Ex-Pools chairman Ken Hodcroft offers help to potential Hartlepool United investors

Hartlepool United are in dire need of investment after being put up for sale by HUFC Holdings Limited.

Pools fans pitched in with a phenomenal fundraising effort which helped the club meet its financial commitments for this month.

But they were dealt a bitter blow when interested businessman Chris Musgrave walked away from a deal to take over the club.

Now the club's former chairman has said he was willing to help anyone else interested in the club.

"If someone can come along and perhaps look at how we did it, we'd be willing to show them," Mr Hodcroft told the BBC.

"If they wanted us to, we'd be willing to help, these are our accounts, this is how we ran the club, this is what you can achieve.

"They hopefully could sort out the state of the club right now, put the two packages together and see if they'd like to take on the project."

Mr Hodcroft ran Pools for owners Increased Oil Recovery Limited, and in an earlier interview he said the group ran the club "like its oil companies" - without sentiment, and without a budget.

"The manager is not told at the beginning of the season or at any day of the week that they have a budget to spend," he said in 2012.

"If anybody here, a manager, is interested in a player they have to follow a procedure, which is the normal procedure in the oil business for buying a piece of equipment."

The group held the club for 18 years, before selling to former owners JPNG in 2015.

His time in post was Pools' most successful era, seeing them make it to the League One play-off final in 2005 where sadly Sheffield Wednesday snatched the second-tier place from them in extra time.

Hodcroft's reign ended with the 2014/15 season when Ronnie Moore and his team pulled of a Great Escape, closing a six-point gap to survive relegation from the Football League.