I’ll remember the 16th of April 2025 as the day the tide began to turn at Lewes FC. Ever since the club became community-owned, the fanzine and I have spoken out against the empty gestures made by a long line of bad actors on the board who paid lip service to fan and community ownership while undermining its true spirit. Of course, I recognise we have also had some outstanding directors.
The trashing of the core values of our constitution has been meekly accepted by far too many owners. A benefactor led hybrid football club has emerged, where successive boards have done whatever they want and used the fan ownership model seemingly for branding purposes, seemingly regarding Lewes as a useful commodity rather than the heart of our club and our greatest resource.
A community football club should be largely funded by the local community. The membership should be drawn from that community, and the club should be run by volunteers from that community. Instead, approximately a quarter of our sponsorship and membership comes from Lewes area.
We fund a paid, dysfunctional, bloated, and inefficient bureaucracy that is directed to do its job so badly by a board struggling to cope with the mess the Murphy era left us in that we are now close to insolvency. We have ended up in the position of only 1% of our eligible owner-voters tuning into pivotal election hustings, yet we employ a full-time fan engagement officer. Outside of Lewes FC 99% of readers would find this very perplexing.
But then, the day before the election candidates were announced, the penny finally dropped. Fourteen people set out their manifestos to stand for the board, a huge number.
The candidates are split evenly. Half are what I term homegr’owners’—involved with Lewes, the town as well as the football club. Proper fans who attend games, actively volunteer, and want Lewes FC to be run like a proper fan-owned community club. The standard of candidates from this group and their CVs is brilliant. Five of them are standing under the Football Foundation, an associated grassroots entity connected to the club that does incredibly important community and footballing work. Standing under the same banner, and with a combined strength of will, Lewes FC now has a large grouping of people, frankly far better qualified than our current Board of Directors, to run the club. This is not a group of troublemakers and discontents. At last, we have a credible, united alternative vision, one that aligns with mine and I hope a lot of voting owners.
Here comes the war!
It was only a few years ago that Lewes FC was a community club with a difference. Bad actors running the club, generously, well intentioned but naively funded by Ed Ramsden, decided, in a narcissistic act of self-destruction, that they were so big and clever they could redefine what community meant. They concluded that it was “the world.” Armed with a huge war chest, Lewes FC set out to conquer that world.
A good war chest needs a good story and good performers. The story was Equality FC, already losing its fizz, why was this not obvious?—and the performers, well, they weren’t very good. Huge membership targets were set for the “team,” and of course, they failed dramatically. They then swiftly pivoted to a focus on local membership, which, being poor performers, they also failed to achieve.
As with any failed plan executed badly, there is a price to pay.
It says so much about those previously running Lewes FC that they seem to think adding 1,500 new members and a temporary £75,000 boost in fees is some kind of legacy. But this is the problem: those 1,500 didn’t sign up for Lewes FC—they signed up for the values of Equality FC. And this is the other side of the war: the internationalists, as I call them. They joined in good faith, and I agree with most of the philosophical aims, but they haven’t read the instructions.
Six are standing in this election. They hardly mention the men’s team. Most don’t seem to have ever been to a game and certainly know anything about Lewes. None recognise the parlous state of our finances, which is perverse, since the aims they seek to achieve require heavy investment in human resources. But we have no money. The club is a busted flush.
Let’s be honest: they don’t give a damn about LEWES, or COMMUNITY, or a MEN’S FOOTBALL CLUB. Their membership, in fact, pretty much goes against the spirit of our constitution.
And because approximately 1,500 members are internationalists, and, I would argue, should not be involved in the running of our Lewes FC, and only around 1,000 are homegrown, you can see where we end up: an ownership tilted towards an international, socially-driven agenda. One that heavily supports the women’s first team over the men’s, seemingly unaware of the hypocrisy of being a cheerleader for “Equality FC” while essentially eschewing the men.
This is a direct result of dreadful management and decisions by the board.
So we now have the internationalists vs. the true fans of Lewes FC. A side pushing an agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with Lewes FC or our wonderful town.
And they have allies. The club currently employs bureaucratic staff who, should the homegrowners take control, will probably be made redundant. There are still remnants on the board from the old days of “spend and fail” who are happy to pay these people, even when volunteers would do it better. In essence, the club has been set up to allow people to do whatever they want and not be properly held accountable as most of our membership simply could not give a hoot about our club or Lewes. Remember before you snarl at this, only 1/3 of owners bothered to vote on the pivotal Mercury 13 proposal which essentially would have been the beginning of breaking up fan ownership.
But the great thing is: there will only ever be one winner in this. It will be the homegrowners.
Administration is a real possibility. And in the Football Foundation and the apolitical but thoroughly dedicated Supporters Club, there is a group of people who will not only do a better job of running this club than any of the previous boards, by a long chalk, but they’ll run it like a fan-owned, community club for the town of Lewes.
A few years ago, there was zero dissent about the governance of the club. Now, thanks to years of reckless management, there’s a large swathe of owners and fans actively hacked off, to the extent that there’s now an established group fighting to return Lewes FC to the community it left 15 years ago, in one of the greatest ironies of all: when we became a community club.
But as the money runs out, the redundancies start, the branding falters, and the cash-strapped teams fail, watch as the internationalists and the people involved for all the wrong reasons bugger off. Jog on eh?
The Rights of Fans. 