by Chris Harris
This is part 3 of my blogs on the ‘How Lewes FC Strangled the Life Out of Fan Ownership.’ The links to the four others are below.
Meanwhile, the women’s team quietly kept going, punching above their weight, maintaining their place in the third tier of the national league structure. Change, however, was on the horizon.
At the 2016/17 board elections, benefactors Charlie Dobres and Ed Ramsden were required to stand again for a third term. It was during this election that they presented a new essentially dual manifesto and business plan under the banner of Equality FC.
At its core, the initiative promised budget parity between the men’s and women’s teams. Lewes FC became, we believe, the first football club in the world to pay its men and women equally. There was cynicism at the outset, an article in The Guardian announcing the move drew a hundred comments, unprecedented for non-league coverage, most proclaiming it a gimmick. And to me, initially it was a gimmick, an effective and clever one, but one that, in fairness, matured into a genuine campaign of merit as serious figures joined the cause.
The original plan was simple: Equality FC would run for three years. If, by then, the club hadn’t raised sufficient external income, through sponsorships and other support, to make the initiative self-sustaining, it would be abandoned. The genius of the plan was that it thrust Lewes FC into the spotlight. Suddenly, we were one of the most talked about non league clubs in the country.
At the time, the men’s team operated on a budget of around £100,000. So, in principle, achieving parity for the women’s team would require Charlie and Ed to inject maybe an additional £100,000 annually. While it’s not my place to speculate on their personal wealth, it is relevant to note that, for several years prior, they had already been contributing around £100,000 each year just to keep the club afloat. In that context, the extra financial commitment may not have been an insurmountable burden. And given that Ed would eventually donate £700,000 a year, it’s fair to suggest that Equality FC was not solely a socially driven gesture, it was also a strategic move to attract sponsorship and external funding through a bold, values led brand.
But it begged the question: how was this bold new venture compatible with fan ownership? The stated aim had always been to become self-sustainable, either by reducing costs or increasing revenue. Yet this strategy was only going to dramatically increase expenditure. Yes, if the hoped-for sponsorship materialised, it could potentially propel the club toward genuine sustainability for the first time. But that was a big “if.” And the whole principle of fan ownership is that you don’t gamble. You build slowly, methodically, and organically. You don’t take shortcuts. You don’t stake the future of the club on speculative investment or glossy branding.
We got the publicity. But the cash never followed. Although Equality FC generated great coverage from the BBC, The Guardian, and others, outside interest was limited. Not particularly the fault of Lewes FC, women’s football simply had very low visibility at the time. That’s why the FA intervened and restructured the women’s pyramid, creating the Women’s Premier League and Championship, hoping to create a juggernaut to raise the game’s profile. Perversely with all the noise about Equality FC around the club, any remaining intent to push a fan ownership agenda virtually disappeared.
The club received a massive boost, one that fatally blew the idea that if the project wasn’t self sustainable within three years it would be pulled.
Rather spectacularly, The Lewes FC Women were invited into the newly formed FA Women’s Championship, placing the women’s team among the top 24 in the country. Curious as to why more prominent clubs had been overlooked, I contacted the FA’s Head of Women’s Football, who told me candidly: it was because of Equality FC.
A s we moved further and further away from a grassroots football club for the town of Lewes director Barry Collins resigned, citing, “I joined a football club and feel like I’m leaving a political party,” indicating discomfort with the club’s shift towards activism at the expense of its sporting focus.
I got slammed at the time for repeatedly saying that joining the FA Women’s Championship was totally unaffordable, and I received heavy criticism from pretty much everyone at the club for daring to raise concerns. It wasn’t that I was some great business guru, it was common sense that a small club would get swallowed up. Eventually I was proven right.
It was always a distasteful tactic, weaponised against me by the leadership and some of their cronies, announcing unworkable ideals, slagging me off when I deigned to criticise them, knowing full well it would be a few years before the ideas can be judged by results. Easy to slag off what can’t be proved for a few years.
I also argued that Lewes FC, who had played an influential role in the development of the women’s game, should be championing the creation of a women’s sport that didn’t simply mirror the men’s structure. At the time, women’s football was still in its embryonic stages, and blindly copying what is essentially the best league system in the world, which I always claimed was short-sighted.
Instead, I suggested a more innovative approach, akin to cricket’s newly launched The Hundred, which introduced fresh teams and a new format, and was hugely successful. But again, I faced enormous pushback from the club. I was told that, as money flooded into the women’s game, it would eventually trickle down into Lewes FC’s coffers.
It never did.
And to the club’s credit, when the party was over and reality hit, they finally acknowledged that their original assumptions, following the status quo, had been fundamentally flawed.
Despite the huge additional costs, Lewes FC Women held their own for several seasons in the Championship, regularly finishing mid-table. facing giants like Manchester United. Attendances steadily grew, and, relative to the town’s population, Lewes became the best-supported women’s club in the UK. But beneath this success, it became increasingly clear that the club’s narrative had shifted entirely. The original ideals of fan ownership had faded into the background, overtaken by the branding of Equality FC, which now defined the club’s identity. The founding principles had drifted into irrelevance.
The club’s expensive marketing looked to have been successful as attendances increased and the club branding suggested a club on the up.
It all looked so rosy, until you read the accounts. By now Ed Ramsden was bankrolling the club to the tune of £700,000 per year, an astronomical sum for a relatively small football club. Sponsorship simply did not arrive as expected. The board had assumed that exposure from the Women’s Championship would lead to an influx of sponsorship money. But although TV money and league revenue were welcome, they didn’t come close to covering the enormous cost of competing at that level. The club claimed it would eclipse Barcelona’s 140,000 to fund our forthcoming ‘dominance’ but brought in 1,500 newbies at vast marketing and bureaucratic cost, most of whom have already jacked in their membership.
In a sense, we became hoisted by our own petard, as the costs of players’ wages rose. To meet the costs of being competitive within the Women’s Championship, with equal playing budgets, the men’s team had to have a dramatically increased playing budget to achieve parity.
Another huge budget came into the picture. With delusions of grandeur, it was decided in order to facilitate the growth of the club, and realise the potential income from sponsorship, Lewes FC would need a large bureaucratic team to deal with, administrate and market the growth of the club.
As Lewes FC professionalised, a bloated bank of bureaucratic staff was hired to take on roles that could, and should, have been filled by skilled local volunteers. With this shift came an unhealthy culture of secrecy. While the club loudly extolled the virtues of fan ownership in its public messaging, the reality was very different: owners were kept in the dark. There were no meaningful updates, no transparency, just a stream of polished platitudes.
In stark contrast stands FC United of Manchester, a club that remains a beacon of how proper fan ownership should operate. Transparency is at the heart of their model. Just this week, I received an email outlining their latest board meeting. A few days later, a comprehensive 12-page set of minutes was released, detailing everything discussed and agreed upon. Members can even dial in and watch the meetings live. That’s what genuine accountability looks like.
At Lewes, however, fan engagement is largely symbolic. A full time Fan Engagement Officer was appointed, and remains in post, but the results speak for themselves. At the most recent board election hustings, only 1% of owners bothered to tune in. When the club held an emergency meeting to discuss a bailout plan, we calculated just 12 out of 2,700 members participated. The disconnect could not be clearer. A dictionary definition of broken and dysfunctional, we can all agree.
FC United’s website, geared toward fundraising and supporter involvement, is superb, practical, clear, and community-driven. In contrast, the Lewes FC website offers a distasteful barrage of self-congratulatory messaging and superficial publicity grabs, more anchored in narcissism than meaningful engagement or effective fundraising.
As FC United proudly states:
“One of the benefits of being a co-owner of FC United is that you can keep up to date with the decisions taken and issues discussed by the club’s elected board members within a few working days of each monthly board meeting taking place. It’s a level of transparency that very few football supporters around the world enjoy.”
And some. At Lewes, nothing remotely close to this exists. Board meetings and operational decisions are conducted like a clandestine operation. And this secrecy matters deeply. When owners are actively involved in the workings of the club, when they understand how it operates and why decisions are made, they are far more likely to care, contribute, and integrate themselves into the club’s machinery.
That’s how fan ownership should work. At Lewes, it simply didn’t.
Because the board of our fan owned club had by now forgotten we were a fan owned club, how convenient eh?
Instead, the plan was to turn Lewes FC into a global football brand. Members were bombarded with lofty strategies and more corporate claptrap that bore no resemblance to football, or to Lewes, as the club tried to exponentially grow its international membership.
The final nail to fan ownership as decreed in our constitution came when the CEO and board openly declared that Lewes FC was no longer a community club for Lewes, but a community club for the international community. It was the ultimate cop out, an unashamedly opportunistic rebranding of Lewes Community Football Club into something abstract and borderless, designed to justify chasing global cash and prestige. In doing so, they severed the club’s deep local roots. It became the footballing equivalent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all fans were equal, until the pigs took over and declared themselves more equal than others.
New catchphrases emerged as the anticipated wave of sponsors failed to appear. “We’re still talking to potential investors,” the club would say, but those conversations rarely led anywhere. The great Lewes FC Equality FC project was floundering, not because of a lack of effort, but due to a simple lack of interest and poor inexperienced and lacklustre management by the board and the vast array of administrative staff.
Ironically, despite having driven a stake through the heart of meaningful fan ownership, Lewes FC remained, on paper, a fan-owned club. Importantly, this in itself became a commercial obstacle. Potential sponsors were reluctant to invest significant sums in a club where they would have no say in how things were run. Meanwhile, although women’s football was rightly gaining prominence on the international stage, the domestic leagues remained sparsely attended and lacked mainstream visibility. These clubs weren’t delivering brand impact at scale, certainly not fast enough to justify major sponsorship deals. Lewes FC, chasing big investment under the Equality FC banner, found itself stuck. And all the while, the club was racking up unsustainable operating losses year after year.
Time was running out.
#Lewes FC #Fan Ownership #Football Governance #Gross Mismanagement #Narcissism
The Rights of Fans. 