By Chris Harris
Anyone who was at Leylands Park on Saturday (3/1/26) for the Burgess Hill vs Lewes game, and who’d been to Leylands Park before, couldn’t have failed to notice that this is a club on the up.
I hadn’t been for a few years. Back then, they’d just been relegated into the Isthmian 1st and the stadium, like the squad, was struggling. Walking through yesterday, the transformation is amazing. The pitch is now 3G, generating income for the club. It now has a massive and snazzy fan zone. The chairman, David Corney, by all reports a thoroughly decent man, has invested £1 million in the infrastructure and clearly creating a platform for growth.
More importantly, the average attendance between Lewes FC and Burgess Hill Town FC is nearly the same.
Go back three years and the crowds at Lewes FC were probably averaging nearly a 1,000, and Burgess Hill FC 300. Let’s examine why Lewes FC are in a doom loop and Burgess Hill FC on the rise.
It was funny walking around on Saturday, taking in their new fan zone and the new outside bar, Only With Love branded who of course were involved with us a few years ago, maybe another sign of our decline.
This new status quo hasn’t just appeared overnight. It’s been caused, hasn’t it? Not by luck, not by some sudden wave of local interest, but because the new chairman actually knows how to market his football club.
The people I spoke to, at the game yesterday, put the rise in attendances down to the club’s excellent targeted marketing campaign, where he has done what we are always incapable of doing: he has a non-league football club, and has marketed it as such.
The upshot is, in two years, the attendances have doubled, seemingly for no other reason than marketing a non-league football club properly to the local community.
The Contrast with Lewes, and the Cost of Misdirection
Whereas, unlike Burgess Hill, at Lewes FC, the target and the focus of the marketing has been Equality FC, 90% focused on the women’s team, and let’s not forget, a bureaucratic team to oversee it. The paradox is that the people, bombarded with marketing, new members driven to the club by the success of Lewes FC Women, are still receiving all the old Madame Marketing spiel, but the project, for now, is in tatters, the membership has deserted the sinking ship, 40% down in an alarming collapse. The club have been focusing on an aspect of the club in TERMINAL decline.
For the Lewes FC Women, the gates have haemorrhaged down 2- 300%.
In the meantime, the men’s attendances haven’t fared as badly. They’re probably going to be, by the end of the season, down from 900 to 700, which is still a very massive decline in an area of football that is traditionally on the rise.
The decline at Lewes FC is not subtle. It is visible in attendances, visible in finances, and visible in the mood around the club. It has been happening for long enough that nobody can claim surprise, and yet the leadership behaves as if the situation is either unavoidable or caused by everyone except themselves.
Help is in hand for the Lewes FC Women with new investors promised, mmm I wonder who that wil be? Apparently, has been on the cards for a while, so why the hell has the board not been on switching focus and halting the decline of er….our non league football team.
This is not an argument against women’s football. It is an argument against the basic failure of leadership to run a whole club properly, to build two strong parts of the same organisation, and to adjust strategy when the numbers and momentum clearly demand it.
Under the banner of Equality FC, you would expect a genuine 50/50 focus between the men’s side and the women’s side, with equal attention, equal energy, and equal strategic intent. What has actually happened is a lopsided obsession, closer to 90% of the focus in one area and a tokenistic afterthought for the other.
The Problem is There for Everyone to See
The most baffling part is that even when one part of the club has held up reasonably well, the leadership has refused to double down on it. In any functioning business, you identify what is still working and you invest in it, you grow it, you turn stability into momentum. At Lewes, the people overseeing the club seem incapable of doing this.
They have ignored the most obvious and practical route to improvement: increasing attendances through serious effort, proper marketing, and a relentless focus on getting people through the gates. It is not complicated, it is not mysterious, and it is not beyond the capacity of any non-league football club. The problem is not that it cannot be done, the problem is that the leadership has not bothered.
If Burgess Hill Town Football Club can focus on building its crowd and pushing its attendances upward through effort and outreach, then there is no serious reason Lewes FC cannot do the same. The difference is not some magic ingredient, or some unique local advantage, or some exceptional level of funding. The difference is simply that Burgess Hill have acted like a club that wants to grow, while Lewes have acted like a club that wants to be defended.
The end result is predictable and unavoidable: Burgess Hill look like a progressive club on the up, while Lewes continue to drift, decline, and rationalise their failures when they are just incompetent and have no strategic vision.
#Burgess Hill Town FC #Non League #Football Blog #Football #Isthmian Premier
The Rights of Fans. 