The tiny English football club about to have its shot at stardom thanks to two American billionaires

Telegraph

28-02-2025

Opposition players don't exactly receive a warm welcome when they line up to play Real Bedford. At the Ledger Stadium (more a ground with two dozen seats under a cover), the tunnel (more a short corridor in the prefab clubhouse) from the changing rooms is painted jet black, with baleful graffiti scrawled over the top in blood red, ultraviolet paint. In the hours leading up to kick off, the whole thing vibrates with heavy metal music turned up to 11.
Bobbing his head to the screams, the club chairman and co-owner, Peter McCormack, grins widely. 'Bit different, innit?' he yells. On the wall behind him, a Rage Against the Machine lyric catches the eye: 'WE DON'T NEED THE KEY, WE'LL BREAK IN!' Welcome, then, to the most eccentric football club in Britain. They won't be for everyone, but then again, which team is?
It's a nippy Tuesday evening under the lights. Real Bedford – that's 'Real' pronounced the Spanish way – are currently top of the eighth-tier Southern League Division One Central, and the visitors tonight, poor old Aylesbury United, shouldn't trouble them. 'Oh, we're expected to win,' McCormack says. 'This is actually a rematch, when we first played them we had a floodlight failure when we were 2-0 up with 20 minutes to go. You get 15 minutes to put them back on or the game has to be abandoned.'
Just five years ago, Bedford FC, as it was known, was a barely-existent football club in the tenth tier of English football. A few dozen people turned up to matches, the club's turnover was meagre and the coffers were empty. McCormack then bought it, changed the name and branding, including making Real Bedford 'the world's first Bitcoin club', and last week finalised an investment deal to the tune of £3.6 million – the largest ever in non-league football – from US twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency billionaires perhaps best known for founding an antecedent to Facebook.
'One of them, I'm pretty sure it was Tyler, originally said he wants me to get the club in the Premier League,' McCormack, 46, says. That's the long-term goal. The medium-term goal is to get into the Football League – meaning the three divisions below the Championship – within a decade. The short term goal is to be promoted at the end of this season for a record-equalling third consecutive year. And the very short term goal is to beat Aylesbury tonight. Ultimately, any goals would do.
Real Bedford is a curious story, and one the gregarious and elaborately tattooed McCormack enjoys telling. Like all promising follies, it begins with the words 'what happened was, I got divorced'. To offer the short version, McCormack, born and raised in Bedford, was once in advertising, took a year off to care for his unwell mother, then decided to start a podcast about Bitcoin.
He started becoming interested in the cryptocurrency as an ad-man, 'when I was buying cocaine on the internet'. But that's enough about that – 'I haven't done drugs in over a decade, [using Bitcoin] was just the safest way to get it.'
McCormack is a football fan, and 'always wondered why we didn't have a team here in Bedford that was in the Football League'. He dreamed of seeing people in the local club's scarves and shirts streaming through town on a Saturday, and having a little local pride through sport.
Having made decent money from investments and his podcast, in 2021 he tried to buy the historic Bedford Town FC but was turned away. Fortunately he had other options close by. Specifically, 25 metres across the carpark from where Bedford Town FC play. There, Bedford FC was based.
'I've never disclosed how much I paid, but it wasn't a lot,' he says, sitting in a store room full of training equipment at the clubhouse. Understandably, there was always confusion between the two Bedford clubs, so he set about changing the identity of his new venture. 'I was in Miami at the time and watching David Beckham's Inter Miami. I liked what he'd done there, so I came up with Real Bedford. I thought it was kind of funny and people won't forget it.'
He made the shirts a lairy marmalade orange, introduced heavy metal aesthetics wherever he could, and made the club's new nickname 'The Pirates' – a moniker reflecting the skull and crossbones iconography McCormack already favoured. Bedford is around 95 miles from the sea. He may mean online pirating. Are they plundering the rich?
'Well, we never actually thought of ourselves as The Pirates, that was a former player, then the players started singing pirate songs on a social. So we said, OK, we're The Pirates. But look at me, I've got a skull tattooed on my hands, they're up my arms…'
They also became the crypto club. Where you'd normally see a club's founding date on its badge, Real Bedford's has the words 'est. block 712003' – the first Real Bedford trace on the blockchain. Much of the club's money is held in Bitcoin. You can buy anything, even a Bovril in the clubhouse, using it. 'I thought if I made us 'the Bitcoin team' it'd enable us to create a commercial model. The only difference between being a tier 10 team and getting up to the Premier League is having the money and infrastructure to do it. Football is simply a business.'
McCormack has the gift of the gab, but he's also clearly a very shrewd businessman, prodigious fundraiser and surprisingly – to some – sensible about the investment he does get. Thanks to his own money, various sponsorships he's attracted from crypto and other tech companies, and the Winklevoss cash (which was actually paid in Bitcoin), Real Bedford is now sitting on a kitty of £6 million.
'I consider that money a slush fund. The first season we were profitable, the second season we were profitable, this year we'll lose a bit of money because we've had a lot of costs.' Among those was the establishment of an instantly successful women's side.' Then next season if we want to get promoted again, the cost of player recruitment will probably be ahead of what our turnover will be,' he says. 'So I can look at that and say, 'Well, OK, maybe we will lose £200-300,000 next year to get promotion, but let's do it because we have 6 million on our balance sheet. It's like a start-up.'
With half an hour until kick-off, the clubhouse is starting to fill with fans of all ages and genders. Pints are poured, tea's served, hot dogs are consumed. McCormack, who greets every fan personally, and delivers food and drink stock, or whatever is required, in his blacked-out Range Rover, is on hand to press the flesh.
His chairman's letter in the matchday programme is always worth a read. In December, the FA fined him £30 for 'improper conduct' after it noticed a photo of him brandishing a rifle had accompanied the letter in every programme for months. He has now replaced it with a mocked up photograph of him at the controls of a tank. 'Ridiculous,' McCormack says. 'They said I was making guns look cool. But guns are cool. It's shooting people that's not.'
One thing we must understand, he says, is that the Winklevoss situation is not like the glorious rags-to-riches transformation of Wrexham AFC, where Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are both co-owners and the face of the operation. McCormack, the home-grown everyman, is very much the face. He's also the engine.
The Winklevoss twins would be colourful faces, mind. Once Olympic rowers, in 2004 they sued Mark Zuckerberg, receiving $65 million as a settlement, in a case that formed the basis of the David Fincher film The Social Networ k. They've since gone on to become billionaires anyway, largely thanks to founding their own cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini. It's now a sponsor of Real Bedford.
McCormack met the twins five years ago through his Bitcoin podcast, which they also sponsor. Later, over drinks in Miami, he wooed them by explaining the elaborate, aspirational nature of the English football pyramid – anathema to Americans, whose professional sport is notoriously lacking in jeopardy.
He told them he planned to buy his local club and, using Bitcoin, get them to climb the leagues towards playing clubs even the Winklevosses might have heard of. They agreed to become a sponsor, then gave McCormack a couple of years to get the hang of it, before agreeing to invest big last year. Not that a few million is a huge risk: each twin is worth around £2.1 billion. Their accountants may not have even noticed yet.
Engineer manager Craig Barton, 41, drives 10 minutes down the road to every single Real Bedford match, home and away, usually with his 11-year-old son, Archie. 'It's decent football, good to watch. I'll be honest, I don't know a lot about Bitcoin, but the branding… who doesn't like a pirate? I think it's great, it attracts attention. The formula without the investment was there, we're doing well, but the funding just helps us progress quicker. And it's got to be good for the town as well.'
It's very much a family affair: McCormack's 20-year-old son, Connor, is his vice-chairman; his brother, Neil, is the club secretary; their dad's the kit man. The CEO, Emma Firman, grew up with McCormack. Her son, Seb Hendrix, is the media officer. Fans' teenage kids work behind the bar. A clique of opposition fans gravitate to a corner, looking on enviously.
'That's the best thing about the club: the community we bring, the journey everyone's coming on. It's great to see old faces, new faces, people want to come and support a team that's winning, that's up-and-coming. It's what I love about it, at any age, everyone's generous,' Firman, 44, says.
As kick-off nears, we make the short walk to the pitch, where perhaps 150 people have come out to watch. The Ledger Stadium is hemmed on one side by one of the largest abattoirs in the UK, and on another by the A421, which connects Bedford to the rest of the country. Are they heading for the slaughter, or going places? The answer might lie in what happens with their other neighbours. McCormack is in advanced talks to merge Real Bedford with Bedford Town FC, who play in the division above.
'We're the two closest clubs in the country, with similar ambitions. Only one club, I think, will be able to make that, and it'll become a war of attrition. Our balance sheet says we're in a healthier position to do this.' Bedford Town, who know they cannot compete with the crypto cash or McCormack's sheer verve, have accepted his offer, meaning the two could be one club as early as next year following formal merger talks, which are currently underway having opened last month.
As the teams arrive, McCormack stands next to a speaker and uses his phone to play a sea shanty at full blare. 'Cos we're The Pirates!' he shouts to me, beer in hand. Fans, huddling against the barrier as the temperature plummets, bellow their support as the referee's whistle blows.
Within minutes, Aylesbury go ahead. Bedford – sorry, Real – pull one back. Aylesbury score on the break again. The rest of the first half is a cagey, muddy affair. 'You've f------ jinxed us!' McCormack yells in my direction at half time. But he remains confident. He always remains confident.
'Pass and move, pass and move, it's fantastic football down here,' says Phil Janes, 58, a commercial director for a local construction company. He's swathed in Real Bedford merchandise. 'Pete's a local lad, I really like his style. So we've switched allegiances.
'I've lived in Bedford for 30-odd years and it's just lovely to see someone who wants local stuff improved. He's trying to help people out, people fulfill their dreams. I don't know anything about Bitcoin or this big investment, but it's a bit of fun for some decent football. Pete's got a passion, got a plan, he wants to go places.'
In the end, the home side come from behind twice to beat Aylesbury 3-2. The march to a third promotion beats on, and McCormack hasn't even touched the Winklevoss millions yet. But in Bedford, the real revolution's still to come.
'A lot of people say, 'What's the scam here? What's the scam you're playing?' There is no scam. We're working all day every day to do everything we can to make this football club a success. But because they don't understand Bitcoin, they think something weird's going on,' McCormack says.
On the gates at the Ledger Stadium is a hand-painted sign: 'THIS HOUSE BELIEVES'. And nobody more than the chairman. 'I'm proud to be from Bedford. We're essentially a nothing town. Why would you come to Bedford normally?' That grin again. 'Now, we have two billionaires who've invested in the local football club. There's a reason for people to visit the town.'