30 September 2023 , 15:01
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TV dancer Kevin Clifton has a new mission - to Strictly help save his favourite football club.
The dancer donated more than £1,000 towards a fundraiser launched by fans of Scunthorpe United - who have plunged from the Championship to non-league and face a battle for survival.
Staff went unpaid for the month of September. The total today reached more than £50,000 - understood to be enough to cover the missing wages.
Clifton, 40, has been a fan of the Lincolnshire club, nicknamed The Iron, since he was a boy. His granddad was formerly a director and he was a mascot for the first match at the club’s Glanford Park stadium in 1988. He wrote on the fundraiser: “From Grimsby but been Iron since the day i was born.”
Strictly's Kevin Clifton makes huge donation in bid to save beloved football club (Getty Images)
Kevin is hoping to save the football club (Getty Images)This is England actor Thomas Turgoose, who supports fierce rivals Grimsby Town, also pledged to donate to the fundraiser. And another Scunthorpe fan, film producer Ian Sharp, also donated £1,899 - in a nod to the year the club was founded 124 years ago.
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Clifton, who has a child with partner Stacey Dooley, added on Twitter: “Lovely to see so many people , not just iron fans coming together to help our club in such a difficult moment. Even Mariners. Thank you so much. Please consider helping out with anything at all if you can.”
Scunthorpe launched the careers of future England captains Kevin Keegan and Ray Clemence and spent 72 years in the Football League before suffering back-to-back relegations in the last two seasons to put them in National League North.
This week the club issued a statement that owner David Hilton intends to withdraw his funding from the club and that they will no longer play games at their Glanford Park stadium as of next month.
Hilton purchased the club from the unpopular Peter Swann for a nominal fee back in January. But the situation at Scunthorpe has deteriorated further since Hilton announced earlier this month that the club had been “made available to purchase to the right people” due to the “significant” amount of debt that has been racked up.
He has also clashed with fans and has been locked in a legal dispute over the agreed-upon deal for the club’s ground with Swann, whose company Coolsilk still own it.