."
"We call Bill 'Mr. Maidstone,'" says Craig Fagan, the club's assistant manager.
Williams' coaching career took him from Durban in South Africa to managing the Atlanta Chiefs in the North American Soccer League with Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer. After that, it was back to Maidstone. Wherever he's been in the world, that town in the southeast of England is where the heart lies. It's a life well lived, but after nearly seven decades of football, seeing his Maidstone United team at Portman Road on Saturday facing Ipswich in the fourth round of the FA Cup will top the lot.
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Maidstone United are the lowest-ranked team remaining in the FA Cup, sitting fifth in the National League South, six divisions below the Premier League. Managed by ex-Wolves midfielder George Elokobi, this is the first time in the club's history they've reached this stage of the competition. So either way on Saturday, unlikely win or hammering: it's history. They've sold in the region of 4,500 tickets for Saturday, and they'll be praying for a miracle against Championship high-flyers Ipswich. But this club has already come back from the dead once, and it's in the fabric of the place to find a way to make things work when odds are stacked against them.
When Bury went bust in 2019, you'd have heard the name Maidstone. They were the last league club before Bury to go to the wall, back in 1992. Back then, while the top clubs were toasting the influx of cash from the newly created Premier League, down in the old Fourth Division, (now League 2) Maidstone were reluctantly resigning from the Football League with just two players left in their squad.
To understand the significance of the Maidstone United side you'll see on Saturday, in their amber-and-black kit, you need to head back to this point in their history.
Maidstone is 38 miles southeast of London, the administrative capital of Kent. The club found a home at the Athletic Ground in 1898 and was there for 90 years, until 1988, when the club's board -- headed up by chairman Jim Thompson -- sold it to property developers intending to build a new, state-of-the-art ground in the town. They had league aspirations, but the Athletic Ground didn't meet the required standards, so they moved to a temporary home in Watling Street in Dartford.
In 1989, they got promotion to the Football League and reached the playoff semifinals in 1990, one win from Wembley and a spot in the Third Division (League 1). But they were knocked out by Cambridge United, and by the time the 1992-93 season ticked along, the money had run out. Owner Thompson had spent in the region of £400,000 on land in Maidstone to build the new ground, but the local county council blocked 47 separate attempts for planning permission.
With the club losing money playing in Dartford, things reached a head in the summer of 1992. There was a mass exodus of Maidstone's best talent, including future Newcastle star Warren Barton, who was moved on for £300,000 in transfer fees. With debts totalling £650,000 by the time their opening match of the new season ticked around, they had two players left and couldn't fulfill their opener against Scunthorpe United.
"What happened in 1992?" Williams says rhetorically; it's followed by a mischievous laugh and a sigh. "Yeah, it was a very, very grim time because I was involved trying to save us and making sure we still had a football club here in the town. We kept getting knocked back after knock-back, and when they eventually said that's it, well, it was a terrible day, terrible day."
The club issued a statement that concluded with four brutal words: "Time has run out."
"I mean, there were thousands of people who fell into a football depression," Williams says. "So yeah, that was the worst time ever that I experienced in the football club."
Sitting in the stands this Saturday in Portman Road will be John Bunyard, who has supported the club for almost all of his seven decades, since his first match in a 2-1 defeat to Wycombe Wanderers back in April 1962. He was the curator of Maidstone: United in Football -- an exhibition that told the social and footballing history of the town and was displayed in the Maidstone Museum across four months from 2019 to 2020. He later published a book by the same name, and in that exhibition, amid the stack of memorabilia, the focal point of it all was the kit worn by ex-Maidstone striker David Sadler in the 1968 European Cup final where he helped Manchester United beat Eusebio's Benfica 4-2.
For Bunyard, his standout memories of the club are a tapestry of big cup wins, key league moments and the joy of watching the team with his pals. But the memories at the forefront of his mind are inexorably intertwined with the FA Cup.
He remembers watching Charlton Athletic player Mike Flanagan trading punches in a third-round tie at the Valley in 1979. In the replay at the Athletic Ground, the floodlights failed in the latter stages of the match, so they had to use goalkeeper Dickie Guy's hairdryer to warm the cables and get the generator running again. Then there was the 1987 third-round FA Cup match against Graham Taylor's Watford, a team owned by Elton John and featuring the great Liverpool and England forward John Barnes.
"When I put together the exhibition, I interviewed dozens of fans and used their memories on a sound loop, and that Watford game was right up there," Bunyard says. "Whatever happened to the club, the fans have always remained unbelievably loyal and committed."
Despite all that history, in 1992 the club temporarily ceased to exist. With new owners, they took over local youth side Maidstone Invicta, and Maidstone United were reborn seven levels below where they were in 1992, 10 leagues down at the foot of the pyramid, in the Kent County League Fourth Division. They were playing on a training pitch next to their old ground -- now a furniture salesroom.
"We were a pub team again, basically," Bunyard says. "It was all a little bit eccentric. We were an ex-Football League club playing teams like Sporting Bengal, teams most people haven't heard of. But we'd still get hundreds of fans wherever we went. There'd be singing and some joshing between the fans, but wherever you went there'd be black-and-amber scarves."
Williams has less fond memories of that time, nostalgia not blunting the pain of seeing his club at that level. "I loathed it. I detested it all," Williams says. "I played at a good level; I'd managed at a good level; and I was in these little tiny -- you had these little tiny dressing rooms you couldn't swing a cat in. There was an outside toilet. People would still say it was wonderful, but they were awful times. I didn't like it until we got back into the National League South and the National League, and that's where I felt at home."
Maidstone United clawed their way back up the tree, regaining senior status in 2001 when they were promoted to the Kent League. They teetered close to the financial abyss in 2008, only to find last-minute funds to survive. It was around this time Maidstone supporters saw a young centre back called Chris Smalling progress from the youth academy to the first team.
"I remember watching him, and you just knew wherever he went after us, he was going to be OK," Williams says of the 31-cap England international, who had a decade at Manchester United and is now at Roma.
By 2010, Maidstone had new owners at the helm, Oliver Ash and Terry Casey. "I remember the first time I met Oliver," Bunyard says. "At this level, there are a few dodgy people around, but Oliver walked in and he's a very articulate, well-dressed man, and I remember thinking, 'Crikey, what's he up to?' But he's as honest as the day is long and cares so much about the club. And then he brought in Terry Casey to co-own the club. He's got a huge heart and stuck by the club. And you know what they've brought? Stability."