This not the nuclear option many will suppose. The jewel in the crown that we can be rightfully proud of Equality FC, budget parity can and must be maintained.

The recent publishing of the accounts and the unravelling of our dire financial situation means as membership of the Women’s Championship is way outside our means needing a £600,000 donation to cover them.
We must resign because the cost of membership under the licence arrangement with the FA contains so many expensive and unaffordable cost we are racking up astronomical financial losses.
The hapless bunch in charge run around with fairy-tale ideas of raising money, the net result of their efforts being looming financial disaster.
First and foremost we are supposed to be a community club striving to achieve the aims of the constitution we signed up for, the main point being we are financially self-sustained, If we cannot be we must cut our cloth accordingly.
Resigning will mean the loss of some revenues from involvement in the Championship. From some of the deals associated with our participation from tv and Barclays etc. However these are not huge amounts in comparison to how much membership is costing us.
The huge costs we would lose are the plethora of backroom staff that under the licence arrangement we have to employ in both management and training fields. We have a ridiculous wage bill of support, office and management not associated with actual team management.
All are unnecessary, we should be run by volunteers. It works for all clubs of our size. Nobody anywhere near us in tier 7 for the men or in potentially tier 3 for the women needs £500,000 thrown away on wages not associated with playing games of football in those leagues.
Remember budget parity was supposed to be about a principle of equality, but since it’s inception the club has totally lost all sense of perceptive, drowning in a process of corporatisation that has seen us simply drift away from attempting to be a community club to a wild unfunded attempt at ‘making it big.’ That has failed in everyway, where we have ended up with people on the board and candidates for board elections who have not even been to a game, seduced by the presentation and ideals of a politically perfect football club.
Yes, we have reached the farcical position where people from Lewes don’t want to stand for the board of Lewes FC and instead we are run alongside the club ‘strategy’ which is pretty much focused on getting sponsorship and income from outside the town.
Not only completely wrong but unworkable and we are now in the financial shit, bankrolled by someone who helped set the community club up 13 years ago, an idealism based on how wrong it is to bankroll football clubs! We are a joke of a community club. Budget parity has been both very good and very bad, the ugliness with how the club is now run so badly should stop.
Yet instead of cutting our cloth accordingly we continue to hire more and more staff to help keep up with the potential explosion in women’s football post Euro 2022 and the new investment established league clubs are making. It is financially unfeasible and we drift further away from financial reality. We will never ne able to compete with these clubs. We got lucky and got involved from the inception as the previous owner had always ensured an emphasis on the women’s team.
Lewes FC is now not a football club with a healthy side-line in promoting equality, it has become an out of control monster eating at the very principles of community ownership. We have only a few years in reality before we will be simply ousted from the Championship by the growth in the women’s game. Budget parity is now established and is an amazing tool in the club’s armoury for what we stand for as a town, but like the club it must be run sustainably. We need to resign from the Championship before the whole thing brings the whole club down and private individuals come in to bail it out. The inception of Equality FC, a gimmick to many, but one that has worked well as a principle for Lewes FC to be proudly associated with. But the management of this little jewel has to date been nothing short of shocking.

One thought on “Why Lewes FC Women Should Resign From The Women’s Championship. by Chris Harris”