This article by Paul Hayward taking in full from The Observer, 22nd August. We found it interesting and thought you would too. It fits in what we at SportTrades aim to do for Grassroots football and sport in general.
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Article by Paul Hayward taking in full from our friends at The Observer.
It would make a compelling film, but screenwriter Patrick Marber's move into football club ownership is not about Hollywood-sized egos, it is about a community pulling together.
One rainy day last autumn the playwright and actor Patrick Marber went home to his wife and said: "I have some bad news."
Marber, who wrote the Hollywood hit Closer and first made his name in comedy alongside Steve Coogan, had succumbed to a contagion now spreading across Britain. "I'd got involved," he explains. As the wife of a writer who had dissected the dark urges of gamblers in his play Dealer's Choice, the actress Debra Gillett must have braced herself for a grim confession. What Marber had discovered was the thrill of local non-League football. His enthusiasm for Lewes in East Sussex was to help add another name to the growing legion of community-owned clubs.
At the symbolic pinnacle of supporter power stand Barcelona: a non-profit making Catalan association of 180,000 members, 53,000 of whom voted in this year's presidential elections. In Germany most Bundesliga clubs are owned by their supporters. In the Premier League free-for-all that has treated us to Thaksin Shinawatra, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and the Portsmouth scandal, extreme laissez-faire economics are the context to a shift lower down to co-operative ownership of the sort embraced by Marber and Lewes, who drew an attendance of 601 to a 2-1 victory over Thurrock in the Blue Square South at the Dripping Pan in midweek.
In their 125th year, the Rooks fended off bankruptcy to become Lewes Community Football Club, thus joining AFC Wimbledon, FC United of Manchester and Exeter City, among others, as collective entities. The government-backed Supporters Direct lead the way in encouraging mutual ownership and the pioneers assist fellow clubs in the transfer of power from business people to fans.
Marber says: "It's a tiny bit of a trend, isn't it, with AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester? Charlie [Dobre, a fellow director] got Supporters Direct down and we had a meeting in the bar with Andy Walsh of FC United [their general manager], who was inspirational. He made us feel it could be done."
Arsenal, Marber's other team, joined the tide in a small way this week by launching a Fanshare scheme to enable supporters to buy a stake in the club in affordable slices. At the elite end, fan unrest is driven by disgust at the high price of leveraged buy-outs and questionable governance. Though Lewes have granted free admission to children for all league games and have donated their shirt sponsorship to the local Lewes Victoria Hospital and the NSPCC, Marber is in no rush to pose as a campaigner against Premier League greed and exploitation.
"In showbiz I've seen it all. I'm in a very sleazy business myself," he says. So which is worse: top-level football or the film trade? "I think they're neck and neck. It's the same in movies, You meet a lot of strange people who want to put their money in and get a slice of the pie. I've taken many a meeting like that. That's fine. That is the business. Football is showbiz. It attracts people who want to flash the cash around.
"I don't begrudge the footballers earning their big money because I'm in movies and the movie actors earn big money. Half the time we can't get our movies made without them."
A masterly comic writer whose work on The Day Today and with Coogan on the Alan Partridge shows preceded a move into high-end theatre, Marber is armed to respond to the accusation that Lewes, from a town of 16,000 an hour's walk from Brighton and Hove Albion's new Falmer Community Stadium, have been taken over by thespians. "Only two of us are showbiz, only me and Ben Ward [another director], so that's one-third of the board [the writer and the International Federation of Poker president, Anthony Holden, is another patron, as, to declare an interest, is this correspondent]. There are 50 or so benefactors, there are actors, but there are tons of Lewes people. It's not just my lot, my friends are showbiz people – that's who I've managed to squeeze money out of."
The joy of non-League football is proximity, authenticity, an absence of graft and greed, and, in Lewes's case, a chance to gather behind the goal with a pint of Harveys, the local nectar, and talk to old friends while the South Downs frame the efforts of a mostly homegrown side. Against Thurrock, Lewes finished the match with four under-18s.
Aficionados everywhere will recognise the charm of clubs where everyone seems to know each other and the eyes must be averted from the aimless agricultural clearance in the wait for the bursts of proper football that the best non-League clubs try to encourage. There is no special glamour attached to the presence of so many creative folk on the terraces at the Dripping Pan but the "velvet revolution" that transferred control from a well-meaning but cash-poor ownership to a community benefit society is a template.
Marber takes up the story of his own involvement: "I had been living in Sussex for about three years and had always meant to come down to the Dripping Pan with my son to watch Lewes. We came to our first game at the beginning of last season and I just had the best time I'd had at a football match for years, in terms of a very pure footballing experience.
"Obviously, I'd enjoyed greatly supporting Arsenal for years and still do but in terms of the game it just reawakened my love, reminded me why as a kid I'd loved watching and playing it.
"And being close to the pitch: I'd forgotten what it was like to be close, and to hear the players and the ref and the linesman, and feel the atmosphere in a completely different way, because I realised that sitting at the Emirates Stadium you experience the atmosphere by proxy, through the crowd, because you're one of them, whereas here you're kind ofin it.
"So I thought: 'Great, we're going to carry on coming, we're going to support Lewes FC as well as Arsenal, this is a good thing.' I went on the website to find out more about the club I was now going to support and found out it was in dire peril. It owed HMRC [Revenue & Customs] about a hundred grand at that point and there were messages on the website from the owners saying please contact us if you can help. Please contact Steve Ibbitson the manager if you can help.
"My first thought was I could afford to donate a bit of money to the club: a couple of grand or something, if that would be of help, so I phoned Steve Ibbitson and said: 'Look, I'm just a bloke who's started supporting your club and I don't want to see them go under and I do know a few people with some money who might be able to help.'
"We had a three-hour cup of tea on a very rainy day and he took the time and had the courtesy to explain to a complete stranger how the club works and how they got in this financial strait. At that time it looked in serious shit, it was going to go under.
"Once I'd met with Ibbo I was in for life. There was nothing I could do. This is a man who loves his club and he'd been working around the clock, had given his own money to the club, wasn't being paid and was just doing it for love. And I thought: 'I want to get involved with this man, with this club. I'm in.' I just couldn't stand aside. I went home to my wife and said: 'I have some bad news.'"
When Marber used the phrase "I'm in" the card schools of Dealer's Choice flew back to mind. There is idealism and flying the ensign of volunteerism and common ownership and then there is the commitment, the torched time, the drain on the £75,000 contributions fund and the fight to keep inching forward. There is addiction and survival, the last imperative. These are stresses faced by all the new community clubs, who need local people to flood in with their skills and their goodwill, and businesses to keep stumping up.
The Lewes board are still in the first throes of these obsessions and it was necessary to ask Marber whether running a football club might consume his life. He says: "It sort of has for the time being, but I'm still writing. I'm really fund-raising and talking to press, generating interest. I'm ambassadorial.
"We need plumbers, we need electricians – we certainly need more supporters – and we need people to come and make sandwiches, we need sponsorship, we need more stewards: the whole club is a volunteer club. This could be a disastrous experiment and go tits up, and just be a silly dream, or it could work fabulously, and become a model for other clubs to follow, just as we've followed AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester."
Between trips to Staines and the putting on of ties to appease tiny clubs who expect visiting directors to arrive smartly dressed, Marber is working on screenplays of his own Don Juan in Soho and Zoë Heller's The Believers. But his lunge into club management is not background for a prospective drama. "There's a fabulous play to be written about this takeover. I could write it tomorrow.
"It's not research but there's been fantastic material, as you can imagine when there are six blokes who don't really know each other at the beginning, get together to take over a football club and have to negotiate with the owners. It's very rich. But I'm not going to write about it. It's too good."
St Pauli 0-1 Hoffenheim
