The website of Vintage Lapointe is a showcase for a performer who describes himself as a musician, a poet, a story teller, a father, an engineer, a sports coach, a businessman, an entrepreneur, a fragile mind, a writer and a restorer of old cars.
By the end of June the old cars won’t be the only recipients of his tender loving care. The personal bio will expand to include an interest in restoring the fortunes of one of Scotland’s oldest football clubs.
When Mario Lapointe – Vintage to his friends - agreed Heads of Terms on a deal to save League Two Dumbarton a poster on the Pie and Bovril fan forum spoke of the novelty of finding out that someone keen to take over a small Scottish club had not immediately been exposed as a property shark, a character of dubious legality, a sociopath with a spiteful grudge, or a fantasist.
Over the course of a 30-minute Teams call to Quebec, Herald & Times Sport manages to establish that the son of a truck mechanic father and food-prep cook mother seems to be none of these things. Enthusiastic, engaging and normal there are, however, two areas which arouse natural curiosity.
Why would an independently wealthy man from Montreal choose to blow his wealth on a toiling football club in the SPFL with an average home gate of 600, serious financial instability and a long history of owners who saw more value in the stadium land than the football team? And, moreover, how did his artistic alter ego Vintage Lapointe come into being?
“Its unique,’ he explains. “There are so many singers called Lapointe here in Quebec, but none more Vintage than me.
“Besides, the only Mario that really did well with that name are the (F1 racing driver) Andretti and (Canadian ice hockey player) Lemieux. So, Vintage it was.”
An only child, Lapointe grew up playing baseball and hockey, while working part-time at a local grocery store and McDonald’s during his high school and university years. He went on to earn a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Université de Sherbrooke, founding SMT-ASSY Electronics in 1996.
A father of three boys he dabbled in music for 32 years. Three years ago his marriage ended and he was urged to take writing and singing a little more seriously by friends
“I still had lots to write about and singing was a way to express it. It’s vindictive, it’s loving, it’s painful, it’s family, loyalty, pride, lots of emotions and it's what I call ‘me’
“Not a great musician, not a great singer, just me doing what I can.”
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His tunes attract between 15,000 to 20,000 listeners a month on Spotify and 50,000 streams. By his own admission he doesn’t do it for the money.
“The music makes no money at all,” he laughs, “about $150 per month. But it’s not about that. I have fans that need to know that they are not alone feeling sometimes like that, or going through stuff.”
Dumbarton supporters have a good idea of how it feels to ‘go through stuff’. In November one of the founding members of the Scottish league was docked 15 points when directors decided they had no option but to call in administrators.
Fans rallied round, organising a GoFundMe, which raised over £122,000 to keep the club ticking over until a buyer could be found. Searching for a European lower league football club to buy, Lapointe was impressed.
A coach of hockey and football for over 20 years, his electronics firm made the kind of money he found it difficult to spend in Scotland once Oxford based Gareth Phillips nipped in to agree a deal with administrators to buy the relegated Sons.
Owed over £1million when the club collapsed, control offered Phillips a chance to avert litigation and get his money back by pursuing the planning permission required to build homes on development land surrounding the stadium.
While Lapointe looked at other teams in England and Portugal he came back, time and again, to Dumbarton. And when Phillips pulled out on health grounds, the ping pong match with the administrators resumed.
“There were two weird attachments for me there. In high school, I went out with a girl from Glasgow for two or three years. We would watch movies and stuff about Scotland and it was such a beautiful place.
“The second thing I really liked was the GoFundMe effort of the fans.
“When you hear about GoFundMe you see people saying their objective was $50,000 and they make it to $25 or something and say, ‘thank you’ then give up.
“The opposite happened with Dumbarton. They reached well over £120,000 and I liked the fact that people cared about their team. And it was not only people from the town of Dumbarton. I went through the list and fans of teams from other towns were helping out as well.”
In an effort to convince the administrators he went the extra mile, forging a plan to buy the old barren shipyard office on Dumbarton High Street – most recently used as The Clipper bar – and turn it into a base for overseas players, sponsors and supporters.
“I wasn’t buying it just to look at this nice old building. But I had to put that to one side for now.”
Canadians investing in British football are not unheard of. Expat Fergus McCann saved Celtic from oblivion in 1994. A rather different kind of investor, Hollywood list movie star Ryan Reynolds purchased lower league Welsh club Wrexham with Rob McElhenney and delivered three successive promotions and a highly successful Netflix documentary.
“I’m not a multi-billionaire who makes movies and has lunch with Netflix executives when I can find the time. Nothing like that.
“But what I did see with Wrexham was that Ryan got involved and did all sorts of things.
“And what I want to get involved in first is putting the finances of the club where they should be.
“What I have noticed in football is that the ego and ambitions of too many owners is deeper than their pockets.
“They put the viability of the team in jeopardy. Especially in Italy and in Spain.
“Dumbarton had debt but it only had debt because of all that stuff that went on with the previous owners.
“Listen, that’s not for me to judge. The administrator told me, ‘Mario, turn the page and don’t look back. I’ll make sure I don’t have people like that in my group.
“Dumbarton won’t need to make money. But what it does need to do is stand on its own two feet.
“This team has been here 153 years and I want it to be there 150 years after I’m gone.”
In recent times, Dumbarton’s value as a property transaction has exceeded its value as a football club.
Former owners Cognitive Capital tried to revive a plan to move the football club to a new 4,000-capacity stadium at Young’s Farm, featuring 200 new homes, a hotel, retail park, office units and community sports facilities.
Pie-in-the-sky from day one they planned to fund the project by building nine new homes and 40 flats in development land around the Marbill Stadium. Borrowing money from Gareth Phillips, they signed over security on assets which actually belonged to the football club.
Had the homes and flats been built the sums might have worked. The football club would have received some hefty lump sum payments to keep the lights on. Rebuffed by council planners the plans never came to pass and the money never arrived.
By the end of last year Dumbarton were unable to pay management, staff and players their wages directors concluded that administration was the only course.
“People wanted to build there because of the location,” says Lapointe. “The location is surreal, it’s Disney like. With the castle in the background it’s a place that we should be renting off season for movie sets and Netflix dramas.
“But if you start destroying it with high towers all around you know what? You will lose all that heritage.”
Lapointe inherited his mechanic father’s passion for restoring old cars. In his spare time he restored an old Ford Mustang sports car until it reached pristine condition. After talks with local politicians Jackie Baillie and Douglas McAllister the plan now is to refurbish and rebuild one of Scotland’s traditional clubs.
“I can’t be held accountable for what happened before. Between 2021 and 2024 the team had a bad run and it affected the image and branding of the club. Some people didn’t want to be associated with Dumbarton any more.
“So my plan is to talk to sponsors and raise the team up. We can’t get sponsors if we only have 600 people in the stadium.
“If there is nobody in the stadium it doesn’t help. So the Young Sons Ultras and me are going to walk around and sell tickets door to door if we have to.”
While he prefers to watch football played on grass he hasn’t ruled out laying down an artificial pitch, to generate revenue for the most picturesque community stadium in the country.
“I want the stadium to be open so that anyone who wants to come and meet me and talk can come.
“I want to be hands-on. I want to participate. I’m new to everything, but you know what?
“That gives me a chance to reach out to everyone and say, ‘let’s touch base.’"
