A long goodbye with love as Lewes FC enters a different era
What I Want to Communicate to Local People About Lewes Football Club
A long goodbye with love as Lewes FC enters a different era.
Pete Bull
Lewes FC has built one of the most powerful stories in non-league football: supporter ownership, Equality FC, women’s football, community benefit, and the idea that a small club can do things differently.
And for a while, that story mattered enormously. It drew people in, including myself. It changed how people talked about football. It gave supporters, players, volunteers and owners a way of imagining that a football club could stand for something larger than results, wages, league position and survival.
I do not want to sneer at that. I want Lewes FC to win at everything, always. I do not want to dismiss the work that went into the club’s campaigns around equality, women’s football and supporter ownership, because those things had force. They brought people to the club who might otherwise never have come near it.
I was one of them. I stopped playing football when I was thirteen, but came back because a club appeared to be saying: we’re different, we’re inclusive, this is a place where other kinds of people might belong.
As an autistic ADHD-er, that mattered a lot. The exterior of the club — the language, the values, and the apparent openness — made it possible for me to approach and volunteer.
But I do wonder whether the Equality FC era is now coming to an end, maybe?
Not because people have stopped caring about Lewes Football Club. They plainly have not. People still give money, volunteer, organise teams, coach children, run sessions, raise funds, maintain facilities, serve on committees, and keep the club alive in a million mostly unseen ways.
But I am less sure now how many people believe the public story in the way they once did. And I am less sure how many people experience Lewes Football Club as a serious Community Benefit Society, rather than as a football club with a powerful brand, a lot of goodwill, and a community around it that keeps being asked to carry far more than it should.
That distinction matters.
The question for me is not whether Lewes FC is legally a Community Benefit Society. It is. The question is whether the CBS model is still working as a meaningful form of community ownership, or whether it has become a container for a story the operating reality can no longer sustain.
Because a CBS is not made real simply by having community shares, board elections, good values and the right language. It is made real by the ordinary things that allow community ownership to function: clear money flows, proper facilities planning, transparent decision-making, supported volunteers, safeguarding systems, owner scrutiny, and real routes for community football to shape the club.
If the story is no longer strong enough to carry the reality, then the task is not to pretend harder. It is to ask what should be protected as the next version of the club emerges.
For me, the answer is clear. Community football must be protected. The 3G must be protected. The Dripping Pan must be properly maintained. Safeguarding, administration and coaching support must be resourced. Parents need clear routes when things go wrong. Volunteers need support and reasonable structures around them.
The wonderful people who have built Lewes Football Foundation, the Supporters Club, Lewes FC Juniors, Lewes FC Vets, Walking Football, the Women’s Vets and Lewes FC Select should not be treated as atmosphere around the “real” football club.
They are a significant part of the real football club.
This piece of writing is not a leaving rant. It is a marker in the sand and it is a goodbye with love. It is an attempt to say what I think local people, community owners, parents, players and volunteers need to understand before the next version of Lewes FC is built.
The issue is not whether Lewes FC once embodied some of its values. It did.
The issue is what remains when the story that is being told is no longer enough.
The gap between story and structure
The public story of Lewes FC is values-led, while the accounts tell a more fragile story.
The 2023/24 audited group accounts contained a formal “material uncertainty related to going concern” note. The same accounts show a consolidated group loss of £383,814, and record significant donations from individuals to assist cash flow.
The draft 2024/25 accounts sharpen the point. The draft Lewes 2000 FC Limited accounts show turnover falling, donations falling sharply, and the football company still recording a loss of £365,085. Net liabilities increase from £33,748 in 2024 to £398,833 in 2025.
I am not raising this to attack anyone. Football at our level is expensive and running a football club is hard. People have put in massive sums of money, time and energy to keep the club alive. Directors are volunteers too, not villains. I firmly believe that many people currently involved are acting in good faith and doing their best with the information, time and resources they have.
My concern is definitely not individual bad faith.
I am grateful to people who have put money in when the club needed it. Without that, there may not have been a club to argue about. But gratitude cannot be the same as clarity, and financial rescue cannot be allowed to substitute indefinitely for transparent community governance.
My concern is whether the club has the practical structures it now needs.
By structures, I do not mean something abstract. I mean the ordinary systems that make a community club work: clear agreements, transparent money flows, proper facilities planning, safeguarding processes, coach support, parent communication, volunteer protection, community representation, and enough paid or properly supported labour to stop everything depending on goodwill and crisis management.
Because without those things, values become fragile. They depend on whoever happens to be available, generous, resilient or well-connected at the time.
Financial influence has shaped that culture, but I do not think it is enough to make this only a story about one or two individuals. Ramsden and Dobres mattered. Trevor Wells has mattered too. More generally, once a club depends on a small number of people repeatedly putting significant money in, budget, risk and accountability all start to mean something different. The discipline that ordinary community ownership would require can drift, not necessarily because people are acting badly, but because someone may be able to cover the gap.
If a club survives because a small number of people repeatedly put in large sums of money, those people inevitably have influence, whether formal or informal. It is not necessarily corrupt. It may be what keeps the doors open or the lights on.
It is just not the same as a straightforward democratic community model.
And that is why owners and local people need clearer answers now.
Lewes FC has been exploring external investment into Lewes FC Women, including the possible sale of a majority stake. That may be necessary. It may be the only route available. But if the women’s side of the club is going to be used to realise value, then local people need to understand what is being protected in return.
- Is the Community Benefit Society being strengthened, or is it becoming the values-led wrapper around a football operation shaped by other forces?
- Is the 3G replacement fund protected?
- How will the Dripping Pan be maintained as the income-generating home of the club?
- How does money actually move between Lewes FC, Lewes Community Football Club Limited, Lewes 2000 FC Limited, Lewes FC Women, Lewes Football Foundation and the community teams?
- What terms attach to benefactor or investment-linked money?
- Who really has power when the club is under financial pressure?
These are not hostile questions. They are the kind of questions that a serious community-owned club should welcome.
Truth has to matter more than branding.
What community football actually means
One of the difficulties in writing about Lewes FC is that people use the name to mean different things.
For many people, Lewes FC means the Dripping Pan, the Men’s First Team, Lewes FC Women, and maybe the Under-18 boys. But around the club there is also this whole community-football world that many supporters probably do not fully see.
By community football, I mean the football affiliated with Lewes FC through the FA that is not the Men’s First Team, the Under-18 boys or Lewes FC Women. So that means Lewes FC Juniors, Lewes FC Vets, Lewes FC Walking Football, Lewes FC Women’s Vets, Lewes FC Select, and the other community teams playing in Lewes FC shirts. That is over 500 players, and thousands of supporters, parents, family members and local people connected to them.
These teams all have their own histories, committees, volunteers, bank accounts, cultures and practical problems. But to the outside world they are often collapsed into one thing: Lewes FC.
Lewes Football Foundation sits in the middle of all this. It is a CIC, run by committed volunteer directors, with the formal arrangement around community football and the 3G. The club handed over administration of the 3G bookings, but not site management, to that separate community structure, whilst granting local players a regular number of tickets and access to cheaper or free ownerships, as well as occasional use of the Dripping Pan during the ‘golden window’ when the pitch is waiting for maintenance post-season.
The community teams create participation, identity and local legitimacy. They also generate and handle not insignificant money. My estimate is that community football income across the various teams is now well over £150,000 a year, probably somewhere in the region of £160,000 to £170,000 or more, once you add together membership fees, subs and fundraising activity.
But that does not mean £160,000 to £170,000 flows straight into Lewes FC. It does not. Most of that money is spent by the community teams themselves on the ordinary costs of running football: pitch hire, leagues, referees, kit, equipment, tours, admin, events, welfare, insurance, holding reserves and all the other stuff that keeps teams going.
It is also worth saying that community football does not simply keep money to itself. Lewes FC Vets, for example, has regularly donated much of its annual reserve to Friends of the 3G, a fund that offers grants to both Lewes Football Foundation and Lewes FC to improve facilities at the 3G. So the picture is not one of money flowing in a single direction. It is more complicated than that.
The amount returning to the club through the 3G licence fee is much smaller, likely under £50,000. So the point is not that Lewes FC has deliberately built some kind of extractive mechanism to take money from community football.
The point is that community football is large, economically meaningful, operationally demanding and emotionally important, but the structure around it is still unclear to most and under-resourced. The relationship between the club, the Foundation, the 3G and the teams does not yet create enough capacity to support community football properly.
So when people talk about Lewes FC, they need to understand that there are meaningful distinctions inside the name. There is the public story. There is the senior football operation. Then there is the community-owned parent, the Foundation, the community teams, the volunteers, the 3G, the parents, the players and the coaches.
They overlap.
But they are not the same.
And power and responsibility are not always where people assume they are.
What must be protected
I founded Lewes FC Vets in 2016. It may have looked as if I was just starting a football session: older players, Friday nights, a 3G pitch, a way back into the game for people who had drifted away from it.
But I was also interested in what happens when relationships are placed before ability, and whether football could become a place where people could look after themselves through the joy of playing together.
Lewes FC Vets has worked because it lowered the threshold for people to return. It put relationships before performance. Not perfectly, because nothing is perfect, but intentionally.
It is now in good shape: around 110 members, a committee of about 17, and more than 30 volunteers doing serious work across fixtures, welfare, finance, admin, comms, coaching, organising, tours and hospitality. It turns over roughly £45,000 to £50,000 a year and provides thousands of football opportunities.
The wider community football work has also become more serious. With others, I helped found Lewes Football Foundation in September 2024. Community income is now collected more reliably through Spond. A booking system for the 3G exists. Juniors fixtures have moved onto proper pitches at Priory School fields. The Pan Siro festival has become a regular festival of football at the Dripping Pan. Kit arrangements with Intersport Lewes have been rebuilt. At the 3G, there are now container changing rooms, storage containers, two basic but proper toilets with hot running water, running water on site, a gate between Priory School fields and the 3G, and new signage from the car park down to the pitch.
So the point is simple really. The community football side of Lewes FC has built real infrastructure, often with very little practical or financial support from the main club.
Not slogans.
Not just goodwill.
Actual things.
And those things now need protecting and developing.
A real community club has to resource three things properly.
The first is facilities and money.
The 3G is not a side asset. It is the base of football participation in the town because of how much football can be played on it. It supports Juniors, Vets, walking football, women’s vets, girls’ football, school use, community sessions and, when needed, senior football contingency.
But the long-term replacement plan for the 3G is still not clear enough. If there is a proper sinking fund, the club should say how much is in it, where it sits, what restrictions apply, and when it will be used. If there is not, the club should say so and explain how the gap will be closed.
The wider facility question matters too. The 3G is now competing, in practical terms, with places like Ringmer, Newhaven and Saltdean, where players have proper changing facilities, showers, toilets plumbed into the drains, and somewhere to gather afterwards. Lewes cannot build community football on a surface alone.
Community football cannot be built on optimism about a pitch that may not be properly funded for renewal, or on a facility that is not being developed realistically enough to meet the needs of the people using it.
And the Dripping Pan matters too. It is the visible home of the club. It is the place where the public story is staged. And it is also one of the engines that has to produce income across the season: bar income, hospitality, matchday spend, sponsorship, commercial relationships and supporter experience.
But when I began looking properly at facilities in 2025, the Pan did not look like a ground being managed through a settled long-term plan. It looked like a place being kept going by goodwill, improvisation, inherited knowledge, donated materials, volunteer labour and people quietly making things work because they cared.
That does not mean nothing was being done — a lot was being done! But too much of it depended on informal knowledge and patching things together.
I have also found some of the talk about “developing” the Dripping Pan strangely detached from the reality of the site. This is not a blank piece of land waiting for ambition. It sits inside the South Downs National Park, in full view of Lewes Castle, with all the planning sensitivity that implies. The lease also sits within the Mountfield Road Pleasure Grounds Trust, currently held through Lewes District Council and, hopefully in time, moving to Lewes Town Council. All of that significantly restricts what the ground can realistically become.
Any serious conversation about the future of the Dripping Pan has to start from those constraints. It needs realism before romance. The ground matters enormously, but it cannot just be imagined into becoming something it is not.
A football club cannot live on story alone. It needs water pressure, drains, safe electrics, functioning showers, clean toilets, efficient bar flow, sensible storage, maintained roofs, trained people, proper documentation and a plan.
One contradiction has always stayed with me: we could raise huge sums through Who Gives a Crap to support toilet-building in Africa, while female community players at Equality FC were still changing tampons in portaloos at our own 3G.
Values are not only proven by campaigns.
They are proven by plumbing.
The second thing a real community club has to resource is safeguarding, administration and governance.
Community football is not just teams playing in Lewes FC shirts. It involves children, parents, coaches, team managers, volunteers, selection decisions, exclusions, conflicts, complaints, training needs, welfare concerns and safeguarding responsibilities. And that cannot be held properly by volunteer goodwill alone.
A club like Lewes should have clear structures for coach support, safeguarding, parent mediation, inclusion, communication, escalation and training, outside the personal volunteering relationships that currently carry this load within the community teams. Coaches should know what is expected of them and be supported to develop. Parents should know where to go when something goes wrong. Volunteers should not have to invent systems under pressure.
Community football should not depend on whichever volunteer happens to be willing, available and emotionally able to carry a problem that week.
There is a real argument that Lewes FC should fund some form of community support worker: someone who can support Lewes Football Foundation with administration, community memberships, 3G oversight, bookings, communication, kit, safeguarding processes and the week-to-week relationship between the club and the football being played in its name.
With the increased governance and safeguarding demands from the FA, alongside the need to continue to generate more than £100,000 through community football, maybe that is not a luxury. Maybe it is basic infrastructure?
The third thing is real inclusion.
And this is where I have probably learned the most.
I have given a lot of myself to Lewes FC and to the Vets. I have given organisational labour, emotional labour, therapeutic labour, community labour and a huge amount of volunteer time. Some of that has been joyful. Some of it has been meaningful. Some of it has helped build things I remain proud of.
But I have also learned that I am unlikely to volunteer that kind of skill and intensity again unless it is resourced by proper structures.
For me, as an autistic ADHD-er, inclusion is not a vibe. It is not a poster. It is not a slogan. It is not just the right public language. It is whether the organisation has enough structure to make belonging possible for different kinds of people.
That means reasonable adjustments around communication. It means looking after volunteers. It means understanding that people bring different nervous systems, different capacities, different family pressures, different bodies and different histories into football. It means not extracting professional, therapeutic, emotional or administrative skills from volunteers without support, clarity or protection.
That is what equality means to me.
It is not only gender. It is disability and neurodivergence and age and class and all the ordinary ways people find themselves slightly outside the centre of things. It is children being able to belong. It is parents knowing how to raise concerns. It is older players being able to return to football without humiliation. It is women and girls having proper facilities. It is coaches being supported to do difficult work well.
Equal pay for the men’s and women’s first teams mattered.
But equal pay is not the whole of equality.
If Lewes FC wants to be Equality FC, it has to think about the everyday structures that make equality real.
Where power actually sits
I am no longer convinced that the governance of Lewes FC works in the way the public story invites people to believe.
There is an idealised version of the club: democratic, supporter-owned, community-rooted, different from normal football. And there is truth in that story. But it is not the whole truth.
The board is not a mythical, all-powerful entity. Directors are volunteers too. Many are trying to do serious work with limited time, limited information, limited money and limited support. I know that, because I sat on the board myself, and I have seen how hard it is.
And that is part of the problem. The model asks too much of volunteer directors, while also asking ordinary owners to believe that democratic election alone creates effective community governance.
In practice, formal community mechanisms are often weaker than informal mechanisms of influence, including the ability to put money in when the club needs it. Important conversations happen in WhatsApp groups, pubs, private rooms, crisis discussions, benefactors’ homes and small circles of people who have time, money, history, confidence or proximity.
Again, that may be normal in football.
But it is not the same as community ownership functioning well.
The annual election of volunteer directors may not, by itself, create the strategic capability, continuity or operational support that a complex community football club now needs. This is not a criticism of any one director. Some people join without fully understanding the responsibility involved. Some people join because they care but cannot realistically do the work. Some people do an extraordinary amount and still cannot shift the structure on their own.
This is also where I think comparisons with FC United are useful but limited. FC United has a different history, a different supporter culture, a larger population base, and a founding moment built around resistance to private control. Lewes is not that. Lewes is a smaller town, not quite a football town in the same way, sitting close to Brighton, with a thinner supply of people willing and able to do the sustained committee, governance and operational work that community ownership actually requires.
The question is not whether anyone has acted maliciously. I do not believe that is the main issue.
The question is whether benefactor influence, exceptional donations and informal power have shaped the community-club aspect of Lewes FC more than owners and local people have been allowed to see.
The community often provides labour, money, legitimacy and emotional energy without enough formal power. Vets, Juniors, Walking Football, Select, Women’s Vets, the Foundation, the Supporters Club, parents, coaches, volunteers and owners all sustain the meaning of Lewes FC.
But the mechanism through which those groups shape the direction of the whole club is still not strong enough.
If Lewes FC wants to be a serious community benefit society, or even a football club properly rooted in the town, that has to change.
The Foundation question
There is also a question about Lewes Football Foundation itself.
Should the Foundation come more formally into the club, so that community football is properly represented, resourced and protected inside the CBS? Or should the Foundation become more independent, with its own clearer identity, funding, accountability and voice?
I do not think the answer is obvious. And I do not want to idealise the Foundation either. Like any volunteer-led structure, it can become factional, personality-driven and over-dependent on a small number of people trying to hold the whole thing together. But it has also shown that community football can organise, raise money, improve facilities and build things when enough people commit to the work.
If the Foundation comes closer into the club, community football may gain more formal influence, representation and access to club resources. But it could also lose independence and the ability to speak clearly for community teams.
If the Foundation becomes more independent, community football may gain a stronger identity and a clearer mandate. But it could also become more separate from the club whose name, facilities and story still shape so much of what community football is.
So that question should be faced openly. It should not just be left to drift, or be decided by exhaustion, personalities, or whatever crisis happens next.
The current arrangement has achieved a lot.
But it is not yet clear enough, strong enough or resourced enough to hold what has now been built. To take it forward is also an enormous piece of work without a united club to get behind.
A goodbye with love
I have been in and around Lewes FC for twelve years. I founded Lewes FC Vets in 2016. I helped found Lewes Football Foundation in September 2024. I became a director of Lewes FC in April 2025, and I stepped away from both Lewes FC and Lewes Football Foundation in August 2025. I am now also stepping away as chair of Lewes FC Vets and as a coach of Lewes FC Under-13 Rooks because my family and I are moving to the North.
I am proud of Lewes FC Vets. I am proud of Lewes Football Foundation. I am proud of Lewes Juniors, Lewes FC Select, Walking Football, Women’s Vets, and the wider community football culture so many people have built. I am proud of the players who came back, the volunteers who now hold it, the tours, the teams, the Friday nights, the Pan Siro, the Old Quality League, the care, the ridiculousness and the seriousness.
I am grateful to everyone who worked with me and believed.
I also feel sad about what the process has shown me.
But this piece is not ultimately about me.
I think the Vets and the Foundation can survive without me. That is a good thing.
The test of Lewes FC is different.
- Can the club become less enchanted by the idea of itself and more disciplined about the structures that would make the idea true?
- Can it protect the pitches, toilets, water, admin, safeguarding, volunteers, children, older players, women, girls, walking footballers and community teams that partly give the club its claim to be different?
- Can it stop asking the community to carry the gap between aspiration and reality?
And perhaps the hardest question is whether Lewes FC has ever really had the conditions needed for community ownership to work properly: enough active owners, enough volunteers, enough transparency, enough facility planning, enough financial discipline, and enough people willing to carry the constitution in practice rather than simply believe in it on paper.
I do not know whether Lewes FC can continue to be the kind of community club it has claimed to be. Perhaps the Equality FC era is ending. Perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing, if what comes next is more honest, more grounded and better resourced.
But whatever comes next, the community football, the facilities, the volunteers, the children, the older players, the women, the girls, the parents and the people who keep putting their hands in their pockets must not be left to carry the gap between the story and the structure.
Maybe the change will not come through one plan, one board, one article or one dramatic reset. Maybe it comes through years of smaller, disciplined changes: clearer agreements, better admin, proper facilities planning, stronger safeguarding, more paid support, better owner information, and less reliance on heroic volunteering.
That may be less glamorous than the old story.
But it may be more real.
Because I do not want Lewes FC to fail.
I want the reality — the money, the facilities, the safeguarding, the admin, the volunteering, the accountability — to become strong enough that the story is no longer doing so much work.
That is what I want to communicate to local people about Lewes FC.
