Photo by James Vickery

Go to an Exeter City away game and chances are you’ll hear Grecians fans singing “We own our football club” to the home support. It’s a powerful reminder of just how close the bond is between supporters and their club as City fans revel in their status as one of the few supporter-owned clubs in the country, and one of the most successful.

The Devon club may have become an unintentional poster child for the Supporters Trust movement but, as their vice-chairman Julian Tagg noted yesterday, there is no blueprint for a fan-run club at their current level of League One, far less the Premier League. It is an issue The Red Knights will no doubt be picking over, along with any other top-flight or Championship Supporters’ Trust that harbours ambitions of owning their own club.

Exeter City: the poster child

Whenever the example of Supporters’ Trusts come up, Exeter City are the obvious place to start. The Devon side may only occasionally trouble the back pages of national newspapers, but they’re also the leading example of a successful Trust.

Created, initially, to find funds to buy striker Gary Alexander, the Trust, like so many others, came into its own when the club was at its lowest ebb. In the spring of 2003, Exeter had been relegated out of the Football League and were staring oblivion in the face. Their chair and vice-chair, John Russell and Mike Lewis, had just been arrested for fraud (Russell was later convicted and jailed for this), the debts were mounting and saviours were in short supply.

The Trust were invited to take over the day-to-day running of the club and embarked on a period of intensive fire-fighting. They managed to negotiate the purchase of shares from former chair Ivor Doble at the 11th hour meaning the fans were truly in charge of the club. Had this not been completed, the Trust had a press release drawn up saying they could no longer continue to fund City and the 100-year-old club would have, most likely, been liquidated.

But while Trust members were happy to raise large sums of money, which saved the club in the long-term, much of their current success can be put down to luck or, more specifically, the moment Tony Cascarino drew them away to Manchester United in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. The money from this, and the replay, generated around £1m, enough to pay off a large chunk of Exeter’s debts.

From there the club has gone from strength to strength. After losing the Conference playoff final in 2007, they went one better the following year before securing back-to-back promotions as runners up in League Two. Heady times indeed.

Off the pitch, the Trust was slowly evolving as well, from fire-fighters into a more professional outfit. Exeter fans with experience in the city were brought onto the board, while Denise Watts, a single mum, took over as chair of first the Trust, then the club. This was the ethos of the Trust in a nutshell – any fan could join, stand for election and find themselves shaping Exeter’s future.

But promotion to a higher level has brought a new set of challenges. “At the moment we’re the second smaller club in the division in terms of the number of people our ground can take,” says Julian Tagg, the club’s vice-chair and one of the original Trust members who pitched in at boardroom level in 2003.

“We look at the rugby club [Exeter Chiefs]. They’ve boosted attendences and, via that and their facilities, leisure dollars spent at the ground. This is something, with the current stadium, we can’t quite match. There’s a lot of work to be done now in how we structure the club and how we maintain that Trust ethos, and how we rebuild the stadium to bring in new finance to the club.”

The stadium issue is one of the most pressing concerns for Exeter. Their Old Grandstand is on its last legs and badly needs replacing, the uncovered away terrace needs work and the whole pitch needs moving and relaying before any of this work can be done. The Grecians are reasonably fortunate in that while they don’t own their ground, the local council leases, meaning development, while slow, is possible.

For the time being, though, the club’s attention is also taken up by Exeter’s relegation battle at the foot of League One and while Tagg is confident they can survive, he knows their success on the pitch is tied into major off the pitch activity.

“We can compete in this league,” he says, “and we may even get into the league above, all things being equal. My ambition is always took look at Crewe as an example – much of their success has been down to youth.

“If we can complete our stadium then we can sit down and think about how we go from there, but we can’t do this overnight. Everybody wants instant success – that’s what causes their downfall – and as long as people can be patient, we can get there but we have to do it gradually.

“We sold four young players and it took ten years of work on them before it came to fruition. That’s not short-term at all. If we start with them at eight, nine, ten, who knows what could happen.”

It’s something that has been borne out by the club’s most recent accounts, when they announced losses of £227,000 between June 2008 and May 2009, although taking into account depreciation, the trading deficit stands at £67,092. This includes the sale of youngster George Friend to Wolves for around £350,000. Since then two more youth graduates have departed – Dean Moxey for Derby and Danny Seaborne to Southampton, both for six-figure sums.

Strangely, the club would have been better, financially speaking, to avoid promotion. The Grecians earned just £10,000 from finishing second in League Two. With bonus payments this meant Exeter would have been better off reaching the playoffs or missing out on promotion all together.

The clubs debts stand at £1.8m, although much of this is soft loans from the Supporters’ Trust. Even so, this shows what a hard job a sensible, relatively run supporter-owned club has in the lower leagues. Not that Tagg would ever consider selling up.

“An offer to buy the club would be something the members would have to vote on, and you never say never, but to me the only reason we’d do this is is we’ve failed and I’ve not got involved to preside over that. We’ll do the best we possibly can.

“If someone were to come along and they were genuinely philanthropic and loved the club then we may consider this, but I’d prefer that we stayed in the hands of the supporters.”

Brentford: The hybrid club

When Exeter gained promotion last season, the club that pipped them to first place was another fan-owned club, Brentford. Supporter power, for one season at least, ruled at the top of League Two. But while Exeter have stuck resolutely to the Trust model, Brentford have gone down the philanthropic route and found a rich fan willing to sit alongside the Trust, Bees United, at boardroom level.

Hit hard by the recession and the increased costs of League One, as well as plans for a desperately-needed new stadium, and at their borrowing limit, Bees United realised they needed a significant cash injection to compete and struck a deal with wealthy supporter Matthew Benham, who had already lent £4m to the club to help manage their debt.

Under the terms of the new deal, Benham will put in a million pounds a year for the next five years, while Bees United remain the majority shareholder, giving Brentford a form of financial stability. At the end of this period, Bees United can either buy Benham out and repay his loans, or Benham can exercise an option to become a majority shareholder, with Bees United becoming a minority stakeholder.

However, the Trust would also retain a Golden Share to ensure that Griffin Park could not be sold without their permission and the proposed new stadium at Lionel Road is not affected. Crucially, this deal had to be approved by the membership and 70% of Bees United members voted on the issue, with 99% agreeing to the move.

For Brian Burgess, former vice-chairman of the club and an active member of the Trust, the deal is a sensible one, and something he can see being replicated at other clubs. “I think that’s quite a good model for other Trusts because we have to live in the real world,” he says.

“The economics of football as such mean it’s very difficult to compete under the current regime with the big clubs and cubs who’ve got wealthy supporters putting in loads of money. So you need to do this sort of deal and at least we’ve got some safeguards in with the golden share in particular.”

Without it, Burgess doesn’t believe Brentford would have been able to compete. “The standard’s higher, we’re playing against bigger clubs like Leeds, Norwich, Southampton and Charlton and you need more money. Bees United couldn’t raise the kind of money we needed to compete. If we had serious aspirations to get promoted from this league into the Championship you need the Matthew Benham deal, we needed that extra million pounds a year.

“That doesn’t guarantee that we will get promoted, but the plan is to work towards getting promoted in the next four years and have a new stadium in the fifth year so we can progress from there. Without that million pounds a year, I think we’d struggle in League One and, of course, the danger is that we’d have got relegated again. In League Two because you’ve got smaller teams with lower away support, you just don’t get the revenue. You tend to get into a downward spiral. Obviously we want to get into a virtuous upward spiral.”

Bees United was formed in 2001 in response to worries over the future of Griffin Park and in 2006 the Trust brought the club from then-chairman Ron Noades for two pounds, although a condition of this was they relieved Noades’ company of the £4.5m owed in loans to the banks.

Former BBC director general Greg Dyke, a Brentford and Manchester United fan, was installed as chairman with Burgess as his deputy and although the club was relegated from League One in 2007, they managed to bounce back under young manager Andy Scott. In the meantime, Burgess and Bees United were, like Julian Tagg at Exeter, turning their attentions to their stadium, and rapidly concluded that it needed replacing.

“We knew we’d never really be sustainable as a business here at Griffin Park,” says Burgess. “We budget to lose around half a million pounds a year in order to give us even a reasonable playing budget, let alone one that can compete in League One. There’s no commercial facilities here, nothing. It’s very difficult for us to earn any kind of serious revenue because there are no corporate boxes, no hospitality suites.

“During the week we don’t have conferencing and banqueting facilities that would enable us to make commercial revenue. It’s always been the plan to build a new stadium. I’ve been working on it all the way through and at the end of 2007 we did a deal with Barratts to buy this site at Lionel Road and it was obvious then it would become a full-time job.”

The recession and the housing market crash knocked plans for the new stadium back from the original date of 2012, but it still remains on course as Brentford look to prove that Trusts and wealthy investors can co-exist comfortably at boardroom level.

The new clubs

Further down the chain comes two very unique success stories: AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester. Both these clubs were formed out of protest – the Dons from the football league’s decision to relocate the original Wimbledon to Milton Keynes, while FCUM was a reaction to the Glazers takeover of Manchester United and a desire for United supporters to get back to their roots and ensure that ordinary supporters weren’t priced out of watching their team.

Both have enjoyed impressive rises through the non-league pyramid. Since their formation in 2002, AFC Wimbledon have risen from the Combined Counties League to the Blue Square Premier, including back-to-back promotions in recent seasons, and are currently still in the hunt for a play-off spot. Similarly, FC United won promotion three times in their first three seasons before stalling at the Unibond Premier.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that both Wimbledon and FC United have enjoyed success at lower league levels. They both started with a blank slate – there was no burden of history or, indeed, historic debts and both had a ready made community and Trust ethos in place (the Dons Trust structure and values can be read here). What’s more, the crowds they were attracting gave them a significant financial advantage when competing in the lower leagues, where income is often scarce.

In many respects, both these clubs can be seen as being the purest and most successful wholly Trust-owned teams (even Exeter City have other minor non-fan shareholders) but as both teams climb the leagues and compete at a higher level, new problems arise. Just as the blank canvas benefitted these clubs at the start, so it also means each promotion is a further step into the unknown.

Chief among these issues is the now-common theme of the stadium. AFC Wimbledon currently groundshare with Kingstonian, although the Dons actually own Kingsmeadow Stadium, while FC United are tenants at Bury’s Gigg Lane. But as the Dons rise up the league, the looming question is whether they continue at Kingsmeadow or look to build a new stadium in the borough of Merton, their spiritual home.

This ties in with the debate about how best for the club to progress as a whole. Gone are they days when the old Wimbledon could rise from non-league to the top flight and win the FA Cup, but if AFC have aspirations to continue their climb up the football pyramid, there will be a level, as Exeter and Brentford have found, where Trust money can only fund so far. For the time being, though, Dons fans are enjoying their status in the Conference.

FC United are a slightly different case as they have no ’spiritual’ home (unless you count Old Trafford) but are well aware that their own stadium is key to future progression. Currently rental on Gigg Lane is around £5,000 per match. The Rebels have recently submitted plans for a 4,000 capacity stadium to a supportive Manchester City Council (unlike Merton Borough Council, who are lukewarm on a Dons return) and will be looking to the end of their lease at Bury in 2011 as a rough timescale. A ground of their own will give them greater opportunity for matchday and non-matchday revenue.

What FCUM and AFC Wimbledon both have, though, that many clubs can’t buy is a stable well-run board and a genuine sense of community and belonging to the club. And in non-league, where many sides are an unexpected bill away from crisis, that counts for a lot.

The phoenix from the flames

As Dave Lister once said to the hologram Rimmer in Red Dwarf: “Cheer up, death isn’t what it used to be,” and that could equally apply to football clubs teetering on the brink today. If your club went out of business years ago, that was the end – or if a new club was set up with the same name, it would take decades to get back to where you once were as Aldershot and Accrington Stanley can testify.

But if a club collapses financially today, there is light at the end of the tunnel and often the Supporters’ Trust is waiting in the wings to reform the club and put it on a more even keel, giving fans the opportunity to run their club as opposed to an owner with big promises but smaller pockets.

Dave Boyle, CEO of Supporters’ Direct, is one of those who urges fans not to despair if it looks as if their club is going to the wall. “The idea that the worse thing that can happen to a club is that it be liquidated isn’t as strong as it was,” he says.

“Fans would be told of this horrible prospect of the club disappearing and then accept whatever sharp practice, ground sale, asset strip was put forward as the least worst option. Even if that didn’t happen, they’d fundraise like crazy trying to keep the club afloat when their money and energy were never going to do the job.

“But thanks to those trusts and those clubs, we know in fact what people always knew in their heart of hearts – that football in a given community isn’t about the limited company formed to play it in an organised football league. If that company were to be liquidated, football would survive in the community. And, thanks to the success enjoyed by those clubs and the enjoyment their fans have in owning their own team, we see a lot of people being very sanguine indeed about keeping a busted flush of a small town team alive.”

Perhaps the leading example of this is AFC Telford, who were formed out of the ashes of Conference side Telford United. The Bucks were liquidated in 2004 when the chairman and owner, Andrew Shaw, got into business difficulties and had to put his entire empire into administration. But no sooner had United ceased to exist, the Trust was waiting in the wings to create the phoenix club.

Having secured use of Telford United’s New Bucks Head ground, the club was placed in the Northern League Division One. Within three years they were playing in the Conference North, with crowds averaging around 2,000. Far from killing the support for football in the town, Telford United’s demise actually re-energised support. The town rallied round and created a community club that was far more engaged with its supporters. In both potential and execution, AFC Telford are the best possible advert for a supporter-owned phoenix club.

Scarborough Athletic are another example of the supporters rallying to keep professional football in the town after the original club, Scarborough FC went bust in 2007 with debts of £2.5m. Again, a new club rose from the ashes under the management of the Supporters’ Trust, although the Seadogs have fell further than many reformed teams and, after one promotion, currently play in the Northern Counties East Football League Premier Division, groundsharing with neighbours Bridlington.

Tomorrow, we will look at those who’ve not quite been the same kind of resounding successes the Trust movement was hoping for.

Just when Chester City fans thought their club might finally be put out of its misery in its present state — its ownership having wrecked the club’s finances to the extent that they could not field a team, thus now facing a vote on expulsion from the Blue Square Premier — things have taken a turn for the even more bizarre. Last week, Chester’s supporters’ trust said they hoped they would be given the chance to start the club over,  but now it seems a Danish consortium claiming to be saviours might make things even worse.

Owner Stephen Vaughan Junior (who acquired the club from his father, skirting rules banishing him from owning a club) revealed to chesterfirst that:

A deal has been done with a Denmark-based consortium, Chester projekt.dk, subject to legal issues being agreed.

“I was one of three people from Chester City who met members of the Conference board at a meeting in London on Friday where the club presented cash forecasts and funding projections in a bid to safeguard the club from being expelled from the league.
“The club admitted it had breached five rules including rule 8.6 which mentions expulsion, and the Conference board have now recommended that member clubs of the Conference Premier Division will vote to expel Chester City from the competition.

“The Vaughan family will today contact the Football Conference and inform them that we will defer full payment until June 2011 and ensure that full funding will be made available to pay all of our outstanding creditors, i.e. rent, revenue and all players wages and players arrears, and other football creditors.

“We will make an application to the Football Conference for them to reconsider their position so that we can fulfil the remainder of our fixtures.”

Now, let’s check out this Danish group “Chester projekt.dk” via their own website, which they’ve perhaps unhelpfully for themselves translated into English via rather garbled English. Check out this gem on their page about “Our Ambitions”:

Our ambitions

Of course we won’t interfere in strictly sporting affairs such as who’s in the starting eleven and so on. However, it’s the owners of the club who will approve new player contracts, hiring of staff and so forth, so in that respect we’ll have the final saying.

Of course we won’t be in charge of the day-to-day operation of the club; we will need to hire some skilled people to do that (there is already a lot of people employed at the club – we just need to find out if they are the right ones). This is where the CFU will come in to the picture; the fan club will really be able to contribute with a lot, be it fundraising, knowledge of the local area and so on.

We have a limit of 10 shares which each investor are allowed to own. This limit ensures that it will be a more democratically elected board of directors and this will therefore reflect the common stance of the shareholders. This has been put in place due to the fact that we don’t want one person to dictate the entire future of the club.

The CFU mentioned is City Fans United, the Chester City Supporters’ Trust.

Last week, the Chester Project.dk website said: “Unfortunately there has been some miscommunication between us and CFU. It appeared here on our website that CFU was behind us 100%. They have their own option to save the club, but we keep them informed on a daily basis and we will meet with them this weekend to discuss options for future collaboration. They are very important in this project – no fans, no club.”

The Danish consortium did indeed meet with the Trust this weekend. And it certainly doesn’t sound like the supporters want anything to do with them, from a press release yesterday on the CFU’s site:

Members of a Danish consortium met representatives of the CFU yesterday before they met the club. It was made clear to them that any rescue bid would need the support of the fans, the wider community, and a viable Business Plan. We were not satisfied with the very brief report we had after the meeting with the club.

In our opinion the Danish consortium also have no adequate business plan or strategy for running the club on a day to day basis. They do not have adequate finances to cover the current debt, and have no plans for community involvement.

We are saying clearly and directly to the Danish consortium: On Thursday you stated that if we did not wish you to continue with your bid, you would not proceed. We are saying that we do not wish you to proceed with your bid. We would however welcome you to be part of an exciting journey with us as we rebuild our club in our own vision. But if you proceed without us, you are proceeding against us with all that entails.

I think that’s pretty clear: “On Thursday you stated that if we did not wish you to continue with your bid, you would not proceed. We are saying that we do not wish you to proceed with your bid.”

Despite this opposition, today the Chester Chronicle reports that “Chester Projekt.dk have reached an agreement with the Vaughan family to buy their 100% stake in the Football Conference outfit.”

Obviously, the Danish consortium have no actual respect at all for the wishes or plans of the supporters for the club; at the least, they could stop pretending they care.

Two Hundred Percent has the transcript of an interview with the man leading the consortium, Palle Rasmussen. It’s google translated from Danish, but I think this version of sums up the fantastic and hideous situation the club and its supporters are in:

Yes, so the news came out a little before intended, and some people its on TV2 with red ears.

Well, all that stands in my presence mail today. This will be my last blog. From tomorrow, our forum on the legs, and only people who have paid for the project is included in the debate.

There has been too many new flap hats today, this is a serious undertaking; prepared operating budgets, capital raised and every detail thought through.

And in terms of fan support:

CFU is a new fan club founded on 4 months ago with the sole aim would start their own club up and leave the existing bankruptcy. Fortunately, more than 100 true fans let me know by email that there will come people on battens. And that the CFU is “old but sour.” I can only recognize: Yesterday TV2 and I was invited to the football festival of CFU in Chester. We had counted on club jerseys and “pep in Sweeping” – but came down to a game of bingo for 100 persons aged 50 +. It was so bad that TV2 and I subsequently chose to slip away again without filming.

And just to repeat the words from our attorney, who acted 20 football clubs for the last 8 years: Fans can boycott but always comes back. Therefore: We are not the press of a fanfraktion how official they may be. Therefore: We are not the press of a fanfraktion how official they may be. In our operating model, we expect yet not with so many spectators at the start; money can/should include retrieved in a newly created youth amateur division and a football academy + many other new projects I am GAME to reveal to you all in the closed forum.

Thank you for this time – and to all faithful chesterprojekt.dk investors: I will be contacted tomorrow + Tuesday with an “entry ticket” to our closed forum.

Ciao

Palle

“Too many new flap hats” indeed, Palle.

Eastleigh F.C. vs. Hayes and Yeading, Blue Square South Play off Semi-Final (2nd Leg). Silverlake Stadium, Eastleigh, England. May 2nd, 2009.

Photo credit: mr.southampton on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Poor Chester City, of England’s Football Conference. Imagine waking up the day after Christmas and finding that your club had appointed as Director of Football a man who had led another club (Halesowen) into severe financial peril and expulsion from the FA Cup, and who had received a year-long touchline ban after clashing with one of his own players? That’s what Chester fans discovered on Boxing Day, as they learned their former owner, Stephen Vaughan, had appointed Morrell Maison in that position.

This is the same Morrell Maison who only two months ago was arrested as part of a police investigation into fraud at Halesowen.

Vaughan himself is pretty much the opposite of a white knight. Only last month, he was banned from operating as a company director for eleven years for fraud while he ran Widnes Rugby Club. Following this, he became the first club owner to fail the Football Association’s Fit and Proper Persons test, and was told he had 21 days to divest of his majority stake in Chester City. Vaughan simply passed on the shares to his son, also called Stephen, to skirt the ruling. He claims the family are looking to sell their share.

This latest news caps off a terrible 2009 for Chester City. Relegated from the Football League at the end of last season, they were given a 25 point deduction to start the 2009-10 season for financial irregularities. They sit bottom of the Conference National league today, still on -3 points.

City Fans United issued a statement today on the decision to appoint Morell Maison, praising the players for their continued efforts despite the off the field distractions (and lack of pay):

CFU are both surprised, disappointed and shocked at events currently taking place at The Deva Stadium.

Whilst the players, we believe, have still to be paid from November and the current  manager is working miracles in what can be some of the most difficult circumstances ever experienced by a Chester manager, Stephen Vaughan, currently banned from acting as a director by The Department of Trade, has appeared to appoint Morell Maison as Director of Football.

CFU feel that this appointment is totally unnecessary and can only undermine the excellent work of both the manager and the players at this very difficult time.

Mr Maison’s time at Halesowen was one of great turbulence for the club; being expelled from the FA Cup and FA Trophy, going into administration and reports of financial irregularities.

Maison also recieved a twelve month touchline ban after clashing with one of his own players and the former Chief Executive, Guy Simpson, who arrived at the club on the invitation of Maison, was in August 2009 charged with fraudulent evasion of tax duty in the region of £4.5 million.

Once again we call upon Vaughan and his family to make real efforts to sell the club at a reasonable price to genuine potential purchasers. In the meanwhile we ask him to reconsider his approach to Maison who, we feel has nothing to offer to CCFC and use the money which would be paid to him to pay some of the unpaid players.

We would also like to thank the manager and the current players for their great professionalism under these very trying circumstances.

The City Fans United committee would like to wish all CFU members, and Chester City fans across the globe, a Happy New Year.

Two Hundred Percent, as ever, best sums up the position this club in crisis faces as they enter the new year:

Chester City will finish 2009 with a negative points tally after their match this afternoon was postponed. No-one at the Football Conference, the Football League or the Football Association has yet made a public statement on the startling success of their decision to allow Vaughan to perform what could best be described as a “switcheroo” during the summer. Exactly who will benefit, and in what way, from the involvement of Morell Maison at Chester City Football Club is anybody’s guess, and the bare fact of the matter is that there is precious little to suggest that the issues surrounding the ownership of the club has been resolved.

Lewes is a very, very small and rather charming town, the capital of my home county, East Sussex. With a population of around 16,000, nestled in the natural beauty of the South Down hills not far from the sea, it’s best known for its Guy Fawkes night fireworks rather than its football team. Lewes Castle gives the team its nickname, the Rooks, and its outstanding brewer Harveys provides the delicious beer served in the bar at the stadium, the delightfully named Dripping Pan.

When I went back home to Sussex last Christmas and made the trip from Brighton to Lewes to watch a match there, the locals seemed bemused by my choice. “You came all the way here and you’re going to see Lewes play footballl?”, one lady exclaimed in utter bemusement.

The match was enjoyable. For less than a third of a price to watch my hometown club Brighton and Hove Albion, I had a better supporter experience: I was not squeezed into a tiny, overpriced plastic seat miles from the action in an all-seater stadium. Instead, there was open terracing where fans could gather together and sing, chat and even drink reasonably-priced beer sold in the clubhouse overlooking the pitch.

The rolling grass banks on one side gave the place a relaxed feel, as Lewes comfortably dispatched the soon-to-be-famous Havant & Waterlooville 4-0. It turned out to be a key win on Lewes’ way to winning the Conference South, and thus promotion to Conference National. This will mean big changes off the field: within a year, the stadium will have to be upgraded further to meet minimum requirements for the Conference. This will probably mean the end of the grass banks and beer on the terraces.

But the most shocking change has already apparently happened: after guiding Lewes to promotion, rumours began to fly that Steve King, the manager, has already been told he won’t be retained next season. New investors have taken over and want to bring in their own man, as Lewes’ ambition seems to have gotten the better of them.

As Lewes collected the trophy for their title win last weekend, blogger Ian King (no relation) reports that Steve King burst into tears and was engulfed by his squad, many of whom are expected to follow him out of the door. Meanwhile, the crowd booed the club’s benefactor. Lewes is a small place, and sustaining crowds over 1,000 when your population is only 16,000 is no mean feat; pissing off half of them doesn’t seem much like progress to me.

Ian King asks and answers the key question: “Can Lewes FC afford to alienate its hardcore support? I would venture that this might turn out the make next season even longer than it was going to be before.”

It’s a shame that promotion has already brought tears to the Dripping Pan.

It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, exceptionally hard for newcomers difficult to get in. Every five to ten years or so, someone would get lucky (and there were considerably murkier rumours surrounding some clubs’ applications), but it was largely seen as a sop to upward mobility whilst maintaining the status quo very effectively.

The beginning of automatic promotion and relegation would change the face of lower and non-league football in England forever, and one match would come to symbolise the changing of the times.

The move towards automatic promotion began in 1979, when a group of clubs, frustrated at the lack of opportunity for non-league clubs to join the League, left the Southern and Northern Premier Leagues to form the Alliance Premier League. Two years later, they invited two clubs from the London-based Isthmian League to join them and, by 1985, the non-league game had taken the pyramid shape that it still holds to this day. One of the two clubs invited to join the APL in 1981, Enfield, were immediately and spectacularly successful, winning the FA Trophy in 1982 and the league championship the following season. They won the title again in 1986, but times were changing, and Enfield were about to be left behind. In the summer of 1986, the Alliance Premier League talked the Football League into allowing one automatic promotion and relegation place per season. Crowds in the Football League had been plummeting for years, with the creeping belief that there was nothing for a lot of clubs at the foot of Division Four to play for. Something had to be done.

The first team to go up, Scarborough, were a surprise package who had finished in mid-table to the season before. At the foot of Division Four, it went to the wire. On the last day of the 1986/87 season, one point separated three teams – Torquay United, Burnley and Lincoln City at the bottom of the table, with Torquay playing at home against Crewe Alexandra. Crewe raced to a 2-0 lead before Torquay pulled a goal back. In the chaos of a match being played in front of a huge crowd, a police dog called Bryn bit Torquay’s Jim McNichol, who had to receive medical attention at the side of the pitch. In the injury time brought about by the dog incident, McNichol scored again to level things up and relegate Lincoln City in their place on goal difference. Bryn was given a lifetime season ticket at Plainmoor, and is still there to this day, stuffed and on display in the club’s boardroom.

That it was Lincoln City that fell through the trapdoor would be one of the more understated tragedies of the 1980s. Lincoln had been the opponents of Bradford City on May 13th 1985, the day of the Bradford Fire. They lost two supporters to the fire that day and, whilst it’s impossible to say completely what the psychological effects of their involvement in it were, it hardly seems a stretch to say that two successive relegations following on from such a trauma was a coincidence.

At the end of the 1986/87 season, the Alliance Premier League renamed itself the Football Conference. A number of clubs, scenting the possibility of League football, turned professional. Crowds leapt up as the reality of automatic promotion and relegation between the League and non-league football started to hit home. Lincoln took a gamble and stayed professional. After two relegations, their crowds grew and they settled in near the top of the table.

It was, in all honesty, a transitional moment when Enfield played Lincoln City in the quarter-finals of the FA Trophy in March 1988. Enfield had stayed semi-professional, their crowds of around 800 making them unable to sustain a full-time team. The champions of two years before had already lost the majority of their best players and had slipped towards the lower end of mid-table. On the day, though, the old guard had one more big performance in them. Lincoln had the majority of possession but couldn’t score, and then midway through the second half their goalkeeper fumbled a corner, allowing Nicky Francis to poke home the only goal of the match. Enfield went on to win the FA Trophy Final, in which they beat Telford United 3-2 in a replay at The Hawthorns after drawing 0-0 at Wembley Stadium. The defeat was Lincoln’s only ever FA Trophy defeat – they were promoted at the end of the season, and their last match of the season against Wycombe Wanderers attracted a crowd of 9,432, a record for a non-league match until Oxford United attracted a crowd of over 11,000 for a Conference match against Woking last season.

For Enfield, it was the last hurrah as a major force in non-league football. They were relegated to the Isthmian League in 1990, and were unable to get promoted back despite finishing in the top three for seven successive seasons following their relegation. The warning signs for their long-term future came in 1995, when they won the Isthmian League but were barred from promotion because of Conference concerns over their financial situation. Worse was to follow, though, with the sale of their Southbury Road stadium in 1999, without a new one to move into. Matters came to a head in the summer of 2001, when the club’s supporters voted overwhelmingly to break away from the old club, and form a new club called Enfield Town FC. To this extent, they were the fore-runners of the Supporters Trust movement, which has given birth to the likes of FC United of Manchester and AFC Wimbledon, as well as giving the supporters of smaller clubs that have folded to start over under the ownership of their own supporters. They currently play in the Isthmian League Division One North, three divisions below what is now known as the Blue Square Premier.

The last hurrah for Enfield was also one of the last hurrahs for the semi-professional and amateur clubs in the non-league game. Twenty of the twenty-four clubs in the Blue Square Premier (as the Conference renamed itself last season after a sponsorship deal) now are fully professional, and the ones that aren’t are the ones near the bottom of the table. Many people say that the non-League game is in a terminal decline, strangled by the all-pervasive influence of the Premier League, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The League itself now has two automatic promotion and relegation places, with lucrative play-off matches at the end of the season, culminating in a final at Wembley. Crowds have risen from an average of a few hundred in the mid-1980s to over 2,000 last season. Matches are shown live on the television, on the digital channel, Setanta.

There have been plenty of non-league clubs that fallen victim to gold-diggers, misplaced ambition and conservatism that has bordered on the plain stubborn, but this season the Conference, Southern, Isthmian and Northern Premier Leagues seem likely to get to the end of the season with no-one folding. This might not sound like much to be proud of until you consider that we’re talking about 272 clubs, many of them surviving off crowds of a couple of hundred people and largely administrated by volunteers and supporters.

Lincoln integrated themselves back in the Football League fairly quickly. Since their promotion back in 1988, they have managed just the one season in League One (in 1999) before getting themselves relegated. The rest of their last twenty years has been spent in the Football League’s basement. In spite of a ropey start to this season, they have stabilised back into mid-table again and don’t look like going anywhere very far soon. Should they come to celebrate their twentieth year back in the Football League this summer, one would hope that their supporters will take a moment to remember and raise a toast to the only team to knock them out of the FA Trophy.

1. Walk Like An Egyptian — You’ll often hear non-league football in England referred to as “the non-league pyramid” or just “the pyramid”. This is, unsurprisingly, because it’s arranged into a pyramid shape with the national Blue Square Premier (renamed for sponsorships reasons, formerly the Conference National) at the top, down to the County Leagues at the bottom. It fans out like this because crowds generally get smaller as you go down through the leagues, from the 4,500-odd that turn out to see the likes of Oxford United to the crowds of 20 or so at, say, Sussex County League also-rans Southwick. You can find out which divisions feed to in this illustrated map.

2. Conference Rules — The Blue Square Premier rules everything. Just as the Premier League broke away in 1992, so a select group of clubs from the Southern and Northern Premier Leagues broke away to form the Alliance Premier League in 1979. After allowing teams in from the Isthmian League in 1982, it renamed itself the Football Conference in 1986 (and you’ll usually hear me refer to it as the Conference), when automatic promotion and relegation was introduced with the Football League. Since then it has become more and more like the Football League. The stadium regulations are stringent and nowadays the vast majority of clubs in it are fully professional (I’d go so far as to say that the big step up in quality is between the Conference and its two feeder leagues, the Conference North & South, than between the Conference and League Two). There are now two promotion and relegation places, with the champions promoted automatically and the next four clubs playing out tense play-offs at the end of each season.

3. Faded Glamour –– Non-league football is stuffed full of former League clubs that, due to a mixture of bad luck, bad administration and long-term neglect, have fallen through the trapdoor and can’t get back up. A good number of their supporters are insufferably arrogant, referring to non-league clubs that haven’t been in the Football League as “tinpot” and, more often than not, the very competitions that they are in as “tinpot”. This overlooks one crucial fact: if non-league clubs and the Conference is “tinpot”, then their clubs are now “tinpot” too. One of the small pleasures that can be taken at the end of every season is the wailing and gnashing of teeth of those that simply can’t adjust to their new, reduced circumstances, as their (often expensively-assembled) teams fail yet again. There are currently eight former Football League clubs in the Conference (plus current leaders Aldershot Town, whose predecessors, Aldershot FC, were league members before folding in 1992 and reforming).

Non-league football in the 1980s

4. Up For The Cups — There are two cup competitions, as well as the FA Cup. The FA Trophy is played out by the “senior” clubs — clubs from the Conference and Conference North & South, as well as the regional Isthmian, Southern and Northern Premier Leagues. The FA Vase is played by the clubs at a lower level than this. With play-offs occupying many clubs’ minds nowadays, the cups are considered less important than they used to be, although last year’s final between Kidderminster Harriers and Stevenage Borough (the first cup final to be played at the new Wembley Stadium) drew a crowd of over 53,000. These competitions suffered immeasurably when Wembley was demolished in 2001 — the finals were played at the likes of Villa Park and White Hart Lane, but crowds fell massively. It’s hoped that the lure of a final at the rebuilt Wembley will continue to be a pull for supporters.

5. The Non-League Experience — Especially below the Conference, it’s vastly different to the Premier League and Football League. Entrance fees range for £3-4 at the very bottom to £13-15 in the Conference, and crowds are often unsegregated, meaning that supporters will “change ends” at half-time to stand behind the goal that their teams are attacking. The vast majority of grounds will have seating on one side only, and many lack covered terracing behind the goals. The clubhouse is also very important. Usually situated next to the ground, one can drink until five minutes before kick-off, half-time and after the match (and at some grounds, such as Conference South club Lewes, during the match — their clubhouse overlooks the pitch). A sizeable number of people go to non-league football for the social side of it as much as anything else.

6. Money’s Too Tight To Mention — Non-league clubs perennially struggle for money. There is precious little sponsorship, so most revenue comes on match days from gate receipts, bar takings, food and raffle tickets. One or two teams seem to fall by the wayside every season, yet there always seem to be more to take their place. Some boom and bust — they get taken over by a local made good who over-stretches their finances buying in players that their budget can’t afford, leaving them to flounder when the going gets tough. It is a far from ideal model for ownership or stewardship and it fails far more than it succeeds, but the short-sightedness of most non-league football supporters means that if you asked most of them what they’d like more than anything, they’d answer “a millionaire benefactor” without even thinking it. There are trust-run clubs which run on a more even financial keel, but these are still comparatively thin on the ground.

Mangotsfield vs. Taunton, F.A. Cup, 2007

7. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow — There’s certainly a case to be made that, at least partly due to the flakier nature of their finances, non-league clubs often don’t have the same stability and durability as Football League clubs. If they get in trouble, banks will be more wary of propping them up and a small, poor club which owns its own ground is always at risk of the unwelcome attentions of asset-strippers and property developers. The collapse of a chairman’s business can result in a brush with closure. Some of the biggest non-league names of the last fifty years, such as Hendon, Enfield and Dulwich Hamlet (and it’s no coincidence that all three of these clubs are from London, where land values are amongst the highest in Europe) have all endured ongoing crises (culminating, in the case of Enfield, in the ground being sold, and the supporters breaking away to form their own club). Still, non-league clubs can be durable and adaptable. Mergers are often preferred to two clubs near each other closing — this week’s FA Cup heroes, Havant & Waterlooville, are a merged club.

8. Over The Hill — Now that the average Premier League player can make enough money in five years to retire, it’s less common to see former stars seeing out their last days, but there are still a few knocking about. The former Blackburn player Jeff Kenna (a Premier League winner in 1995), for example, still plies his trade in the Conference for Kidderminster Harriers, whilst former Wimbledon FC hero Marcus Gayle made an emotional return to AFC Wimbledon last summer, making him the only player to play for the old club in both the Premier League and the new club in the Isthmian League.

9. Watch Out For Gimmicks — The chairman of the Conference, John Moules, said weekend he would like to end 0-0 draws with penalty shoot-outs, believing it would bring people back to non-league football. If this had been suggested at a higher level, it would have provoked an outcry, but most people that know non-league football merely rolled their eyes and sighed. Non-league football has always been used for experiments, going back to the late 1940s, when the first floodlit matches in Britain were hosted there. In the 1980s, the Conference experimented with two points for a home win and three points for an away win. In the early 1990s, the Isthmian League allowed FIFA to run a year long experiment replacing throw-ins with kick-ins (half of the teams refused to take part, and carrying on throwing the ball on, the other half used every kick-in as an experiment to boot the ball as far down the pitch as possible). As we speak, the Conference is the only English league to have a salary cap, meaning that clubs can spend no more than 60% of their previous two years’ turnover on wages.

10. Father Knows Best — Parochialism rules the roost in non-league football. Having been fairly closely involved in it over the years, I know that a large number of the people involved are conservative to the point of paralysis, that some are utterly incompetent at their jobs and that there many people in senior positions at numerous clubs who are only interested in protecting their little fiefdoms. The irony is that non-league football is in an ideal position to capitalise on the malaise surrounding professional football. It has the potential to be able to offer a more competitive, cheaper, community-focussed alternative to “big” football. Whether the people running it have the wherewithal to seize that particular nettle, however, is a highly intractable question, as Dave recently explored on this site.

Photo credits: crouchy_crouch; Running in Suffolk; mo davies

They reside in the Southern League Division One Midlands, which according to Bill’s map of the English football pyramid, puts them in the eighth tier. Their opponents today, Cardiff, were six tiers higher.

The F.A. Cup visits Chasetown

Chasetown’s fans can be more than proud of their team, who took a shock seventeenth minute lead against Cardiff before eventually losing 3-1 in front of 2,000 at the Scholars Ground. There’s a wonderful photo gallery of Chasetown here.

Photo credit: Slightning on Flickr

Weymouth 2, Bury 2. FA Cup 1st Round, 12th November 2006, Wessex Stadium

The last five years as an AFC Wimbledon fan have immersed me in non-League football. Up to then, I thought of non-League in much the same way as many who have not fully experienced it. Corinthian amateurs playing for the love of it, fans united in pursuit of survival rather than unrealistic dreams of global domination, officials motivated by simple service rather than power-brokering and politicking.

There is much of the non-League story about which English football can be justly proud. The depth of competitive football across the country is something that truly marks it out from many, many other countries and that is in no small part thanks to the unpaid hours put in by supporters all over the country. The culture of personal sacrifice, or pitching in for the greater good with no reward other than just making sure a team can take the park and the punters can pay over the turnstile.

But there is another side to the game which is less than admirable. I consider myself a friend of non-League football, and occasionally, friends have to tell people some home truths that might seem harsh. Like friends in our personal lives, I hope that people understand they are motivated by a desire to see the game improve and become what it could so easily be.

The Challenge of Non-League Football

It is important to recognise at the start the obstacles many clubs have to deal with. They are trying to compete against people with better resources, better access to the media and more pull with unaffiliated football fans. There is a justified sense of resentment at the way in which the better appointed within the game seem to go out of their way to make life difficult, such as with the scheduling of European matches.

But the idea that if some things from ‘big football’ simply disappeared life would become good is both untrue and dangerous. It stops the microscope being turned inwards to see what problems lie there.

For starters, there is a simple reason why non-League topics do not get coverage on national and regional TV or newspapers. Clubs outside the top six in the Premiership can make the same claim, and with more people watching the Football League clubs each year than the Premiership, it is a justified grievance. But below the bottom tier of the Football League, the lack of coverage reflects the reality of the audience’s interests, not bias against the non-League game.

Take midweek matches. There is absolutely no chance of the bigger clubs holding a moratorium on week night fixtures. Therefore smaller clubs would be better advised to try to work out why people prefer their sofas and TV than vainly hoping for the European Cup will revert to its old knock-out format.

Now, I’m sure that some would cite a chicken and egg argument here. The lack of coverage the non-League game gets does contribute to the lack of profile the top flight gets for free in every daily newspaper. But regardless of what came first, the top flight is not going to forego coverage, and nor are the newspapers about to radically re-appraise their policy.

Changing Non-League Football

Change is going to have to come from below. And that change might include the ‘exclusive’ atmosphere that some clubs cultivate. Make no bones about it — following non-League sides is a labour of love. To keep the faith in the face of the rival fare on offer, the facilities provided and the length of journeys involved requires an uncommon sense of attachment. But maybe this virtue is also a potential problem?

Let me explain. If football fandom is obsessional, to extend the metaphor, non-League is a little kinky. It is an acquired taste, and like stilton, black olives and real ale, things that need effort to be acquired will always be minority pursuits in competition to the blandness of the mass-market cheddars and lagers.

But in an environment where the very existence of a club is permanently in doubt, what tastes are people being invited to acquire?

The Siege Mentality

When some Manchester United fans intimated they were thinking of starting their own team (ultimately FC United), many in non-League criticised them. Why did they not all start watching nearby Altrincham or Droylsden? The point is that the whole reason they wanted to start again was because they were annoyed at having someone steal their club. The last thing they wanted was to do the same to others.

More cynically, officials of one club effectively offered to sell FC United their league place in the Conference as long as they played in that town, an offer the FC United board immediately refused. At AFC Wimbledon, some long-standing officials of Kingstonian intimated that a merger between the two clubs would make most sense.

Sadly, the fans of both FC United and AFC Wimbledon continue to be on the end of grumpy letters in the Non-League Paper and on various internet forums. The main crime they appear to have committed, though, is simply to be new. They have not got the battle scars from flirting with extinction, nor the enamel badges of the glorious FA Trophy run to the semi-finals way back in the day.

Through my day job I have been lucky enough to travel the country working with fans at the 45 non-League clubs who now have a Supporters’ Trust, and through Wimbledon I have seen a lot more clubs. At many there is something there that looks like a siege mentality. There seems to be a lingering passive-aggressive sense that everyone is being measured by how much — or how little — they are doing for the cause. Are they a real fan? Do they do enough?

Let’s imagine you have moved to an area with a small non-League club. You don’t want to go to the professional club up the road; you like the idea of non-League football and you’re attracted to a place without the exploitative attitude prevalent higher up the leagues.

You’ll find that the price to get in will more than likely be over £10, which surprises you, as the place looks and feels ramshackle. The toilets are pretty basic and you might see fixtures and fittings well past their useful life, victims of one-too-many cutbacks on year-end maintenance having to be shelved through lack of funds.

You’ll be asked to add to your spending for a burger that is often unedifying and potentially unhealthy. There is the commemorative badge to buy, the collection of old programmes to peruse, the Race Night to go to, the end of season fundraiser to turn out for. There is an all-pervading sense of this club having to practically suck money out of people over and above the basics of a match ticket and a cup of tea.

So you contribute but wonder why, despite this, the club seems to be living hand-to-mouth and whether things could perhaps be improved on the cost control side of things, with every bill a crisis waiting to explode. You are told — like an article of faith — that the board and the officials are tremendous chaps who work ever so hard and have done for years. The fact that the benefits of their efforts are not particularly clear is neither here nor there.

The Supporters’ Club often do not seem interested as there is a raffle to organise, and ultimately one would not want to annoy the directors by asking difficult questions. What if they stop the players attending the end-of-the-season function organised by the Supporters’ Club? The whole thing feels like a fund-raising scheme that occasionally plays a match and you would be forgiven for deciding that it is not for you.

Best keep to oneself darker thoughts about rampant egos of many of the people who have become owners or Chairmen of non-League clubs, musings about why people are prepared to get involved in this level, about the status of the loans the board makes, and whether the ground is being lined up for redevelopment.

The Endless Crisis

It has been going on so long that many simply accept this as the natural order of things. Every few years, the budgets get blasted apart, a crisis ensues, and new local worthies come forward. They run the club the same way as their predecessors, the debts build up and there is a crisis again a bit later leading to a new set of worthies coming forward. Repeat again and again, with a ground sale and new stadium thrown in every generation or so.

Except each time, a little bit more of the club dies. A few more supporters disappear, and a few other potential fans walk away. And a strategy for success that seems to be based on importing the worst features of the professional game will never resolve it.

There is a palpable sense that so many clubs are so desperate for success, so desperate for an end to the incessant work and fund-raising that they will be grateful for any benefactor in a storm, who often as not will leave a few years hence. To paraphrase the Life of Brian, fans say “you’re the saviour of the club, and we should know, since we’ve followed a few!”

The days when non-League football could regularly get five-figure crowds have gone, as have the clubs who were best placed to get those types of crowds, most of them having become league clubs over the last 40 years.

Community Clubs

The only path to success for non-League clubs is to truly re-orientate themselves as community clubs: owned by their communities and run by them, not by an assorted collection of businessmen of dubious strategic vision, nor giants of the local football scene who have been doing it their way for so long that they have forgotten that new ideas are always needed. All of this is, of course, dependent on a volunteer army of well-meaning fans who have for too long acted as though it is tantamount to treason to ask that their love and loyalty be rewarded with a meaningful stake in the club, and a say in how it is run.

Non-League football — away from the hype and greed of the professional game — is well placed to enjoy a renaissance as people want to see their local club and be filled with pride at being able to identify as a supporter of it. As fans of AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester have shown, people who have enjoyed the Premiership can find a lot more to cherish further down.

But for it to happen, the current generation have to change the vibe. There are good times waiting to happen across the country if supporters can grasp the opportunity to make it happen and take on real involvement themselves. Time to get the party started!

Photo credits: Jon Hall; hugovk; twohundredpercent; mo davies