After a 5 year hiatus we return.
Read previous blogs from 12 blogs at Christmas and the next lot that I will be publishing daily here
The Lewes FC Fanzine 12 Blogs at Christmas. – Lewes FC Fanzine Blog (wpcomstaging.com)
Over the next 12 days we will be producing a blog a day. Thoughts on the good the bad and the ugly at the club and the governance thereof. We will try and create a narrative
When the Community Club was set up 13 years ago it was with a fantastic constitution. Adherence to that constitution would see Lewes FC as a formidable football club fit for the town. The fanzine has always believed the constitution has been wilfully ignored by the various board members over the years for no other reason than some thought they knew better and therefore the constitution did not apply to us. This string of blogs will examine and hopefully illuminate further.
How the landscape has changed at Lewes FC. In the next 12 blogs we will be identifying the stark changes at the club, where we are going wrong and right, how we can improve and other fresh ideas.
The last time we wrote a fanzine the club was still grappling with a number of issues, foremost achieving the nadir of being self-sustained. We will identify how and why this bastion of importance has simply been jettisoned to the degree some one had to write a cheque, metaphorically speaking, for £600,000 to bail out the finances 2021/22 season. We will examine why everybody outside Lewes FC, even some running the club, believe we are an example of financial prudence when we are the opposite.
As we have seen any attempt to uphold the core principles of community ownership is disappearing fast. Why? Simply because Lewes FC have shed many of these principles for the incredible rise of the Lewes FC Women. The other side of the coin is a perusal of our website and the total lack of any strong community initiatives other than wearing yellow laces to bring gambling to it’s knees!
This issue will contain some caustic criticism but will also acknowledge the positives, but I hope what will come through are the tough choices ahead and how we are sleepwalking into danger and the way out.
I believe the longest thread in the Lewes FC forum ever was one I started titled, ‘The Death of Our Community Club’ I am delighted so many people who insulted this view seem to be coming around to my understanding of the problems at the club. I have even received the odd apology.
But funnily enough I am now one of the people less bothered by this. I’ll be explaining in later blogs why I feel the community part failed and how like it or not a lot of people feel if that is at the expense of getting the Lewes FC Women into the Premiership it is a price worth paying. Equally those who feel we are a community club and should perform like one are the ones morally right? We’ll be asking is there a middle way? The last blog, 12, will be a series of ideas on how we can maybe turn around the current situation and whether anyone has the stomach for it.
We will examine how every other community club except Lewes would welcome a fresh tranche of ideas, a basic function of improving football clubs according to the Fan Led Review by Tracey Crouch MP, but how we all know the board at Lewes FC will simply ignore them. Predictability is such a drag isn’t it?
It is difficult to argue we are now a shell of a community club and in fact more of a privately owned, not run, club with a social and community conscience, dare one say a political experiment? One with a community club constitution where the leadership pays lip service too squirreling away community club aims, sacrificed at the altar of slavish political agenda progress.
But 2700 owners have signed up for a community club not a privately financed one. How do we genuinely reach a balance between achieving the club’s original aims of being self-sustained, transparent and accountable, and the apparent direction of the board.
These are exciting times and I feel we are at a precipice where something will have to give. I believe if the women are not in the Premiership in two years the whole thing will fall apart financially. I have previously written a blog suggesting resigning from the Championship to tier three would keep us high profile in the top 40 clubs in Britain but also rid us of the huge financial commitments. The Championship licence probably in reality costs us £500,000 a year. Do you remember when I got slaughtered for saying it would cost at least £350,000. Going down a tier would possibly knock that need for the £600,000 cheque and instead lead to self-sustained community purity model.
It never ends well, people in power who don’t deserve it. We have an incredibly weak board of directors who are thoughtlessly just rubber stamping a race to the bottom of Community Club purity at the expense of an experiment that I personally support but the pursuit of is destroying our community ethos. I will be examining that.
I’ll be explaining why we need to adopt the ‘shadow board’ suggested in the Fan Led Review and how we need a fit and proper test for future candidates of the actual Board. I will be setting out ideas on how we can improve the board membership and make it more accountable to the values we all signed up for and move the club back towards the community club. A community club should be fan owned but the current board is a mere pastiche of a community board, three of whom I understand had hardly, if ever, even been to a game at the Pan before or connection with the town, becoming a member.
Community or private? Are we disruptors or mere poseurs? How we can become Lewes FC rather than a faux political project whilst maintaining the profile of Lewes FC Women but introducing integrity into the mix. I’ll try and throw some thoughts and ideas around. I’ll make it the usual critical but constructive blogs and by the end hopefully a new train of thought moving forward.
Blog 2 tomorrow can be read here.
The 12 blogs will all be published here over the next 12 days
The Lewes FC Fanzine 12 Blogs at Christmas. – Lewes FC Fanzine Blog (wpcomstaging.com)
The Rights of Fans. 