Chris Harrs 28/5 25
As someone who regularly writes about Lewes FC, I’ve made it something of a personal mission to keep an eye on how other Sussex clubs are doing, and how other fan-owned clubs are run too. Last year, I shared a blog post in the FC United of Manchester Facebook group. It got 70 likes and around 30 comments, all positive. To put that into perspective, I’d be lucky to get those numbers in a year on Lewes FC’s own page. Because at FC United the club celebrate and utilise opposite opinions as often, and at Lewes neatly always, used to better that those of the board!
In Lewes, a town with a proud tradition of independent thinking,it’s considered taboo to express independent views about the football club. I’ve always found it deeply ironic, even hypocritical, that some of the most vocal Lewes FC diehards seem to miss what Lewes as a town is really about. But is this about to change?
Let me get to the point. Recently, I signed up as a member of FC United of Manchester. It cost me just £25, and the reason was simple: I wanted access to their membership emails to better understand how they run their club compared to how ours operates. And let me tell you, it’s night and day. I bet nobody running Lewes FC keeps an eye on how successful gfan owned club operate and how we can copy them for a more successful outcome than being forever skint. Seriously, I bet you nobody, so insular is Lewes FC.
At FC United, transparency isn’t a buzzword, it’s a practice. Every board meeting is minuted and sent to members. I know their player and staff budget for next season will be £309,000 because they told the owners. Their last board meeting summary? A hefty 12 pages long. That’s what fan ownership should look like.
Meanwhile at Lewes FC, board meetings remain shrouded in secrecy. That’s why the email sent out to members on Thursday 22 May caught my attention, it seemed to signal a partial shift. From what I understand, this was the first proper communication from the newly elected board of directors. I had high hopes for this group, especially since four of the five new members campaigned on a promise to restore genuine fan ownership.
To their credit, the email didn’t disappoint.
It had the tone of something FC United might send if they were facing financial hardship, straightforward, honest, and clear-eyed. It acknowledged the challenges of the past season, celebrated the club’s survival, and laid out the stark financial reality. Finally, an honest appraisal instead of the usual sugar coated spin. To a degree.
I’ve been calling for this level of transparency for years. Now, for the first time, it seems like the club is actually asking its members for help, and I applaud that.
Still, we have a long way to go.
Let’s be honest: when only 13% of members vote in board elections, and barely a dozen people attend important meetings, it’s clear the fanbase is disengaged. This won’t change overnight. But last Thursday’s email was a good start, it peeled back the illusion that everything is fine.
That said, only the most committed fans attend those Zoom meetings. Most members, if they’ve paid for ownership, deserve to know the basics: what shape the finances are in, and how they can help when things get tough.
Encouragingly, I’ve seen a lot of creative ideas popping up on social media in response. If the club can keep drawing fans into the conversation, bringing them in from the cold, it could mark the beginning of something meaningful.
Lewes FC has long been driven by lofty, ‘big idea’ initiatives. And where did that get us? Financially straitjacketed. Fan-owned clubs shouldn’t be vanity projects. They should be built on the small ideas of many, not the grand designs of a few. I’ve no doubt some of the old directors read the latest member responses and rolled their eyes. “That’s not going to change anything,” they’ll mutter. But they’re wrong.
Because real community ownership starts with involvement—fans offering ideas, raising money, pitching in. Some ideas stick, others fade. But the result is a club that’s collectively owned and steered democratically, not controlled like a private fiefdom. That’s the ideal. And that trust, broken by past boards, will take time to rebuild.
The tone of the email was promising, but not perfect.
It still included some of the off-putting ‘cheery’ language we’ve come to expect from Lewes FC: “These costs help us upkeep the Dripping Pan, pay our utility bills, maintain the pitch and develop hospitality so the chips are ready, the beers are quick, and we’re match-fit to enjoy the football.” Please. Don’t talk down to us. That kind of presentation is alienating, not engaging.
Apparently, we finish the season with a small surplus. But that’s irrelevant if we’re heading into a three-month income drought with major wage bills ahead. If you’re asking for money, be straight about it. Don’t dress it up in feel-good fluff. People want honesty, not vague optimism.
The elephant un the room. At some point, we need a grown-up debate about whether a financially struggling, fan-owned club like Lewes FC can justify paying for layers of bureaucratic staff—roles like a COO—when capable volunteers could step in and help, freeing up vital funds for the club’s survival. You are going to get far more help from people if they don’t feel donations will be squandered on a bank of staff we cannot afford and are seemingly incapable of self-funding themselves
The email could’ve been far more effective by showing what donations actually do:
- £50 keeps the lights on at the Pan for a day.
- £150 helps maintain the pitch for a week.
- £250 supports player training sessions this summer.
This isn’t marketing genius—it’s common sense. Help people see the impact of their donation. Make them feel powerful.
Instead, we got a vague appeal with no roadmap. And a jaw-dropping quote from Director Joe:
“If our 600 local owners each supported with £250, it would generate £150,000 and set us up for a stellar season.”
Really? After years of ignoring local owners in favour of flattering international members, now you want the locals to foot the bill?
He continues, “This isn’t a time for negativity or finger pointing. We need support and positivity.”
Actually, this is exactly the time for feedback—both positive and critical. If Lewes FC had listened earlier, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
That said, there is one undeniable positive: there’s finally a pulse between the board and the membership. That’s a big shift, and it’s long overdue.
So while my tone may sound harsh, I say this out of care. Treat us like adults. Stop spinning. Let’s have an honest conversation about where we are and how we get out of it, together.
It is nice to feel hopeful again, it’ll take a long time to win fans around, and time for the club to drop bad habits. I read the manifestos of the new directors and they were far superior examples of what is required, straight talking. To move forward we need to cut the crap.
Footnotes
But here’s a note to the board: if you’re going to ask people for donations, you might want to start by publishing the 2023/24 accounts. Anyone willing to give a significant amount will want to know where the club stands financially.
Everything’s Fine, Just Send Money
have our new governance proposals in place for owners to vote on
We hope that this will be the last time we will need to ask for donations like this — not because we won’t need support in future, but because we’re committed to building more sustainable income streams from across our community.
The focus is on what the club needs to do, not on what the donor enables.
Why It Fails:
Effective fundraising is about making the donor feel powerful — that their action directly changes the outcome.
The email mentions general amounts, but doesn’t show what specific donations achieve.
Why It Fails:
People respond better when they understand the impact of their donation.
Suggested Fix:
Add something like:
- £50 keeps the lights on at the Pan for a day.
- £150 helps maintain the pitch for a week.
- £250 supports player training sessions this summer.
The email mentions general amounts, but doesn’t show what specific donations achieve.
Why It Fails:
People respond better when they understand the impact of their donation.
Suggested Fix:
Add something like:
- £50 keeps the lights on at the Pan for a day.
- £150 helps maintain the pitch for a week.
- £250 supports player training sessions this summer.
As I write about Lewes FC a lot, I make it my duty to check on how the other Sussex clubs are doing—and other fan-owned clubs too. I posted a blog last year on the FC United of Manchester Facebook group which received 70 likes and 30 or so comments, all positive. Lucky if I get that in a year on the Lewes FC Facebook page! Well, it is frowned upon having an independent viewpoint at Lewes FC, hometown club of Lewes, a town with a rich history of independent thinking. Always found it so ironic and hypocritical that some of these Lewes FC diehards don’t even understand what Lewes is about. Hey ho. I digress.
So, diving back in with that off my chest, I signed up for membership—only £25. The main reason for this lay in the fact that I receive all of the membership emails, and I can see, and have lately delved into, how they run their ‘fan-owned’ football club compared to how we do. So I can tell you for a fact that the player and staff budgets for next season will be £309,000. I know that because, unlike the clandestine board operations at Lewes Football Club, everything is minuted and reported to all the owners. The last board meeting came in at 12 pages of information. FC United of Manchester celebrate fan ownership and the democracy thereof.
I believe the first proper board meeting of the new board of directors was a couple of weeks ago, and the email on Thursday 22/5 was presumably a product of that meeting.
I had very high hopes for the new board of directors, with four of the five new members clearly positioning themselves in the elections to drag the football club back into some semblance of proper fan ownership—something rather obvious that had escaped the board of directors for the previous 15 years.
To be honest, the email did not disappoint. I would hold FC United of Manchester up as a model fan-owned football club, and the email was very much like one of theirs would be if they were struggling for money. On the face of it, a relatively straightforward email, balancing the positivity of getting through what was a very tough season financially with the cold reality of the financial mess we are in.
Before I go further—note to the board: if you’re desperately seeking money, you do realise you’re asking people to donate to a business that still hasn’t published its 2023/24 accounts, as required.
You realise that pretty much anyone in a position to donate large sums of money will want to see the accounts first.
For the record, I have been saying for years that the club needs to come clean with the members, and also non-members, about the state of the club, and this leaves no doubt. The club needs to reach out to the membership for help, which, amazingly, it has never done before. It’s just been incredibly poor practice from the previous board, who, for 18 months while steering the club through tricky waters, talked about reaching out to the fans but did nothing of the sort. So presumably, this call to arms has come at the behest of the new board members, and well done to them.
Frankly, I don’t expect much. When you have a fan-owned club with a derisory 13% of members voting at board elections—and sometimes a dozen owners attending important meetings, the 2,700 or so members simply aren’t engaged with the football club. As I said in previous blogs, this will take time to turn around. Last Thursday’s email was an excellent start. It pulled down the facade of everything being rosy. Sure, if you attended some of the recent online meetings, the club has been upfront about the financial difficulties, but only real diehards are actually that interested or attended. However, if you’re interested enough to become a member of Lewes Football Club, you should be interested enough to know roughly what our finances are like—and be given an opportunity to help out when times are tough.
All this said, I was delighted to see just on Facebook so many ideas from the fans coming through. And if the club sticks to this current vein of bringing fans and owners in from the cold, this will merely grow and grow.
Lewes FC, as a community club for 15 years, has always just been about supposed ‘big, smart ideas.’ But look where they all ended up, with us in a financial straitjacket. Fan-owned clubs should be built by the fans. It should be an amalgamation of small ideas. I don’t doubt previous directors have read the email and some of the responses and just thought, “Well, that’s not going to do much, is it?”—and how wrong could they be. Because the proper building block of community ownership is to start getting the membership off their own backsides to raise money and participate in the running of the club. Ideas grow, some disappear, but at the end of the day, the result is that the club becomes one, it becomes a mass membership football club with a board of directors in place to direct the club and manage the day-to-day finances. Not to treat it like a personal fiefdom, keeping owners out in the cold, making big decisions that should be put to the owners. The direction of the club is supposed to be a democracy—not a private enterprise dressed up as fan ownership. It will take along time to rebuild trust with members and the local community, the generat gist of the email was very positive.
It wasn’t a perfect email, but it was a great start. My gripe would be that some of the presentation is an unwanted echo of the past. Treating members like children—“These costs help us upkeep the Dripping Pan, pay our utility bills, maintain the pitch and develop hospitality so the chips are ready, the beers are quick, and we’re match-fit to enjoy the football.” This bollocks presentation is infuriating and it is this ridiculous Lewes FC affectation of persistently presenting a feel good factor is not how you get people on board. Peope likr me read it and it is a turn off.
Apparently we go to the end of the season with a tiny surplus of cash. Well that’s no good it it, yoyu’ve got three months with no income and a huge wage bill. Talkibng us great stewardsip of the finances and then telling us, but up to a point is simply a turn off. Any plea for money and a reset needs truth not spin.
What happens next close season? No plan no foresight. Why would you chuck money at a club with no plan.
What we know is the ridiculous Lewes FC Holding Ltd proposal basically said it needs £150,000 to start off with—remarkably close to the £120,000 needed for the close season. I said at the time the plan was a cash-grabbing loony tune, and as usual, I got slagged off for it—but look at those figures. As ever, the bleedin’ obvious has left many heads being scratched.
So what would any other club do with the elephant in the room? At least two pubs in Lewes turn over more than Lewes FC. Do they have unnecessary bureaucratic staff—a COO, etc.? No. Do we have a horde of volunteers happy to step in and do their job better? Yes. Is the wage bill for those people reasonable? Absolutely not.
The club is vulnerable—financially a sitting duck—and it needs to divvy out redundancies. Nobody says it, but boy, loads of people are saying it. On the fanzine WhatsApp group, the general consensus is that the email—rather than being the usual happy-clappy old rubbish—needed to be more straightforward, and at the very least say: “We are looking at ways we can cut costs.” But nothing.
You’re in a situation where you’re begging for money, with no plan, no offer of better financial stewardship—just a flippant message, dressed up as if it’s all rather fun.
But all of this does not disguise the fact that there is now a pulse between the Lewes FC Board of Directors and the ownership for the first time, I may sound harsh with criticisms, but all I am saying is treat us like grown ups, stop making excuses, and let’s have a real debate about the mess we are in.
#Lewes FC #Football Blog #Non League Football #Football Story #Equality FC
The Rights of Fans. 