The board at Lewes FC have adjourned to their bunker (the portakabin) to prepare for unsolicited acts of non league football terrorism and activity. Apparently having sold Ollie Tanner for around £50,000 every football journeyman is going to want a slice of the pie. Actually in reality £25,000 as our excellent budget parity initiative sees player budget split 50/50 between the men and women’s teams. Oh and former director Kevin Powell is possibly entitled to a further slice.
What utter paranoid nonsense.
Earlier this year sections of the football community particularly in Sussex and north London were tickled pink by the news that Lewes FC player Ollie Tanner (only tenner on Word dictate!) turned down a transfer opportunity to move to Tottenham Hotspur from Lewes FC, the fee suggested in the region of £100,000.
On 18/5/22 Ollie finally moved to Cardiff City. Personally I think a very good move and better for his development than Spurs and the other interested party down the road Brighton and Hove Albion.
It was announced on the club website that the fee was undisclosed. As a highly trained investigative journalist I set out to find the truth. I googled Tanner and Cardiff, a BBC Sport article was top of the page and the attempts by Lewes FC at clandestine information shielding failed at the first hurdle with the fee ‘around £50,000’ mentioned in the article. 30 seconds that took!
Ha ha. But this is actually serious. Why? Because Lewes FC markets itself proudly as a fan owned club but, what for our club is a huge story, we the owners are not allowed the relevant information. ‘I mean they only own the club they don’t deserve information’ seems the club view.
So why was it undisclosed?
It seems it was at the request of Lewes FC. Would Cardiff FC be all pompous and preening itself over a teeny £50k transfer? Naturally I published the BBC link and fee on the fans forum.
The club Chairman thus declared on the club discussion forum, hilairiously…..
‘To Cardiff the amount isn’t significant but for us it could impact some of the ongoing negotiations we have with players who may all of a sudden want more if they know how much we may have got for Ollie’
Wow, what rubbish. Okay, so we all know that 6 months or so ago Newcastle United became the richest club in the world. They will be a magnet for football mercenaries, the unfavoured North East will now become a Mecca for every journeyman and aging footballer.
Our enviable pot is a measly 25k, very useful money but no more than a standard kit sponsorship for a year.
Sure if Harvey’s Brewery announced ownership and an investment pot of £10 million for Lewes FC, you’d maybe get some chancers. But hey, maybe footballers aren’t thick and maybe for another fifty quid a week really aren’t that bothered. The reality of under £25,000 is just ridiculous. We have just had a successful pitch pitch to the FA, a grant application for pitch relaying and improvement, realise 30 times that at £750,000. We are a large non-league club turning over well over maybe £750,000 pa with the men and women both having playing budget of £200,000. With inflation running near 10% the transfer fee for Ollie Tanner is essentially wiped out.
It’s not the first time we have heard the weird paranoid views on recruitment from Lewes FC who seem to think players won’t come and sign for us for all sorts of weird reasons negating the fact that we’ve been shit for a decade and maybe therefore players don’t want to play for us. We are also now a political project to the people in charge political whims so frankly a lot of players maybe want to just play for a football club.
But the main point is we are supposed to be a fan-owned club. We own the club. But the people who are supposed to represent our interests see fit to censor what we as owners know.
It is totally bizarre management from the club that want to become self-sustained through membership but don’t want to tell the membership anything of importance, as if the important things have to be kept within the environs of frankly a low grade board if they act this way.
A club strategy initiative was recently revealed. Two things are clear. The desire to dramatically raise membership numbers…’hey sign up but we won’t tell you anything of interest though’ is significantly flailing well below the club aspirations of 3500 new owners by end of season 21-22. ‘The club will improve communication both to and from fans’ yeah right, withholding standard club transfer information is the opposite of the club’s aims. The long term club of the club is to self-sustained by membership, why bother if any information of importance is de facto censored.
You are an aspirational footballer and want a sniff of the big time. Then, paradoxically, surely the club are completely wrong and out of touch. Lewes FC have very much gone the whole hog with looking after the interests of Ollie and surely if young players know that they will want to go to a club pro-active in enhancing their careers and would actually even play for less money to achieve that aim, surely we should be using the transfer news in a positive way to attract young talented players.
Lewes FC pride themselves on what is sometimes the best branding and communication in non-league football but wow sometimes they get it so wrong.
The Rights of Fans. 