As hordes of Fleetwood Town fans swarmed on to the pitch to celebrate their astonishing victory over Premier League champions Arsenal on Tuesday night, the local millionaire who had made it all possible wasn't there.

Sharp-elbowed businessman Andy Pilley, who bought the tiny Lancashire club for buttons when it was so broke it couldn't pay the players' wages, was 14 miles away – in His Majesty's Prison Kirkham.

Sources tell me he was permitted to listen to the match on the radio, and 'danced around his cell' as 19-year-old Conor Haughey scored the penalty that sent the mighty Gunners, whose squad cost £1.16billion – 500 times more than Fleetwood's – to one of the unlikeliest defeats in football history.

It was a shock so seismic it even made headlines in The New York Times.

Without wishing to rain on the parade of a blighted former fishing port whose 26,000 souls are desperately in need of something to lift their jaded spirits, it is worth recounting why Pilley, 56, is serving a 13-year jail term, handed down at Preston Crown Court in 2023.

The wheeler-dealer who once sold cheap football shirts on Fleetwood market struck gold by founding BES Utilities, a company that purported to supply competitively priced electricity and gas to small businesses. 

It became one of the town's biggest employers and made him an estimated fortune exceeding £100million. It was with this that he was able to plough £40million into transforming his beloved club. 

However, the court heard how he secretly employed agents posing as independent energy advisers to cold-call potential clients, before conning them into signing lengthy rip-off contracts with BES.

In harrowing personal statements, 28 of his victims – who ran cafes, hair salons, a dog-grooming parlour and even a children's cancer charity – told how they were driven into debt by Pilley's 'inhumane' scam. 

Some said their marriages had broken up under the strain, and one was on the brink of suicide.

As Judge Graham Knowles told Pilley: 'Yours could have been a remarkable story of redemption, success, local heroism and philanthropy. Instead, it is a sordid tale of squalid lies, greed and fraud.'

Given that he inflicted such misery, we might have expected Fleetwood's largely blue-collar fans, the salty 'Cod Army', to be well rid of him. And yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed, their Highbury stadium still displays a giant poster showing him kissing one of the trophies Fleetwood won under his stewardship, and before every match the supporters sing his praises to the tune of Winter Wonderland, substituting 'sleigh bells ring' for 'there's only one Andy Pilley'.

In the club shop, where sales of replica red-and-white shirts and scarves are booming on the back of Tuesday's win, I meet Charles Kellett, who began sneaking over a perimeter wall to watch Fleetwood almost 70 years ago, and has followed them ever since.

'Everybody here loves Andy, even though he's away on his "holidays" at present,' he winks. 'The first time I met him, on an away trip to Torquay, he was in the pub with us, and he shook my hand and bought me a pint. He's a millionaire, but still one of the boys.'

Gesturing to the 5,300-capacity stadium, stylishly rebuilt with Pilley's millions (albeit that embittered Arsenal fans are moaning the pitch was 'too small' for their pampered stars), Mr Kellett added: 'Without Andy, none of this would be here. Did you see the state of this place before?'

Well, as it happens, I did. For I was raised in Morecambe, 14 miles north, as the seagull flies, along the coast, and during the late Sixties, when Fleetwood's ambitions extended no further than beating my home-town club in the county league, I ventured there.

If Arsenal's superstars felt they had been plunged into a Stone Age bearpit on Tuesday, it was nothing compared with the febrile atmosphere at the Cods versus Shrimps derby. 

In those days, Fleetwood's ground resembled an allotment. They played on a cabbage-patch pitch surrounded by a disused speedway track, and we fans gathered beneath a corrugated iron shed which we would kick repeatedly, sending out a deafening metallic echo that amplified our earthy chants.

After one match, when I was about 12 years old, I was set upon and head-butted by another boy as I made my way to the coach.

For the players, conditions were no less neanderthal. Stuart Murdoch, who became Fleetwood's goalkeeper aged 18, in 1968, recalls being 'paid' with fish from the local docks when there were insufficient funds for his £5 match fee. 'We managed to eat for a week, if nothing else,' he laughs.

Today, the squad are reasonably well-paid professionals; back then they included a postman, a window cleaner, and – inevitably in a town whose fishing industry employed 9,000 people – various dockworkers and trawlermen.

Murdoch says his contemporaries marvel at the dizzy heights they have reached under Pilley and his 29-year-old son, Jamie – who succeeded his father when his fraud conviction forced him to relinquish ownership, and took over BES Utilities, rebranding it Ruby Energy. 

'If you'd said to anyone of my era that Fleetwood would one day beat the champions of the First Division, as it was then, they would have said 'bring in the men in white coats', he says.

Indeed so, but at least then the town was handsome and prosperous. Designed by Queen Victoria's favourite architect, Decimus Burton, who arranged its streets like a semi-circular fan, it boasted a fine pier, manicured gardens and rivalled its gaudier neighbour, Blackpool, as a tourist resort. 

Fleetwood also housed a big ICI chemicals plant, and though on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, it had good transport links, with a mainline railway station and a passenger and car ferry service to Northern Ireland.

However, its wealth came from its 120-strong fleet of deep-sea trawlers, which hauled in 180,000 tons of cod, haddock and hake from the North Atlantic each year, making it the biggest fishing port on England's west coast at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the Second World War, when eastern ports such as Hull and Grimsby were under blockade, Fleetwood's catch nourished the nation. 

The disastrous decline began in the late 1950s, when Britain became embroiled in the first of three 'Cod Wars' with Iceland, whose government objected to our trawlers plundering their prized fishing grounds and set out a 200-mile exclusion zone.

Fleetwood's old seadogs still talk of the skirmishes they fought with Icelandic gunboats in the gale-lashed Arctic Circle.

As the Icelanders rammed their boats and tried to cut their trawl nets, they would attempt to scare them off by playing 'Rule Britannia' over their loudspeakers.

When that didn't work, Fleetwood's finest used tougher tactics, one of which, from 1973, has passed into local folklore.

When a gunboat steamed menacingly towards the trawler, Wyre Victory, skipper Tom Watson used a wartime device known as a 'fog buoy' – a heavy wooden pallet towed by a thick rope – to tangle around the enemy's propeller and sheer it off, disabling its engines. 

Among British trawlermen, Watson's bravery and ingenuity made him a legend. In Whitehall, however, it was seen as dangerously provocative, so he received a telegram summoning him home and ordering him not to reveal the incident to the Press. He replied with two words: 'Get f***ed.'

Had our government showed similar defiance, Fleetwood might still have a fishing industry today.

However, in 1976, under pressure from the United States, who wished to appease Iceland because it harboured two strategically vital Nato bases, Labour prime minister James Callaghan acceded to the exclusion zone.

The treaty he sanctioned effectively sank Fleetwood's entire deep-sea trawler fleet, and with it the town's prosperity.

That it has never recovered is evident when you take a tram ride along its tatty high street, and from social statistics placing it among the poorest, unhealthiest and most crime-ridden of British towns.

Modern-day Fleetwood has no pier, no train station, no ICI plant, no fishing boats beyond a few small inshore ones, and for many people, no hope.

Ironically, one of the few thriving businesses is Lofthouse of Fleetwood Ltd, makers of Fisherman's Friend, the lozenges invented to protect the trawlermen of yesteryear from colds and flu during long and freezing weeks at sea. 

Though the firm's founder, 19th-century Fleetwood pharmacist James Lofthouse, sold his menthol and eucalyptus oil remedy as a tincture to be rubbed into aching joints, the woman who turned it into the solid pastille exported worldwide (with a £79million revenue in 2025) was his daughter-in-law Doreen.

A marketing whizz who sent tubes of Fisherman's Friend lozenges to high-profile figures such as Margaret Thatcher, the Prince of Wales and Ronald Reagan when she saw them cough or sneeze on TV, Mrs Lofthouse built the firm whose factory overlooks the docks.

They sponsored Fleetwood Town's shirts at one time. However, her affections for the club were irreparably damaged in 1985 when they won the FA Vase, a cup contested by small teams.

On the eve of the final at Wembley, an unnamed club officer decided to capitalise on the occasion by ditching Lofthouse of Fleetwood in favour of a higher-paying sponsor, whose logo replaced that of Fisherman's Friend on the team shirts.

Doreen Lofthouse was understandably livid, and – despite Andy Pilley's repeated overtures – 'Mrs Fleetwood', as she was affectionately known, washed her hands of the club. 

Indeed, a club source tells me that when she died, aged 91, in March 2021, and Fleetwood Town remembered her with a minute's silence before a home match, her family declined to attend.

Controversies such as this seem to swim around the Cods.

Between 2018 and 2021 they were managed by Joey Barton, currently remanded in prison as he awaits trial for an alleged assault which caused a man —serious eye injuries. 

And their captain against Arsenal was Ched Evans, now 37, who was jailed for raping a 19-year-old woman in a Rhyl hotel in 2012, but had his conviction quashed on appeal four years later. Since then he has fought to rebuild a once glittering career.

Founded in 1883, Fleetwood have been abolished and reformed five times and, as recently retired vice chairman Phil Brown tells me, their story has been one of 'boom and bust', with huge highs and depressing lows.

Andy Pilley was also jailed for four months in 1998 for stealing from a post office where he worked as a counter clerk. But by 2004 his energy business was growing, and the former Sunday league manager set his sights on owning his local football club.

At the time Fleetwood hadn't paid its players for weeks, and Mr Brown, a local RBS bank manager and longstanding Cods stalwart, appealed for help via a piece in the Blackpool Gazette.

Pilley, who was one of his bank clients, came forward, at first with a modest sponsorship offer.

However, as he later recalled, the ground was so dilapidated that when he tried to open a window during a meeting, the sash snapped off. 

Instead of paying for the repair, an official laughingly suggested that he might as well pay a few thousand and buy the whole club – so he did just that.

This story may be apocryphal but according to insiders the general thrust is true. Moving 'like a whirlwind', within a short time Pilley had bought out other shareholders and taken full control. 

Mr Brown, who left RBS in 2007 to work as head of commercial for BES Utilities, praises Pilley, saying his motivation for investing in Fleetwood Town was borne purely out of his desire to help the club and the wider community.

'There are no negatives as regards to Andy Pilley where Fleetwood Town are concerned. What he did for the club was quite remarkable,' he says, adding that he struggles to believe Pilley committed the fraud offences, seeing him as 'just a sharp businessman who was an easy target'.

You often hear this rosy view in Fleetwood. Whatever the truth, there is no denying Pilley's efficacy as an owner. In a 10-year period they won six promotions, earning long-serving player Nathan Pond (who played in seven different divisions and is now assistant manager) a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

When Pilley arrived, they had just 80 regular fans; there are now around 3,000. He also built a superb £8million training ground opened by Sir Alex Ferguson; and Fleetwood's youth academy is on a par with those of football's elite.

Pilley even got married on the Fleetwood pitch, and his wife Gemma served in the club shop.

He has described his football passion as 'almost an obsessive disorder' – though when he appealed against his fraud conviction earlier this year, arguing that his ADHD had disadvantaged him during his trial, this entreaty failed to convince the court.

This week, Fleetwood Town were at pains to stress that his offences were an individual matter totally unrelated to the club. This was made clear during the trial, they said.

Nonetheless, everything they have achieved these past two decades accrues to the vast fortune Pilley ploughed in, and the club owes almost £50million to companies now run by his son. The £400,000 profit from the Arsenal match will make barely a dent.

Next up, in the Carabao Cup quarter final, Fleetwood will face another giant in Everton – and as Pilley is allowed out of Kirkham on day release, perhaps he might even be permitted to attend.

If so, the Cod Army will cheer their returning hero to the rafters.

For though this complex character's chicanery drove his victims to ruin and despair, his generosity has restored pride and hope to a long-forgotten town.

Additional reporting by Tim Stewart