"Turned that down" - Sam Allardyce reveal is telling on Bolton Wanderers’ modern history | OneFootball

Sam Allardyce has said Bolton Wanderers' board didn't want UEFA Champions League qualification and that was the reason for his departure.

Between 2003 and 2007, Bolton Wanderers qualified for the UEFA Cup twice, reached the League Cup final, and finished in the top eight of the Premier League for four successive seasons.

They bloodied the nose of pretty much every big club in England and also pulled off famous results in Europe whilst coming extremely close to a top-four finish, believing it was a matter of time before they crashed the party of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester United during that era.

Sam Allardyce has given plenty of interviews since leaving Wanderers, where he was most loved and still is adored, and continuing his managerial career across England.

One interview he has given that will and does leave Bolton supporters desperately sad or at least given a feeling of wastefulness will be from two years ago, when he said the hierarchy at the club didn’t want UEFA Champions League qualification.

Like a lot of clubs, the feeling of ‘what if’ is always strong and, with Bolton languishing in mid-table in League One, that feeling is extremely strong in south Lancashire.

Big Sam’s Boltonian ‘galacticos’

Bolton didn’t have their ‘golden era’ in the noughties because that status remains reserved for the sides through the 1920s and 1950s but they still had some special moments and unforgettable memories during that period.

Genuine icons of the game such as Fernando Hierro, Youri Djorkaeff, and Jay-Jay Okocha joined real quality like Nicolas Anelka, Gary Speed, and Stelios Giannakopoulos as well as cult-heroes like Jussi Jaaskelainen, Kevin Nolan, El-Hadji Diouf and Kevin Davies to form part of squads that scaled new heights for Bolton in the modern era.

At the end of the 2004/05 campaign, the Trotters finished just three points outside of the top four and the UEFA Champions League qualification spots before getting up to third in January 2007 and being fifth ahead of an almost top-four playoff with Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium in the spring of that year.

However, with two games left of the 2006/07 campaign, Allardyce stunned many by immediately resigning as Bolton boss, leaving Sammy Lee in interim charge before he took over on a permanent basis over the summer.

In an interview with TWS Sports podcast, Allardyce revealed his sudden departure from the club was a ‘fallout with the board’ and he had made the decision at the end of January 2007 due to the "lack of ambition".

He said: “At the beginning of January 2007, we were third in the league and the players' and staff's ambition was to push for the Champions League that season but our squad was a little with a couple of injuries.

"We were searching for two or three players in January to try and make sure we would finish in the Champions League that season; that was our ultimate goal. Our ultimate goal was to finish in Europe in five years, we did it in three, then finish in the Champions League ultimately.”

‘Big Sam’ said it would result in less spending next season but the board "turned that down" and "turned down the opportunity to finish in the Champions League, saying that they didn’t want to".

“Those were the words: ‘We don’t want to finish in the Champions League.’”

What could have been and what has been instead

Within a year, Bolton Wanderers produced something of a ‘great escape’ in the final weeks of the Premier League season to avoid the drop after knocking themselves out of a delicately poised UEFA Cup Round of 16 tie against Sporting CP with a side that could be generously described as ‘second string’ put out in the second-leg in Lisbon.

Things didn’t get better and it was a steady-ish decline to Premier League relegation in 2012 and then an eventually rapid dismantlement of the club that saw it hit administration within the next decade whilst plummeting down to the fourth-tier ahead of the 2020/21 campaign with just six registered first-team players.

The Whites now sit tucked in the middle of the table in League One – a place that supporters, and the history of the club, suggest is below them even without the ‘Big Sam’ years.

From potentially playing at Europe’s elite level to now an also-ran within the EFL's lower reaches, the grim thought and phrase of ‘what if’ grows bigger with every passing hammering at the hands of a local rival that many younger fans may never have seen Bolton play before in the league until the next day of misery.

A short-sighted decision to prevent Bolton from kicking onto continue their status as gate crashers but in the UEFA Champions League led to the departure of a club legend and therefore the subsequent demise that has ensured; which is something that all Bolton fans will be left desperate about.