After everything Bury supporters have been through in recent years, this was not what they needed.
Everything seemed to be heading in the right direction following their phoenix-like rise from the ashes. From being the first club in 27 years to be expelled from the Football League in 2019 as a result of financial problems, the fan-owned reformed team sealed promotion into the Northern Premier League West Division last season in front of nearly 9,000 supporters at Gigg Lane.
The humiliating decline under controversial former owner Steve Dale was close to being confined to the history books – until the past few days.
On Monday, manager Michael Jolley left his post after only two days without even taking charge of a single match.
Some supporters were angered that the club’s board, a small number of volunteer fans and head of football operations Dave McNabb, had made the appointment. In 2009, the 48-year-old pleaded guilty to having sex with a 15-year-old girl and was sentenced to 12 months’ probation and placed on the UK Sex Offenders’ Register for a year.
There was a fierce backlash on social media and a planned boycott of Bury’s clash with Mossley at Gigg Lane on Saturday.
“It sums up our football club,” Bury supporter Nick Zabel tells The i Paper. “It’s just another thing.
“I think the board just misjudged what the backlash could be. If it was any other club or any other situation, without the recent history we’ve got, it might not have been such a backlash.
“Everyone at the club has been scarred from what happened in the past, that any level of controversy immediately sets off alarm bells.”
Jolley has consistently said that the girl told him she was 19, and, in a statement released on social media on Sunday, he claimed that subsequent investigations found that he was “deceived, and at no time did I act maliciously”.
Over 3,000 supporters still turned up to see Bury beat Mossley – 6x more than any other attendance in the league that day – with Jolley in the stands. Away supporters chanted derogatory songs in Jolley’s direction, while some home fans called for the board to be sacked, as well as for the new manager to leave.
Bury have become a phoenix club after their collapse (Photo: Getty)“We just didn’t know which way the reaction was going to go,” one source close to the club, who wished to remain nameless, tells The i Paper.
“The fact he has worked at some other clubs, Burnley, Grimsby, Barrow and clubs abroad since the incident, perhaps the board thought it would be OK.
“In 2025, and the power of social media, resentment had already built up before he had even taken charge of a game.”
Jolley said in a statement he had “become accustomed” to being abused online and in stadiums by people “unwilling or unable to accept the facts”. He felt he had become a distraction and did not want to “deter the board from its mission of returning the club to its rightful place in the EFL”.
The puzzlement for supporters goes back further than Jolley’s appointment. With things seemingly going well in the eighth-tier of the footballing pyramid, manager McNabb took a new role as head of football operations, before Jolley was identified as the right candidate to take the club forward.
“The whole thing is so strange,” Bury supporter Hannah Monaghan tells The i Paper.
“What club at the level we are at needs a head of football operations? He and the board should have known that given what we have been through, everything needs to be squeaky clean for a while. Who signed this off?”
Jolley hadn’t worked in the UK since leaving Barrow in 2021.
Other supporters have a different view about those volunteers who made the decision and who give up much of their free time to help get their beloved Bury back onto the pitch.
“I personally know people on the board and they’ve been affected by this,” Zabel adds.
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“Many have been abused on social media. No decision was made with the intention of harming the club. Yes, they got this one wrong, but everyone’s still finding their feet. Nobody’s an expert, including the board, including the management.
“I have a lot of respect for these people who stick their head above the parapet and give up so much of their time for the club. For fans on social media and at Gigg Lane to start calling for them to resign is not on.”
The next move will certainly have to be more carefully thought out. Bury may be a club reborn, but it is a rebirth not without its complications.
“I think assistant manager Tim Lees will take charge for a while,” another club source says. “Then I think we will go back to the shortlist, rather than cast the net wider. We cannot have a repeat of the last week.”
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