At Lewes FC Community Club every year three board members depart and three are elected. Unless there are further resignations.
Before I criticise the standard of candidate, please make no mistake they all come across as nice, decent and smart people and probably highly capable. Much of what they say about themselves is very impressive. I believe they can all bring various skills to help the club and in a peripheral way some already do. But I wouldn’t particularly want any of them at the helm of my club, bar one, for the following reasons.
At Lewes FC sadly the quality of board member and candidate has for years been in sharp decline and becoming less of a pivotal role and more of a gang of wannabe revolutionaries with little history with the club or town. Remember, this is very simple, I’ll spell it out LEWES FC COMMUNITY CLUB.
Seven people are standing. You sort of hope they tick a few boxes.
Long-standing affiliation with the club.
Long-standing record of attending games.
Long-standing connection to the town.
AGM Update and Introduction to the Election Candidates – Lewes Community Football Club (lewesfc.com)
We have been fortunate over the years to have board members who have not ticked any of these boxes but have gone on to provide excellent service to Lewes FC. But their election addresses were based on grounded community ownership and hard work. The current seven addresses are just agreeing with the status quo of follow the leader, the crazy unsustainable bulging entity full of paid staff adding little to no value.
Of the seven people standing only one, Tim Bradshaw ticks those three boxes. If you are reading this before the election, I beseech you to vote for him. I do not know or have ever heard of him, but what I do know is he is the only person that ticks the history of the club and town box that is so important to try and understand what the club and community ownership is all about. It is desperate stuff when you choose someone for a local community board on the basis they are the only one from that community and not on what they can bring to the club.
Not one addresses what should be the staple of the current election address-
The huge trading losses we suffer.
Improving proper community links to Lewes.
Improving facilities for the fans.
Improving fan participation in running the club.
Failure of the 3g pitch to bring in significant revenue.
Trust me, the list goes on.
Does that mean the candidates other than Tim are hopeless? On the whole I would say yes. Their criteria and experience for standing to be on the Board of Lewes FC is totally circumspect. None seem to grab the ethos of what a proper community football club is about other than the ethos dictated by the people running the club who let’s face it don’t really understand the vague basics of proper community ownership. The 5 pillars of the tick box ‘club strategy’ some bang on about is just pissing in the wind and no basis for a proper election address.
As Lewes FC more and more becomes a brand and vanity project, facilitated by the current Board, it has been a turn off to anyone local or with the necessary savvy to effect change wishing to join the Board, roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of building a proper community club. Instead as we become a political fantasy of unsustainable pc dreams the candidates attracted see only the branding, image and publicity grabs and their ‘husting’ statements are just a bewildering diatribe of unfettered nonsense with no bearing to the reality of community ownership, the town of Lewes and the mess we are in.
Why is everything NOW NOW NOW…? Why can’t they do some leg work, grotty work and get their hands dirty for a few years, some experience without, in maybe an ego-fuelled whim, jumping straight in the deep end? None of them seem to understand the huge issues and problems at the club when the club needs people on the Board happy to challenge the poor mis management on the Board not queue up for more.
The Rights of Fans. 