LAST WEEK I wrote asking Eastbourne to come out and support this football club. On Monday, more than 800 people were at Lewes supporting Borough, and I am sure plenty will make the trip to Whitehawk for our FA Cup game this weekend.
That matters. We want this to be Eastbourne’s football club, something the town is proud of and wants to get behind.
Someone said to me this week that we are becoming the Tottenham of non league. Spent the most money and still can’t win! I laughed, although perhaps not quite as much as they did.
We have lost three games, while we are playing some really good football, having lots of the ball and creating opportunities without turning enough of that possession into goals. That will change. There is far too much quality in this squad for it not to, and I genuinely believe somebody is going to get a very good beating when it all clicks.
The players and the management care. Alan and I care. Nobody is enjoying losing football matches and nobody at this club needs reminding that ultimately, we are judged by what happens on the pitch.
This season we have attracted some amazing new partners and sponsors, who will be doing some incredible initiatives all season long. We are not resting on our laurels and as fans, we will present opportunities completely new to non-league football. Everyone is busy copying our socials, our previous ideas, we are thinking bigger and better.
But I do want to address some of the noise around the club because there is a little more to some of it than people might realise.
There are people who are angry with me and the club, and I really want to address that. Criticism comes with football and certainly comes with owning a football club.
But some of the loudest anger started when we tightened up what was happening at the turnstiles and stopped people taking advantage of the club.
People were buying discounted tickets they did not qualify for. Adults were buying children’s tickets. People who knew perfectly well what they should have been paying were deliberately paying less.
Let’s call that what it is.
If you knowingly buy a child’s ticket when you are an adult, or claim a concession you know you are not entitled to, you are taking money from the football club you claim to love.
That isn’t supporting your club. It is stealing from it.
Unsurprisingly, when we caught people doing it and stopped it, some of them didn’t like being challenged and some of the feedback and behaviour became anti-social.
Some of those people are now among the loudest critics of Alan, me and the club. It is about people being angry because they got caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.
In the first couple of games, we have also had staff abused. We have had young people working at the club sworn at by drunk supporters simply for doing their jobs. Think about that.
Young people come to work at their local football club and somehow football is supposed to make it acceptable for a grown adult to scream abuse at them.
It isn’t acceptable in a restaurant. It isn’t acceptable in a supermarket. It isn’t acceptable in an office. And it isn’t going to be acceptable at Eastbourne Borough Football Club.
I make absolutely no apology for that.
We have also seen people who were given opportunities by this club, that didn’t work out, now joining in with the criticism. Again, that is life. People can say whatever they want online – we all know the truth.
There are even people who tell everyone how much they love Borough, make media about the club, and then go and watch somebody else when we are playing. You genuinely couldn’t make some of this stuff up.
At this rate my next book might have to become a movie script.
What I won’t do is run this football club according to whoever shouts loudest on a forum or social media.
There is another group among the critics too, some of the former members of the old bowls hall.
I understand why people become attached to things and why change can be difficult, particularly when somewhere has been part of their routine for years. But I also have a responsibility to make decisions based on the future of this club, not simply preserve something because it has always been there.
The old bowls hall barely attracted less than a 100 regular users. This weekend, less than four months after opening our padel club, we welcomed our 1,000th player. One thousand different people have now come to this site to play padel.
Some are completely addicted to it and playing every week. Many had never previously had a reason to visit Eastbourne Borough Football Club.
Yet I still get abuse for making the decision.
That probably sums up the challenge of trying to change this place.
Everyone wants a successful football club. They want better players, a better pitch, better facilities and a competitive team, but some of the same people object to the decisions that can ultimately help pay for all of it.
Padel wasn’t built because it is fashionable. It was built because Eastbourne Borough cannot survive forever by losing money every week and expecting someone to keep writing cheques.
We need this site earning money seven days a week, 52 weeks of the year.
That is the whole point of the sporting village. Padel, the simulators, bars, events, sponsorship, community activity and everything else we are developing here have one fundamental purpose. To build a sustainable business around the football club so that eventually the football club can stand on its own two feet.
Football alone will not make Eastbourne Borough self sufficient. The sporting village can.
So I completely understand that some people preferred the bowls hall. I respect that. But my responsibility isn’t to preserve every part of the past regardless of its economics.
My responsibility is to make sure there is a thriving Eastbourne Borough Football Club here long into the future.
I also keep hearing the phrase, “We want our club back.”
I understand the emotion behind it. But what does having your club back actually mean? Because somebody has to pay for it.
Football at this level is extraordinarily expensive. The players who were abused on Monday still need paying on Friday. The coaches, the staff need paying. The lights need turning on. When the boiler goes again, it is my credit card that pays for it. The ground needs maintaining, insurance premiums are up again and the three officials, however well or badly you think they have performed, still need paying.
The bills arrive every single week regardless of whether we have won, lost or drawn.
This summer alone we have put a beautiful new pitch into the stadium and spent more than £300,000 improving the ground and its facilities. We are investing because we believe in where this club can go.
And here is the irony.
Some of the people shouting loudest about wanting “their club back” are the same people who apparently couldn’t work out whether they were an adult or a child. You want the responsibility for a football club costing around £150,000 every month to operate, but apparently the adult or child question is a difficult one.
So to some of those particularly loud voices, I would say this. Instead of taking money out of the club by buying tickets you aren’t entitled to, help us put some money into it.
That is what having “your club” means. It means supporting it.
I want to be very clear that none of this should overshadow the overwhelming majority of our supporters. They are fantastic.
More than 800 people at Lewes demonstrated that. People travelled, sang, supported the team and cared desperately about the result. They were disappointed when we lost because they care.
Those are the people we are building this club for, along with the next generation of Borough supporters.
We are going to make mistakes. Managers make mistakes and players make mistakes. That is football.
But three defeats do not change what we are trying to build here.
We need to turn possession into goals. We need to become more ruthless and we need to start winning football matches. Nobody knows that more than the people inside that dressing room. Perhaps we can help them too.
Instead of waiting for the misplaced pass so we can tell a player how useless he is, encourage him to try the next one. Instead of abusing a young player after a defeat, remember that he probably cares about that result considerably more than you realise. These guys are winners. Give them the environment to show it.
I remain incredibly ambitious for this football club and for what we can build here in Eastbourne. There will always be noise around football clubs. We aren’t going to stop that, nor should we try.
But we can decide what sort of football club we want to be. I want one where people pay their fair share, treat our staff with respect, get behind their team and bring their friends and families along to enjoy being part of something.
You can criticise the board. You can criticise the manager. You can tell us we should be winning more games. That is football and, and many times you might even be right.
But support the club while you are doing it. Now we need to start winning some football matches.
Whitehawk away in the FA Cup seems like a pretty good place to start.
