Hallelujah, after 15 years a Lewes FC board finally reaches out properly to the community for help to run the club properly. A small article on the club website signalled a shift, long needed, to stop the relentless squandering of money, goodwill and resources at the club through financial and governance mismanagement.
What is the story?
The new board have reached out to people in the community in a pro-active way, to seek fan and membership inclusivity, in helping at the helm of the club and to run the club like a proper community club, at last.
‘We are, in particular, looking for prospective co-opted board members with skills and experience in the following areas:
• Events management
• Accounting and financials
• Legal oversight
• Human resources’
But we have volunteers?
Volunteers are sadly seen as merely tools to help operate the club, are undervalued, taken for granted and have no access to help ideologically and practically in the governance of the club. An answer to problems not a solution.
Why have we not co-opted before?
I can remember about five years into community ownership asking one of the main protagonists in the Lewes FC riddle why on earth we do not co-opt members onto the board. I haven’t gone through my old emails for the precise quote, but it was pretty much along these lines ‘we feel we don’t need to co-opt members onto the board because we feel we have the adequate skill sets’ Skill sets was definitely in there.
We have since the beginning of the Equality FC initiative been co-opting some women onto the board which is of course a very good thing, but that was more to do with promoting a facet of the club rather than improving community and economic governance and dare one suggest a way to get female representation on the board to a better and acceptable level.
What is co-opting.
Community clubs under our constitution have to have an elected board. The elected board are allowed to augment their numbers by up to a third by co-opting board members on. Co-opted board members have no voting rights.
So what is the point?
The point of co-opting members is to increase the pool skills available to the club leadership, to help address the all round requirements of running a football club. If there are certain fields the board feel they are lacking in expertise, they can reach out and co-opt people who are experienced and competent in those areas.
So did the previous boards have all the necessary skills as they claimed?
Well, despite claiming that they had all the ‘skill sets’ required, under no circumstances were they anywhere near this objective. I’m not aware of anyone who had the sufficient experience of the day-to-day running of an entertainment/sporting entity which is also a catering concern on the previous boards. Quite why they thought they did have these is almost on the verge of surreal. The board make up under community ownership has been centred on finance, media and marketing. None of these are ‘skill sets’ are commensurate with running a football club. Promoting one, yes.
So who do you co-opt on?
The various sorts of people in Lewes you will want to co-opt on are maybe someone from the council, someone from the bonfire council, someone in catering, accountancy, social media, experience of bureaucracy, fund raising etc a whole range of subjects. You only need to look at all of the board members ‘manifestos’ over the years to see hardly anyone is proficient in these fields.
So we’ve missed a trick?
The club has simply been run on bluster, spin and rich individuals. Not like a proper community club. At last, we may just have a board who get what we should be doing to run a successful self-sustained football club. The club has been developed in a ridiculous manner to the brink of possible collapse if the stormy clouds gathering align. Had we been run in a sensible and solid manner true to our core values by utilising the skills of fans and not stupid ill placed ambition, we could be an amazing model club by now. This could signal a huge shift and change the momentum and direction of the club.
Happy days then?
No not at all. I have no idea on the take up on the back of the statement release, but in order to get lots of people co-opting onto a community club board it really needs to be a proper community club and not something essentially bailed out by rich people. Successive boards have blind sided so many people by the glitzy presentation of the club when under the surface we are expensive unaffordable bureaucratic mess.
Why would prospective co-opted members want to bother getting involved with putting a lot of time and effort into something, to help the club become financially self-sufficient, if its funds are just going to be wasted on things like pointless exhibition tournaments in Europe, spending vast money on pitch hire in London for the men to train when we have the facilities here, £40,000 on a staff car and haemorrhaging money to a third party by out sourcing the catering? N
A toxic legacy?
Running a club badly has long term repercussions. I know of so many people who are swerving the club at the moment. Morphing from an amazing non league club to an experimental football circus has ramifications. People who have previously helped run the club, people who have offered to help the club before but have been bizarrely knocked back and people who tick the boxes for co-option simply don’t want anything to do with Lewes FC at the moment. People who can be transformative to our fortunes. It is no good by the way tutting ‘so negative,’ when the above is a fact. Would you want to bust a gut on a project over a year or two to make the club £40,000 to see the money frittered away on a car?
Conclusion.
I really hope the club are able to get a good response and co-opt some much needed fresh blood and ideas. I am so pleased that at the helm of the club, after fifteen years, we have some people who finally understand a community clubs only works when they are run by the community and those skills inherent within that community and are finally reaching out. I hope it signals a departure from employing people who add no value to the club, shifting to doing it ourselves and self-sufficiency.
The Rights of Fans. 