COMMERCIAL manager, assistant manager, manger - Mick Hoyle has seen it all in his footballing career, but now the Lancaster based businessman is taking on his biggest challenge yet.

He has bought a 97 per cent stake in North-West Counties League outfit Fleetwood Freeport.

He will manage the team as well as taking responsibility for off the field matters along with his new chairman, former Lancaster City boss Alan Tinsley.

Now Hoyle is plotting a 'seven or eight' year plan to put the team towards the top of the Unibond Premier League.

Hoyle was offered the manager's position at Highbury, then held by Tinsley, after quitting Kendal Town.

He was then told by the club's former backers that they had taken it as far as they could.

Hoyle came back with a buyout package and he is now wrestling with the problems of applying for grants to improve the ground.

He also hopes to meet with representatives of the Freeport shopping complex who have given the club backing in recent years.

Hoyle said: "To be fair, things didn' t work out at Kendal on and off the field.

Unfortunately, it was a nightmare and I should probably never have left Fleetwood in the first place."

He added: "Certainly Alan and myself, from when he took over at Lancaster have the experience of taking over Lancaster in the North West Counties league and, within three and a half years we won the Unibond First Division and several trophies along the way."

And Hoyle believes the club and get back on track and return to the heady days of the eighties and nineties, when the likes of Steve McCauley, Phil Clarkson and current Lancaster star Andy Lyons moved on to the football league from the then Fleetwood Town.

"The town has got the potential," he insists: "Going back to the eighties and early nineties we were drawing crowds of four to eight hundred.

If we can get a little bit of success on the field, hopefully the town can back it up."