For many outside Lewes FC and who don’t read right wing papers, you are probably unaware an article in the Telegraph, explaining the financial difficulties of Lewes FC’s pioneering Equality FC, is currently being weaponised by the usaul supects Mailonline and GBNews to form a misleading anti-woke narrative.
With Lewes FC, for non league football, going viral, this should be a golden ticket.
There’s no getting around it, Ben Rumsby’s piece in The Telegraph hit a few nerves. And in nearly every respect, he was right. Equality FC, or more accurately, the strategy around it, has left the club in a financially precarious state. That’s not a smear. It is the reality.
I swapped messages with the author today giving him some of the feedback, who correctly observed it was actually a chronology of proven facts. I did speak to him about the club prior to the article, but nothing that nobody does not know, but went off on a tangent, picking his brains about the Palace being kicked out of the Europa League. They won’t. I digress.
But while the substance of the article was fair game, the headline,“Woke Club Gone Broke” was cheap and cynical. It captured the tone of the times more than the truth of the story.
So far, the club’s public response has been underwhelming. I get that things may be happening behind the scenes, but what’s been said in public so far hasn’t landed. Take this quote:
“We have been open about our current financial shortcomings but fundamentally these are not because of Equality FC or equal pay. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”
Come on. Statements like that ring hollow when they deny the obvious fact that it was the poor budget management of Equality FC that led to our current situation, and offer nothing in return. No alternate theory. No data. Just vague gestures toward complexity. It reads like the kind of corporate flat denial we all get so pissed off with and know to ignore. What we’re left with is a lot of internal licking of wounds, when in fact. this is quite possibly the golden ticket.
Despite all the energy and budget spent trying to market the club over the years, the reality is we’ve mostly played to a polite audience of well meaning onlookers who were never fully bought in. Now, for the first time in a long while, people are paying attention, big attention. National media coverage. Public debate. Clicks. Arguments. Energy.
Any business would kill for this kind of attention. It’s a classic case of “no such thing as bad publicity.” And yet is this where we are, missing the moment, hiding from it?
What should happen now is bold and simple: a press release to every media outlet, titled Not Woke. Not Broke. A proper statement that this isn’t a story about a club collapsing under the weight of its ideals, but rather a small, independent football club under fire for trying to do the right thing.
Equality FC was never about ideology, it was about principle. About trying to elevate women’s sport. About correcting a structural imbalance that’s been ignored for too long. Of course, behind the scenes, there’s been plenty of eye rolling wokery. We’ve all seen it. But if you strip away the gimmicky press stunts, the vanity projects, the glossy nonsense, the idea itself is solid. And it’s not woke. It’s just fair.
We are not broke. That’s a myth. Yes, we’ve asked for help to cover a quiet patch in the accounts, and yes, there are hard months ahead, but we are not insolvent, and there’s no reason, with smarter budgeting and a leaner back office, that we can’t turn a profit next season for the first time in over 20 years.
So the “woke and broke” narrative? It’s easy to throw around, but just as easy to dismantle. The truth is, most organisations—especially in the commercial and media world—don’t share the politics of the Mail or GB News. And for many of them, this could be a chance to get behind something that matters. A club under attack not for failing, but for trying.
We now have a rare opportunity to recast ourselves from a slightly confused, semi-detached progressive football project into a proper underdog, a club with a real story. And frankly, it’s a narrative that the public might actually care about. This is surely such an amazing, once in a lifetime, opportunity to reach out for sponsors and investors to help build Equality FC
If the club is serious about moving forward, it does need to grow up a bit. Not abandon values, but mature them. Drop the bits that made us look pretentious and brittle. Keep the ones that matter, like Equality FC, which in its essence is a brilliant idea. Not a gimmick. Not marketing. Just a smart, forward thinking commitment to fairness in sport.
Recently, there have been rumblings of a new governance model or direction. If we’re not going to sell the Equality FC brand, and personally, I don’t think we should, then we need to reclaim and reframe it. Not as a PR stunt, but as a living, working example of what sport can be if people actually give a damn about women’s football.
Cut the fluff. Show the substance. The Equality FC label, battered and caricatured as it is, can evolve and go from strength to strength, standing for something powerful. Especially now. This attack from the right wing press? It should be a rallying cry, not just for Lewes, but for anyone sick of the culture wars, the smears, and the divisive populism that cheapens every debate.
We don’t need to apologise. We need to respond, with clarity, purpose, and maybe even a little swagger.
This is a rare moment. Don’t waste it.
#Lewes FC #Football Blog #Non League Football #Football Story #Equality FC
The Rights of Fans. 