'Outstanding' Bolton Wanderers club secretary to step down as Sharon Brittan hails service

Bolton Wanderers club secretary Simon Marland will be stepping down from his role at the end of this season.

The 63-year-old who grew up in Farnworth is a lifelong Wanderers fan and has been at the club full-time since 1993 and been associated with the Whites since the 1980s.

He wrote for the programme and covered the reserve team home and away before joining full-time in 1993 as part of the finance team, later becoming club secretary in 2000.

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He has missed just one Bolton first-team game since 1975 because of a car accident on the way to Watford in 1981, with his first Wanderers match coming in May 1967 with a 5-0 win over Millwall in the old Second Division which he saw with his dad Neville - the first of more than 4,000 fixtures.

Simon has reflected on his time working for the club, particularly the goldern era under Sam Allardyce in the top flight and the world renowned talent that he was able to bring to Wanderers.

And after dark times in recent years with the club dropping down the leagues and avoiding the prospect of extinction, Simon foresees a positive future for Wanderers.

He said: “We got into the Premier League and stayed in the Premier League.

“Then we started bringing in the overseas players and it became a different club – in a positive way.

“We’d done it in the 1990s a little bit, but now we were bringing in superstars everyone had heard of – like Djorkaeff, like Okocha.

“If you had said when I took over as secretary in 2000 that we would be playing in the UEFA Cup against Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid no-one would have believed you.

“I thought our European days were going to be playing in the