by Chris Harris
This is part 4 of my blogs on the ‘How Lewes FC Strangled the Life Out of Fan Ownership.’ The links to the four others are below.
The Death of Fan Ownership at Lewes FC. The Story. Part 4, Mercury 13 and the Stale Whiff of Decline
After 12 years on the board, Ramsden stepped down, indicating he was no longer willing to underwrite the club’s finances. Fair enough, he had invested significantly and generously. But the grand international membership vision had failed. The membership drive fizzled out. The money dried up. The dream began to collapse. For the record Ramsden left a generous legacy fund the future directors squandered.
In desperation, the club tried to cobble together a deal with Mercury 13, a US based women’s football investment firm, thankfully for them they now own the Bristol City Women and dodged the Lewes FC bullet. That decision marked the beginning of the end of the Equality FC global brand, it was also where the town began to fight back.
As the years went by, the hard-working, locally rooted directors who had helped shape Lewes FC and strived towards self-sustained fan ownership gradually left the board. In their place came a new breed of directors, individuals who, frankly, had no business being anywhere near a fan-owned football club. At Lewes, anyone can stand for the board if they’re a member, and with the arrival of 1,700 new international members, many drawn in by the Equality FC campaign, came a wave of candidates who had no real connection to Lewes, to the club, or to the principles of fan ownership.
There was nothing wrong with members from abroad wanted to stand for the board based on promoting Equality FC, they had signed up based on Equality FC and not fan ownership. The fault lay with the previous directors’ lack of strategic vision.
Their focus wasn’t on the town, the team, or non-league football. They were interested in pushing a socially driven agenda aligned with Equality FC, which bore little resemblance to the founding ideals of a community run club. Many of them had never even been to a match, yet were regularly voted onto the board by a like minded membership who also had little real world connection to the club.
The board’s decisions had left the club trapped in a confused and unsustainable model, marked by a mixed identity, conflicting aims, and a fragmented membership. It was no longer clear who the club was for, what it stood for, or how it planned to survive.
At one point, we even had a 23-year-old elected board member whose primary qualification was having written a dissertation on women’s football and hadn’t even been to watch a match. Even more bizarrely, from the point of view of Lewes Community FC some directors had literally never set foot in the Dripping Pan. Can you believe that? And worse, no one at the club seemed to raise an eyebrow.
Even the most loyal supporters of the club’s leadership would quietly admit that too many directors were using the role to augment their CV, something aspirational, a way to burnish their progressive credentials. We had reached a low point. Reading the manifestos of prospective directors felt like reading fairy tales, idealistic nonsense from people utterly unaware that the club was in financial trouble. They praised how “well-run” the club was, despite all evidence to the contrary. Never mentioned the town, of course, well they wouldn’t, the club had rammed Equality FC down their throats.
The sad thing is, Equality FC could have become a landmark initiative, still potentially could, an internationally overseen project embedded within a thriving fan owned structure. Done properly, Lewes could have been the best and most successful fan owned football club in Britain. All the ingredients were there. But the fatal flaw was that the board had failed, well before launching Equality FC, to establish a properly functioning fan-owned club in the first place. There was no solid foundation, no effective organisation, just a struggling club with poor governance. Instead of fixing that, they layered another ambitious but equally mismanaged project on top of it, dramatically increasing costs without a plan. It was a textbook case of dreadful business planning and wishful thinking, driven by directors with no foresight and no coherent long-term strategy—just blind optimism and crossed fingers.
The simple problem, never acknowledged, was they didn’t have a strategy for how to operationalise the new global Equality FC brand, or how they were going to keep fan ownership meaningful and functional at a global level. People were encouraged to sign up, but there was no follow-up—no plan to get them engaged or committed as active participants in the club. Hence the recent announcement a jaw dropping 40% have quit recently.
All of the club’s brand strategy to attract new members relied on gloss and glitz, focused almost entirely on high-profile social change campaigns centred around the women’s first team. There was no effort to get global owners interested in the football club itself, in the town, or in what fan ownership means to local supporters and shareholders.
Still the club pumped out the vacuous, all is fine and aren’t we groovy?
But I knew it was falling apart. As someone who writes for the fanzine, I had, and still have, numerous anonymous contacts within the club. They were telling me things that didn’t match the public messaging. The truth was being quietly buried under the weight of PR.
At the start of the 2023–24 season, true to form, Lewes FC chose the opening moments of the campaign to announce they were seeking external investment. The stated aim? To “improve standards” and push for promotion to the Women’s Premiership.
The Mercury 13 Debacle
It was one of the most bizarre episodes I’ve witnessed at the club. At the start of the 2023/4 season the club announced a potential partnership investment of £5 million from Mercury 13.
Telegraph.co.uk ‘The proposed investment between Lewes FC and Mercury 13 was a significant and contentious chapter in the club’s recent history. Mercury 13, an investment group aiming to inject $100 million into women’s football globally, entered into exclusive negotiations with Lewes FC in August 2023. Their proposal involved acquiring a 51% stake in Lewes FC Women Ltd, which would have marked a departure from the club’s 100% fan-owned model.’
The Mercury 13 deal promised a £5 million injection—but at a steep cost: selling off a majority share of Lewes FC Women and effectively ending the club’s fan ownership. In an attempt to soften the blow, the board tried to rebrand Equality FC as Equity FC, hoping no one would notice the shift in principle. They misjudged the supporters badly.
In an effort to justify what was, in all but name, the dismantling of fan ownership, the board insisted it wasn’t a takeover. But it was. Mercury 13 were introduced as the game-changers, the group who would “raise the bar” for the women’s team.
And what did that imply? That they’d somehow transform our current players into world-beaters overnight, or, more likely, that they’d replace them. The message was loud and clear: our existing squad wasn’t good enough.
The result? A disastrous start to the season, with just one point from a possible 24. Though performances improved later on, clearly when the drawn out takeover failed, the early damage was irreversible. We were relegated. You could not write such incompetence.
This was a direct result of the Board’s out of touch decision making. Astonishingly, after months of negotiation and aggressively pushing to get the deal over the line, the board announced they were walking away, claiming that “the shared values at the start of talks no longer aligned.” The club had become a laughing stock.
During the drawn out debacle, local members, those who actually show up, week in and week out—finally said enough was enough. After years of relative silence and minimal opposition, the club was met with a wave of defiance. A powerful groundswell formed within the fanbase, and for the first time in a long while, Lewes FC learned that it couldn’t just play God with our football club.
The backlash was swift and resolute. Normally large promises of cash injections into fan owned clubs are voted through on a landslide. The board, used to quiet compliance, suddenly had to reckon with an engaged, passionate membership. And that, I believe, is the real reason the deal collapsed. Lewesians had rediscovered our revolutionary spirit—and we made the club accountable.
Of course, if this had happened at FC United of Manchester, the board would’ve published a full, transparent account detailing exactly what happened, and precisely why the deal fell through. At Lewes, we’ve had nothing of the sort. Eighteen months on, all we’ve received is a single, opaque press release.
Even if the Board had backed out with the supposed intention of preserving fan ownership, out of the goodness of their hearts, they couldn’t manage to do it in a way that actually respected the fan owners. No clear explanation, no accountability. The irony is staggering.
Equality FC had lost its fizz. A new board elected in 2024 had to pick up the pieces and keep the show on the road. They managed, but not without again attempting to undermine fan ownership.
This time, the proposal came in the form of a new entity: Lewes FC Holdings Ltd. It was designed to install an unelected, non-executive board to steer the club’s direction, while the elected board, ostensibly the voice of the fans, would be reduced to a rubber-stamping body. For a club founded on democratic ownership, it would have been a disaster.
The plan was cynically packaged as a governance reorganisation. We were told there was a wave of people eager to volunteer their time to support Lewes FC, and that the club would set up a series of volunteer subcommittees to generate ideas and oversee various aspects of club life. That part, on the face of it, actually aligned with suggestions long made in my fanzine—it looked promising.
But then came the catch.
These volunteer committees wouldn’t report to the elected board or the fanbase, they’d answer to a new executive board composed of so-called “professionals.” And who were these professionals? As it turns out, they were to be the existing unelected full-time members of the club’s bureaucracy. Whether they truly qualify as professionals in the field of football club management is highly debatable, but they were unelected. Anyway, par for the course they were never set up anyway.
The FSA and the Financial Conduct Authority intervened. What a joke, the club was basically told the scheme was illegal. The plan was pulled. That was earlier this year.
But truth be told, it was already proving to be a disaster.
Having announced their goal to raise £1.5 million, the board proceeded to value the club at an utterly laughable £7.5 million, want a bigger laugh? This was after their original valuation of £10 million! For perspective, Wrexham, a club with significantly higher profile and infrastructure, had sold for just £2 million a couple of years earlier. It was comedy gold from the start.
As the board seemed to make the plan up on a daily basis, during their so-called consultation, it quickly became clear they had no real idea what they were doing. The chaos only deepened. When the proposal was eventually put to the members, the result was farcical: in reality, only around £40,000 to £50,000 was actually committed—miles short of the £1.5 million target.
And then, hilariously, having sold the scheme as a way to bring members “closer to the club” through investment, the board turned around and said, on the advice of the FSA and FCA, that anyone who invested would actually need to curtail their membership rights. In a stunning twist of logic, they declared this was acceptable because, in their opinion, the fan ownership model wasn’t working particularly well anyway.
It became clear that both the FCA and the FSA had warned the club that, under its own rules, it could not sell additional shares to existing members. The shares in this new scheme could only legally be offered to non-members. This wasn’t just a minor oversight, it was a case of breathtaking incompetence.
To launch an investment scheme without first checking whether the core premise was even legal is staggering. It exposed a total failure of due diligence at the most basic level. How can any board expect to raise £1.5 million when they haven’t even verified whether their plan complies with fundamental regulatory requirements?
And there, folks, is the crux of the problem.
Twelve years ago, this would never have happened. Back then, Lewes Football Club had diligent, competent directors—people who would never have backed a scheme without first verifying whether it was even legally viable. Fast forward to now, and we’ve ended up with a board of directors, and a COO, pushing an illegal scheme that would have been disastrous for the club even if it had been lawful.
This is the inevitable result of breaking down proper democratic processes. It’s what happens when you sideline and alienate the very people who once gave so much to the club, people who, had they been respected and included, would still be happily helping to run Lewes FC to a high standard.
Out of control, bad actors involved and practically bust, the outlook could not have been grimmer. Fan ownership had failed magnificently through incompetent directors and others involved in the leadership of the Equality FC 7-year period, who should never have been near a fan-owned club. Run so badly, incapable of coming clean to the owners, a group of people now with no real power or say in how the club was run. Such is the mess one couldn’t even work out whether Equality FC ruined Lewes FC Community Club or vice versa.
#Lewes FC #Fan Ownership #Football Governance #Gross Mismanagement #Narcissism
The Rights of Fans. 