At a time of cuts, cuts and more cuts, looking after the pitch for non-league clubs is getting to be more cost sensitive than ever.


Neville Johnson visited an unusual club in football’s lower reaches, with an unusual income stream and a very unusual groundsman!


Squaring up in the Blue Square...


E


bbsfleet United’s shirt sponsor may be Eurostar, but they are about as far away from getting into


Europe as you can get. Nevertheless, it’s clubs like this that are the bedrock of English football. This one has a tale to tell though, on and off the pitch. The Conference South club, a stone’s


throw from the Dartford Crossing toll queues, is unique in the way it is financed. I talked first to its chairman, Phil Sonsara, to find out where the money - such as it is - comes from, and how the club finds the budget for the upkeep of its Stonebridge Road ground amid massive pressure right now to save cash all round. Until three years ago, Phil had never even been to Gravesend and Northfleet, which is what the club had always been known as. What sparked his interest, and led to the unusual way the club is run, was an on-line project called MyFootballClub, an internet society with the laudable aim of helping a struggling non-league football club. Borne from Google-ing and Face Booking amongst those with a general


love for the game, it quickly caught fire. Phil’s bit of online trawling at the time led him to chairmanship of a club he hadn’t previously known. Gravesend and Northfleet actually changed its name to Ebbsfleet United in May 2007, as part of a Eurostar sponsorship deal. The MyFootballClub acquisition was first announced in November of that year and the purchase was finalised in February 2008.


“Members participate on a daily basis,” says Phil, “and there is regular two-way communication between them and the club on all sorts of activities.” The weakness in this ownership model, he admits, is finding enough bodies with enough time to be regularly involved at the club. It simply doesn’t generate enough funds to pay for full- time day-to-day administrative management.


“Members have regular jobs and, though very well meaning about the project, can only find two or three days occasionally to be here at best. The value they add in monetary terms has


been enormous though.” At the time the MyFootballClub society took off, there were several contenders for this new source of cash support - Leigh RMI was one from the north. But, it was Ebbsfleet that got the nod and, nearly three years ago, it became the first, and still the only, football club to be owned by an internet society.


Phil says an amazing 53,000 football fans showed initial interest, many of them from the north, perhaps, he suggests, because there was a rumour, at the time, that struggling Leeds United could have been in the frame for help. It wasn’t, and it was the north Kent club that had a new ownership regime.


It was, and still is, a noble idea, but


there has been a fall-off in MyFootballClub membership. The flood of £35 subs three years ago has dried significantly, and now there are around 3,000 members coughing up a £50 sub to have a say in how the club is run. Of these, quite a large number have been to Stonebridge Road, some from as far


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