A Conversation with Oscar Wilde in Lewes
Oscar Wilde, ever the aesthete and lover of social movements, had intended to visit the early days of the suffragette campaign. But his time machine, always too theatrical for its own good, deposited him instead in Lewes, during a critical vote at a community football club. One that, to Wilde’s astonishment, had all the drama, delusion, and moral confusion of a West End farce.
What followed was, inevitably, a conversation with me.
Oscar Wilde: I’ve read the materials. Intriguing, but tell me, does Lewes FC actually possess a men’s team? The documents hardly mention them, if at all. Almost as if their existence were an unfortunate accident.
Me: Yes, they do. It’s quite relevant, especially if we want to talk about the club’s identity as a whole. The sole focus of the club leadership is the women, the men’s team, who bring in most of the matchday revenue and are the historical bedrock of the club, have been largely ignored. It’s a bit of a disgrace, really, Oscar, and may I speak earnestly, probably the reason we are where we are. The income into the club has pivoted from the women to the men, but the focus of the club leadership has remained intensely focused on the women. Doh!
Oscar: Ah, dual identities! How very Bunbury of them. But let’s discuss the vote. I’m told it’s non-binding? How perfectly Victorian, to ask everyone’s opinion and then ignore it. Is there even a point in voting?
Me: Morally, it’s critical. A strong “No” sends a message the board might choose to ignore, but potential investors won’t. Legally, any meaningful investor has to be told during negotiations if there’s organised member opposition. And most serious investors will walk away the moment they realise a significant slice of the ownership, especially as the hardcore, long-standing volunteers and Lewes members, don’t want them involved. And to be clear, this is what we need to do to save fan ownership.
Oscar: So you’re saying it doesn’t even need to be a majority?
Me: Exactly. Just a visible, vocal segment of the ownership standing firm can be enough to sour the deal. No credible investor wants to inherit hostility. They want clean entry, not confrontation. So no vote of owners voting against the investment is wasted.
Oscar: Ah, like arriving uninvited at a dinner party only to find the hosts sharpening their knives. Social suicide. Didn’t the fans already defeat a similar idea with the Mercury 13 affair? Or was that just a dress rehearsal?
Me: Not quite the same, Oscar. Although the board insists Mercury 13 walked away on their own terms, the truth is simpler: they saw the strength of opposition and buggered off. The membership made their feelings clear, and that mattered. Back then, it was a pitch to push us into the Premier League. This time, it’s the Championship.
Oscar: A demotion in ambition, but presumably not in price?
Me: Quite the opposite. The costs are still eye-watering, around £600,000 just for player wages, and at least £1 million per year to operate a Championship level a season under new licence agreements. And we’ve seen no credible plan for how to meet that. Not from the board. Not from the so called investors.
Oscar: So once again, we are promised champagne with no bottle in sight. Curious economics, investment from the same orchard that grows money on trees and unicorns in paddocks.
Me: You are so wise Oscar, and for the record I don’t believe it will happen.
Oscar: And the current squad, how do they feel about being replaced by someone richer and allegedly “better”?
Me: Funny you should ask. Last time, Murky13, they said the players were all for it. Then came the worst run of form in years, one point in twenty-four during the protracted negotiations that effectively led to relegation.
Oscar: Nothing like the thrill of being professionally undermined. One wonders if these investors are hiring or just auditioning themselves as managers of decline. But surely, the club is bankrupt? Teetering on a precipice? I do love a bit of melodrama. Surely you concede, the club is in financial peril?
Me: That’s the great cry of the moment. But the claim that revenue from owners, matchdays, and sponsorships cannot sustain the club is not just misleading, it’s factually untrue. It’s propaganda dressed as pragmatism.
Oscar: So it’s not reality, but rather a fright mask, used to justify a predetermined course?
Me: Exactly. This is textbook scaremongering. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the UK face similar challenges every year. They don’t immediately throw in the towel. They do one of two things:
- They restructure: cut costs, streamline, find new income sources. In our case, that means finally tapping into the wealth of local expertise and restoring the 3G pitch to its original function as a revenue-generating community asset.
- Or they sell up.
Oscar: And surely the former is the norm?
Me: Of course. Restructuring is the default in any competent operation. Selling is the last resort, the act of an organisation that has run out of options, or ideas, or both. To skip trying to proactively sort out a business before flogging bits off is just irresponsible.
Oscar: Then why are the board sprinting toward the second option?
Me: Because they’re enthusiasts, not professionals. They haven’t spent their careers running large-scale event or hospitality operations. They’ve never had to. They don’t really know what they are doing.
Oscar: But surely they could have surrounded themselves with those who do? This is a town that famously churns out eccentric but capable minds.
Me: They could have, but didn’t. The culture within the club remains steeped in entitlement. For years it lived off generous benefactors and short term donations. That mindset, the expectation that someone else will always pay the bill, still haunts the boardroom. It’s killed off innovation, ambition, and the entrepreneurial spark we so desperately need.
Oscar: Yet I’m assured the values of any incoming investors will be perfectly aligned with the club’s own.
Me: Another illusion. A central pillar of fan ownership is transparency, not just in spirit, but in structure. That means deals done with the members, not around them. Any investor willing to bypass those principles, and any board willing to let them, cannot, by definition, be aligned with our values.
Oscar: Then I must quote myself: “To lose one value may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose them all looks like carelessness.” A failure to act dressed up as strategy. I’ve seen this before. In politics, in publishing, and once in a particularly dreadful amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest. They forgot their lines and called it modernism.
So the vote itself. legal but immoral?
Me: Precisely. Our diy constitution was built for flexibility, not principle. Most serious fan-owned clubs would laugh this out of the room. Many have to achieve a 75% vote to sell off any key assets, here you need 0%
Oscar: And these Non-Disclosure Agreements the club insists upon—are they a curtain or a cage?
Me: The latter. In truth, NDAs aren’t standard for fan owned clubs. They’re not about protecting sensitive negotiations, they’re about avoiding scrutiny. A smokescreen.
Oscar: So secrecy parading as professionalism?
Me: Exactly. And here’s the irony: the last time the club flirted with selling a major asset, during the Mercury 13 debacle, there was no NDA. None. So this sudden insistence on confidentiality? It reeks of desperation, not due diligence.
Oscar: Curious. It seems the only thing transparent is their inconsistency
Me: The very first condition any ethical investor should meet is transparency. That should be the opening line, not the final plea. The moment you abandon openness, you’re telling the investor you’ll sell on their terms, not yours.. That’s not negotiation. That’s surrender from the off, it is the lowest form of negotiation tactic and indicates desperation.
Oscar: Gosh, they seem to be a very amateur lot.
Me: Indeed. Most recently, they spent an extraordinary amount of time and money pursuing a Holding Ltd restructure, only to be told, right at the finish line, that it was illegal. Can you believe that, Oscar?
Oscar: Illegal after the fact? How marvellously efficient. It’s as if they boarded a train without checking whether the tracks existed.
Me: It wasn’t just incompetent, it was expensive incompetence in both time and resources. Of course, no one has been held accountable.
Oscar: So they fumbled a restructuring, misread their own constitution, and now wish to sell the club’s future for want of a better idea?
Me: That’s the long and short of it. And now we’re meant to trust the same people to navigate a complex investor partnership. It’s like asking someone who crashed a bicycle to pilot a passenger jet.
Oscar: Couldn’t you simply sell the Equality FC brand and start a new women’s team? Seems a rather neat solution.
Me: Absolutely. In fact, it’s the most logical option. Equality FC has far more market value than the club realises. Selling just the brand, strategically, with the right partners, could generate serious income. That money could then fund a new, community rooted women’s structure under Lewes FC’s umbrella.
Oscar: So the legacy is preserved, the women’s game flourishes, and the club remains fan-owned?
Me: Precisely. It’s a win–win–win. For Lewes FC, for Lewes FC Women, and for the long-term sustainability of our values. But such a plan requires vision, competence, and courage. Sadly, it’s beyond the current leadership’s comprehension to even attempt it.
Oscar: So instead of playing chess, they’ve opted for flipping the board. How very uninspired.
Oscar: The very definition of being insincere—which, as I once said, is saying things you don’t mean. Or worse, mean things you don’t say. So why are people voting for it?
Oscar: But if the facts are so clearly against it, why are so many people still supporting the proposal?
Me: Because the presentation was pitiful, yet persuasive in the way only desperate narratives can be. It was emotionally manipulative, intellectually barren, and completely devoid of serious alternatives. But many owners, quite naturally, trust what they’re told. Why wouldn’t they? They care about the club. They want to believe the board has a plan.
Oscar: And instead, they’re sold a pamphlet of panic dressed as a blueprint?
Me: Exactly. The pitch was a sleight of hand, framing a sell off as the only option. But it’s misleading. Worse, it betrays the founding principles of fan ownership: transparency, accountability, and collective decision making. This deal sidesteps all of those. It’s not just bad strategy it’s unconstitutional in spirit.
Oscar: Then it’s not governance, it’s gaslighting. And I say this as someone who appreciates a little theatre, but even I draw the line at illusion masquerading as democracy. So now, you have a choice between drift and ruin and dignity and hard work. Or, to borrow from a lesser playwright: to sell or not to sell, that is the question.
Me: Exactly. And if we’re serious about keeping our values, real fan ownership, real community football, then the answer must be a clear and unequivocal “No.”
Oscar: A vote not just against selling, but for integrity.
Me: Quite. And next time, Oscar, if you’re aiming for the early 20th century, try typing Suffragette, Pankhurst, and racecourse into your time machine’s search console. Might land you closer to where you meant to go.
Oscar: Ah yes, my apologies. I always did have trouble with the finer points of machinery. But moral machinery? That, I understand.
The players:
Oscar-Sir GPT Chat
Me- Chris Harris
The Rights of Fans. 