Ahead of Macclesfield’s mammoth Monday night FA Cup tie against Brentford, owner Rob Smethurst reflects on his club’s dramatic defeat of holders Crystal Palace, and how an impulse purchase helped him turn his life around.
“I just couldn’t contain myself.”
To the naked eye, Rob Smethurst taking over Macclesfield could have spelled disaster. A club which had ceased to exist in 2019, racking up over £500,000 worth of debts under a variety of different ill-fated owners, and a local entrepreneur who freely admits that the club was not a logical business decision for him.
Yet despite this Smethurst who, seven years ago was handed a large set of keys to the stadium, just masterminded the greatest FA Cup-set in the competition’s 150-year history.
Macclesfield 2-1 Crystal Palace. The holders knocked out by a non-league club for the first time since 1909.
The image of Smethurst wandering through a sea of fans on the astroturf, a boyish grin on his face has since gone viral, he says the surreal nature of the game still looms large in his mind.
“People were dancing on the tables in the bar,” Smethurst said.
“We stayed for four or five hours after the game just taking it in, it was just unbelievable.”
For a Macclesfield boy, born and bred, it was a dream come true, but he is well aware of how quickly things have changed since he took over:
“The place had fallen apart, it had been stripped of any value,” he said.
“The grass was growing, there’s no seats, the windows were smashed, it was a completely derelict building,”
“There was so much to do to keep the club alive in such a short space of time.”
He has absolutely invested in the sustainability of the football enterprise: £4million on the stadium to transform it into a state-of-the-art facility, £2 million more on a community hub. In a football world full of investment that often comes with a long-term cost, Smethurst has prioritised the longevity of the football club in a way rarely seen.
“The whole business model was based around the football pitch,” Smethurst said.
“It was about a community centre that could both inspire and pay for the first team.”
As a self-confessed ‘hustler,’ Smethurst has quickly identified innovative ways to fuel a reborn Macclesfield. Perhaps the highest profile of these has been the Robbie Savage: Making Macclesfield documentary, which Smethurst himself commissioned alongside his Director of Football turned Head Coach, TV personality Robbie Savage.
“The BBC came to us with the idea,” he said.
“Now I think its one of their most watched documentaries ever, with more than a million views I think.”
Three million to be exact, and popularity off the pitch has mirrored success on it, with three promotions in four seasons taking Macclesfield from the realm of the semi-professional to the brink of the Football League in less than half a decade.
Smethurst is well aware of how much his own life has changed in that time.
He purchased Macclesfield after selling his car sales logistics app to Autotrader in 2017. Bereft of a purpose, he quickly slipped into addiction.
“I just kind of lost direction in that period,” he said.
“I had no more dreams, so I always wanted the party never to end,”
“I was in a really bad place in the end just basically drinking in the day and partying on my own.”
He elected to buy Macclesfield at the bottom of that spiral, a bit of a joke that Smethurst admits he didn’t tell his wife about at first after agreeing the deal through property website Right Move.
Now face of a marketing campaign with the website, Smethurst reflects on the fact that the decision changed the trajectory of his life, but also provided an outlet for people in the local community who believed that the club had disappeared completely.
“The club has been so important to inspire not just me but the local community,”
“It’s my job to offer these people an escape.”
Now getting more than 3,000 fans per game, all Smethurst’s ambition for his local club culminated in a spectacular FA Cup tie with last season’s fairytale champions, Crystal Palace.
“The day was just an experience,” Smethurst said, smiling when recalling his memories of the day.
“We’ve got security outside that we’ve never had before, thousands of fans taking photographs,”
He reflected on some of the more comedic moments of the day.
“They were brilliant, a really nice load of lads,”
“But it’s quite amusing that they’re going into a, you know, a little changing room and thinking ‘what the hell is this,’”
In his own words, Macclesfield’s owner admits that he thought the team “were going to get pounded,” after the first five minutes of the game.
“We just didn’t touch the ball for five minutes,”
“I really sort of expected to look at the levels of how good these players are,”
“With the money they’re being paid, you’re almost thinking laser beams are going to come out onto the pitch.”
But, as Smethurst himself said, something just happened and, in front of the eyes of the world, Macclesfield slew the giant that sat 117 places above them.
The practical facts are perhaps less enigmatic and exciting to fans, but Smethurst is under no illusions about the importance of the victory to the sustainability of the football club.
“It puts cash in the bank, which is brilliant,”
“With the TV money and everything else, we’ve made enough to cover the whole year’s pay for the players,”
With Macclesfield’s ambitions,
Despite the financial, Smethurst is still more focused on the human stories of Macclesfield as a local community:
“I had a really nice call with a woman the other day and she just said, wow, I took more money, I took more money on that day than I did on New Year’s Eve in her bar,”
“What we can do for the economy, the local economy in Mac is brilliant.”
On the horizon is another dream tie to look forward to for the non-league minnows, this time welcoming Brentford from the capital to play on the mythologized 4G pitch of the Leasing.com Stadium.
In preparation for the match, Smethurst has re-appointed himself chairman, after it was reported he had stepped away in September 2025 to pursue other business ventures.
“I never really stepped away” Smethurst clarifies.
“I just wanted to find the right person to take the club forward.”
In reality, there was no one else with Smethurst’s drive and passion for the club, without being focused on financial gain, as he still doesn’t take a salary from the club that he has resurrected.
A man with dreams of his club back in the English football pyramid’s big time, he is well aware that whilst victory in Round Three made them sustainable, a win here could make that pipe dream a reality far sooner than expected.
“Clubs at National League level operate with £3 million budgets when we have £1 million,” he contends.
“Money buys leagues unfortunately.”
The major media opportunities available to Macclesfield will only continue with this next chapter in their history, with Smethurst taking on seventeen outlets in a huge media day prior to the match.
He is also a big campaigner for non-league, arguing that League Two should allow astroturf to provide an additional sources of revenue for clubs higher up the pyramid and is a big supporter of the 3-Up campaign, which advocates for a third promotion place from the National League to League 2, bringing it in line with Football League standards.
“There’s a lot to be done still for non-league,” Smethurst said.
“I still think that it’s without non-league football doesn’t really exist because it becomes more about the community.”
As the chairman, Smethurst is conscious not to be swept up in the excitement of the occasion, but he has promised his team a reward regardless of the outcome.
“I’m going to take them all away to Ibiza for a week,” he smiled.
“If we beat Brentford then maybe it might be an extra week.”
“I don’t think they’ll be able to last longer than that.”
That being said, as a businessman who has built his career on optimism, he has demanded the same level of intensity this time around and promised a special celebration this time around.
“I’m sure we’ll be doing cartwheels and maybe a few somersaults this time if we can pull it off.”
In the modern era of football clubs run as businesses, it is rare to see an owner grow with his club, but Rob Smethurst and his phoenix club Macclesfield are a refreshing anomaly that continue to defy expectations.
Let’s hope they can continue to do the same this Monday night.