Latest news with #EqualityFC
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
'Woke' football club beg fans for £120,000 to escape going bust after becoming the only team to pay their women's team the same as their men
Lewes FC have begged fans to help raise £120,000 amid a desperate effort to avoid going bust. The East Sussex side, which has been labelled ' woke ' for providing equal pay for both genders, issued an urgent plea for financial support 'to keep the club running' as they struggle to maintain their ground. Lewes, described as 'the world's first and only equal football club' are known for being the only side to pay their women the same as the men, having done so since 2017. In a remarkable appeal, the community owned club admitted they had only 'just' survived last season but need extra cash to maintain their pitch at their stadium The Dripping Ground, pay utility bills develop the club's hospitality. They revealed that 'cash was tight' and they are dealing with 'financial challenges' after their women's team were relegated from the Women's Championship, the second tier, last year. They added that despite having a 'better-than-break-even season' last campaign, the next few weeks could be crucial and will 'shape the future' of the club for 'next season and beyond'. Fans could support them by making becoming an owner, buying a season ticket, sponsoring its teams, or making a donation, the club said. Lewes announced their equality drive eight years ago and it paid immediate dividends, with the women's side selected for the Women's Championship in the 2018/19 season. Their 'Equality FC' campaign vowed to 'put an end to the excuses for why such a deep pay disparity has persisted in our sport'. The women's team will compete in the third tier next season, in the same league as Bournemouth and Watford, while the men feature in the Isthmian Football League's premier division, level seven on the pyramid. Lewes were handed a £750,000 grant for a new pitch from the Premier League Stadium Fund but the cost of professional women's football has challenged the club. Financial difficulties largely comes as a result of a reliance of director loans. Although the women's team have thrived since the equality campaign, it has caused some division at the club In a blistering resignation letter, former board member Barry Collins wrote: 'I joined a football club and feel like I'm leaving a political party.' He added: 'The club has become overwhelmed by the single issue of the equality campaign.' Collins, chair of the their supporters club, told Telegraph Sport he was not 'ideologically opposed to equality' but 'ideologically opposed to spending that much money that the club doesn't have'. Lewes said their current appeal would be 'the last time we will need to ask for financial support and donations like this' and that they have 'managed to transform our operating budget and our entire management processes.' They added women's football is in 'severe need of change' due to clubs 'defaulting their league status', while non-league men's football is 'ultra competitive and every penny counts'.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
The football club that went woke is going broke
They became famous for being the first – and still only – football club to pay their women's team the same as their men's. But almost eight years after launching their 'Equality FC' campaign, Lewes have admitted they now face a fight to stick to that landmark commitment and even 'to keep the club running' this summer. In an extraordinary appeal to their fans they have revealed they need £120,000 to get through to the start of next season after only 'just' making it to the end of this campaign, as well as warning 'the next few weeks' will shape their entire future. So how has it come to this for a club who had sought to 'put an end to the excuses for why such a deep pay disparity has persisted in our sport'? Is the plight of Equality FC a vindication of those behind the catchphrase 'go woke, go broke'? To find answers requires going back to when Lewes faced going bust after the 2008 global financial crisis. Until then, a side from the Sussex town best known as the bonfire capital of the world had barely registered on the national stage, having spent their entire existence outside the professional game since being founded in 1885. After staving off a bankruptcy petition by HM Revenue & Customs, the club were taken into fan ownership 15 years ago as a Community Benefit Society, led by six supporters – calling themselves Rooks125 – who included some well-off benefactors. Having been relegated from what is now the National League the year before the takeover, the men's team suffered two further demotions under the new regime over the subsequent six years. In stark contrast, the women's team, formed in 2002 as Lewes Ladies, was thriving on the field and made it all the way to the third tier, following the merger with the men's side in 2014. Groundbreaking equality drive But the July 2017 announcement that they would become the first club to pay their men's and women's teams equally really put Lewes on the footballing map. As well as pledging to equalise the five-figure budget of both sides, they said they would provide the same resource for coaching and other staff, upgrade equipment and facilities, and invest in local grass roots to drive participation by boys and girls. The landmark news made headlines nationwide and beyond amid an explosion of interest in the women's game driven by England's Lionesses and the Women's Super League. It also came just two years after it emerged England men's captain Wayne Rooney was earning £300,000 per week compared to the £65,000 a year netted by women's counterpart Steph Houghton. As is common with the announcement of many equality drives, there was little public scrutiny at the time about the practicality of such a policy – although it would later emerge that this had caused a split amongst Lewes' board of directors. The move appeared to pay off spectacularly for the women's team when, despite having played only regional football since being established, they were subsequently chosen to join the new Women's Championship. Any fears the men's team would suffer as a result looked unfounded when they were promoted that same season to the Isthmian League Premier Division. Sponsors and Prosecco on tap 'Equality FC' helped attract sponsors such as Kappa, Marsden and Brighton and Hove Buses as the club introduced the likes of on-tap Prosecco, turned a beach hut (their version of a corporate box) into a nail bar, held chanting practice before women's matches and staged suffragette flash mobs. Lewes also began lobbying the Football Association to provide equal prize money in the men's and women's FA Cups. Within two years, they had quadrupled average women's attendances from around 120, including a record 1,958 for a league game against Manchester United. 'I joined a football club – I'm leaving a political party' But, despite soaring revenues, it was their efforts to compete with the relative financial might of the likes of United and Tottenham Hotspur that saw the first cracks emerge in the club's commitment to 'Equality FC'. Since coming under fan control, and without sufficient supporter owners to make them self-sustaining, Lewes had been relying on hundreds of thousands of pounds of loans from directors which were then written off. Those loans began to balloon after 2017 and, in September 2019, matters came to a head when one of the men who had helped rescue the club a decade earlier quit the board. In a scathing blog post explaining why, Barry Collins said he had become 'convinced that much of the hard work I and others had put in to building the club's reputation had been needlessly squandered'. He added: 'The club has become overwhelmed by the single issue of the equality campaign. I joined a football club and feel like I'm leaving a political party. 'I had my doubts about the pay parity initiative, I still do – my side bet is it will be abandoned as impractical once either of the first teams is promoted without the other. The equality campaign has become an internal crusade that trumps all else. 'A couple of directors suggested it should be the board's 'priority' to attend a literary festival the club was running an equality event at, instead of a game at Margate on the same day. My view was that we were running a football club, not a think-tank. 'There are some board members who can't seem to accept that some people's primary motivation for being part of a football club is the football, not the club's politics. In the end, I felt it best to go, rather than risk further confrontation.' Women's professionalism simply too costly Collins is chair of the Lewes FC Supporters Club and, asked by Telegraph Sport about his resignation, he stressed he had not been 'ideologically opposed to equality' but 'ideologically opposed to spending that much money that the club doesn't have'. He admitted that one of the ironies of Equality FC was that the second-tier women's team became more expensive to run than the seventh-tier men's due to the cost of creeping professionalisation in the Championship. Yet the commitment had remained to provide both with the same budget and, as the coronavirus crisis struck, Lewes continued to rely on written-off director loans. So much so that, by the summer of 2023, more than £2 million had been pumped into the club since Equality FC was launched. Almost two thirds of that was provided in 2021-22 and 2022-2023 by two outgoing board members, Ed Ramsden and Charlie Dobres, who were never likely to be able to keep bankrolling the club. Lewes were still being feted for 'Equality FC', including receiving a number of diversity awards, not harmed by providing a home at their 3,000-capacity stadium, The Dripping Pan, to a 10ft statue of two 18th century bisexual female pirates. They were also handed a £750,000 grant via the Premier League Stadium Fund for a new carpet-hybrid pitch at the ground. And, in arguably the biggest match in their history, they hosted United in the quarter-final of the 2023 Women's FA Cup in front of a record 2,801 crowd. 'A never-ending cycle of boom and bust' Financial salvation, and more, then appeared to arrive in the shape of a proposed takeover of the women's team by Mercury 13 as part of a £79.1 million investment into clubs worldwide. But this proved even more divisive, with Collins part of a group of eight former board members – including one of the original six behind the CBS – writing an open letter opposing the move. It read: 'Over the past few years, the club has sacrificed sustainability at the expense of chasing on-field success. The investment has driven the women's team to unprecedented heights. But competing with clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool has come at a considerable financial cost. 'Directors' donations have climbed steeply over the past five years. In the last financial year alone, one director donated £600,000. That level of donations simply isn't sustainable. 'We believe the answer is not to return to private ownership, with all the risks that entails. Instead, we believe the answer is to remain a 100 per cent community-owned club that finds its natural place in the football pyramid. Private ownership leads almost every football club in the UK through a never-ending cycle of boom and bust. And usually leaves supporters as powerless bystanders and the townsfolk as the bank of last resort.' Takeover and investment plans shelved The deal was put to a vote of the club's 2,573 fan owners and although 67.8 per cent of those who participated were in favour, turnout was just 42 per cent, sparking concerns there was not enough support for the move. It was abandoned, with Lewes even citing the fact that it would have contravened their 'core principles of equality' because it would have resulted in a cash bonanza for the women but nothing for the men. The club later announced it was 'seeking legal advice' over a 'potential conflict of interest' during the Mercury 13 talks, which Telegraph Sport has been told did not find any wrongdoing. Things were also going awry on the field for the women's team, who found themselves in a relegation dogfight which they lost in April last year despite a crowd of 2,614 cheering them on against eventual champions Crystal Palace. That spelt the end of almost £500,000-a-year of FA funding and television revenue and, without access to the director loans that had sustained them, the club slashed their budget for the women's and – therefore correspondingly – the men's teams. By then, not even record average league attendances for both sides could mask the plight facing Lewes and there were calls for the Equality FC campaign to be scrapped, including from Dobres's wife, Karen, a former club director who had been instrumental in promoting it. She and others advocated a move to what they called 'equity', which would involve the women's team being given a bigger budget than the men's in the hope both would ultimately benefit. Instead, Lewes recently floated the idea of launching an investment scheme from which owners could make a financial return but the plans, which contravened the principles under which the CBS had been founded, were quickly abandoned. That was towards the end of a season in which Lewes Women finished sixth in the 12-team National League Premier Division South. The men's team ended the campaign 13th in the 22-team Isthmian Premier. 'You are required to live beyond your means' Lewes's appeal for donations followed less than a month later in an open letter published on their website. It was written by Joe Short, who joined the board a year and a half earlier. Telling Telegraph Sport 'no one's really sure' what would happen if the money did not materialise, he was nevertheless confident the threat to Lewes was not existential. He added: 'It means that we have to shrink to such an extent that our playing budgets would just be relegation budgets.' He also said there were no immediate plans to abandon Equality FC, which had brought income and attention to the club, and that the club were victims of what had become 'aggressively high' licensing requirements at the summit of women's football. Those requirements saw Blackburn Rovers become the second club to withdraw from the Championship in the past two seasons – after Reading did so last year – and Wolverhampton Wanderers chose not to submit an application to join the division. 'You are required to kind of live beyond your means in order to stay in the top two divisions,' Short added. 'We fear it is turning into a template of the men's game, where you lose money year after year.' Collins, meanwhile, had a blunt assessment of what would happen if Lewes failed to raise the money needed this summer. 'It's a business,' he said. 'If you can't pay your bills, you potentially face administration or insolvency.' He also warned they needed to 'stand on their own two feet', even if that meant being unable to 'compete against the Arsenals and Man Uniteds'. He added: 'We just want a club to go to on a weekend.'
