by Chris Harris
This is the first in a series highlighting the comedic goings on (gags!) at Lewes FC.
Only Lewes Football Club could make a complete hash of launching a 140th anniversary replica kit.
Non league football club; are amateur concerns and fuck ups are to be routinely expected, the problem with Lewes FC is these become amplified by the self-assuredness, the arrogance of our leadership, the fact we pay huge wages to non footballing staff, a COO etc to oversee things, we have branding machine that purports us to be something we clearly are not. It is a mesmerising mess of non-league kerfuffle.
Issuing a 140th-anniversary replica kit is a nice thing to do, though, being Lewes, everything has to be different, so a dull one without a club logo has been designed when a more impactful one would have been more impactful and respectful, but missing the point is customary at the club. Still, the leadership until recently seemed, whilst chasing international members to be based in ahem….Lewes, so forgetting a logo is maybe understandable, we are told we are ‘disruptors’ after all, another piece of branding fit for the toilet.
With the club in deep financial problems you’d think there might be more pressing issues to concentrate on than heavily promoting a shirt, or has the new investment fallen through and is the strategy to sell shirts around the world, remember like we were going to do with membership, which, of course, disastrously failed?
But I guess when you believe in the homegrown narcissistic deception that Lewes FC are some sleeping giant just waiting to be discovered, like a shit pub band hoping EMI will come knocking for their services, anything is possible, even though it clearly is not.
Anyway. The kit came out, I believe, a few weeks ago. It is a very nice kit. I presume maybe it sold a load at a game and Lewes FC decided: hang on, there’s income potential here. And so the marketing department went full speed ahead, which is generally never going to end well.
And again, it didn’t.
Because it wasn’t just that a nice thing like a shirt launch had to be turned into a publicity grab. It was the way the whole thing mirrored the decline, the institutional rot and incompetencyat the heart of Lewes Football Club.
The “Members First” Self-Congratulation
So firstly, a week or so ago, we had the big launch where the club embarrassed itself by saying, out of the sheer decency of their heart, they were going to allow the members to buy a shirt before, wait for it, it’s made available to the rest of the world in an AI-generated monologue.
Quite why whoever wrote that and whoever signed of on it didn’t realise it was embarrassing, I don’t know and will baffle marketing students for generations to come, although maybe they realised: well, no one’s going to read it anyway because no one’s actually interested in Lewes Football Club anymore. The paradoxes these days keep racking up.
Therein lies the continued problem of failed leadership at the club, still thinking we’re of interest to anyone, when simply we’re not.
“Community” Suddenly Matters (After Everyone Else Spat It Out)
So, at Equality FC, what do we do? What do we see on social media?
We see the women’s team members staged around Lewes for stylised photo shots, using the town as a conduit to promote the “local community ethics” of Lewes Football Club.
Screeching brakes, really, because what we all know is Lewes FC have only started taking an interest in the town because basically everyone else has spat it out, the ’international community’ that was supposedly queuing up desperate for some of the action. The club pimped itself for international members: a few joined, then left just as quickly. Now the leadership have had to work out, oh dear, maybe our community football club should actually be marketed within the community, not what we had in mind, using our beautiful town to promote the club, but desperate times, desperate measures, out you go girls.
Well done. We’ve all been saying that for years, and great the leadership recognise we are “part of the town”. Like nobody has a memory of the leadership’s behaviour over the last few years.
And for some reason, no photographs of the men around town with a kit. You can draw your own conclusions, but it’s a very stereotypical, almost sexist, state of affairs when the club’s social output is pimping out pretty young ladies wearing a kit and nowhere to be seen are the men.
I actually find that quite disturbing.
The Plymouth Argyle Farce
Being Lewes FC, and the childishness that is inherent within the leadership and #The Second Coming? this constant need for affirmation and publicity, what better time to wear the new mainly black kit than against Plymouth Argyle in a Mickey Mouse Cup quarter-final.
Now, I thought everyone knew Plymouth Argyle famously wear a relatively dark green strip. Maybe I should say: I went to Home Park when I was on holiday in the West Country, which always stays with me because Bruce Grobbelaar was in goal for them and he was showing off his fame with all his antics and was responsible for a 1–0 home defeat when his narcissism ran away with him and his showing off caused the goal, back firing, something we know all too well at Lewes FC
I digress.
So: what a great opportunity, in front of a whopping 200 paying customers, to show off our new statement kit. As if absolutely anybody cares or is interested.
Of course, as everyone knows, a dark green kit turns blackish either through sweat or wet. And the upshot was that, owing to the incompetence of Lewes FC, the brand-new kit had to be replaced at half-time with our traditional kit, as the two teams’ strips looked too similar. But Lewes FC don’t feel humiliation, how can we when we are so perfect?
This would have been seen as a sad thing to happen by the leadership, like a kid desperate to wear his favourite band’s tour t-shirt asap, and at the end of the day, how tragic: we’re going to have to do what we’ve been doing for 140 years and wear our normal Lewes FC home kit at home.
But that’s the thinking at Lewes FC now.
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The Rights of Fans. 