by Chris Harris
Christmas Day felt like a dream to Greg. Just forty-eight hours earlier, he had been utterly crestfallen, convinced that he had let the opportunity of a lifetime slip through his fingers. Now, somehow, he found himself with the woman he believed was the love of his life.
Catherine had made the ground rules perfectly clear. There were to be no guarantees, no pressure and certainly no rush into a physical relationship. They were committing to each other, but they would let whatever happened next unfold naturally. Greg could not have been happier with the arrangement. If anything, he wanted to be even more accommodating than Catherine expected. With so much happening at the football club over the next six months, the timing suited him perfectly. For the first time in years, he felt settled inside himself.
All he needed was Catherine’s honesty and integrity, her willingness to commit meant more to him than any grand romantic gesture. Christmas Day, spent with Catherine, her two sons and Big Mal, became one of the happiest of Greg’s life. When Catherine announced that she would be leaving around six to continue her long-standing Christmas tradition of meeting Lottie for a drink in The Red Lion, he made no attempt to persuade her otherwise. She even invited him along, but Greg, determined not to fall at the first hurdle by smothering her, politely declined. There would be plenty of opportunities for that in the future. Besides, he wanted to spend the evening with Big Mal discussing what promised to be a particularly unusual board meeting on the 28th.
Only a week earlier, all seven people around the board table had been single. Now four were in relationships, two remained single, and one had resigned. The dynamics had changed almost overnight. There would be another subtle difference too. Catherine, who had always chosen to sit opposite Greg during meetings, quietly took the chair beside him, almost symbolically acknowledging the new chapter in both their lives. Her old seat was temporarily occupied by Piotr.
With the encouraging start both the club and management team had made, Dean and Piotr felt the time had come to outline a longer-term vision. There were no PowerPoint slides, flip charts or elaborate presentations. During the previous fortnight they had clearly spent hours talking through their ideas, and what emerged was less a formal strategy than a shared ambition for what Denham Phoenix might become.
Dean invited Piotr to lead. Piotr’s confidence had grown noticeably since arriving at the club, and he explained that their ambitions had grown with it. They didn’t want Denham Phoenix to become another non-league club enjoying a few successful seasons because somebody had written large cheques. Success bought that way was temporary and, more importantly, proved very little. They wanted to build something from the foundations upwards.
Having looked at the forthcoming facilities, infrastructure, community support, and potential already surrounding the club, they believed that National League South, tier 2, was achievable within three years. Initially the two of them had thought the Welex Premier League, tier 3 represented a sensible long-term target, but the more he and Dean had thought about it, the more ambitious they had become. However, the question was no longer simply how far Denham Phoenix could climb, but whether they could create something sustainable enough to keep climbing.
The example they kept returning to was Lewes. They had once risen five divisions and reached the former Conference, despite being far from a giant of non-league football. Piotr wasn’t interested in copying the spending that had accompanied that rise; he was interested in the ambition behind it. Denham’s challenge was to find a way of pursuing the same sort of dream without eventually paying the same sort of price.
That meant beginning to evolve the playing squad immediately. The existing players had been magnificent, and many were capable of taking the club into the Isthmian Premier League. Some of the younger ones might go further. But Dean and Piotr were thinking three years ahead, not three months. Standing still while expecting the club to keep climbing was not an option.
Their philosophy was straightforward. Rather than continually buying ready-made players, Denham would identify young, hungry footballers before other clubs noticed them, then coach and improve them. Those good enough to remain would become the spine of the team. Those who eventually attracted bigger clubs would become valuable assets, with transfer income reinvested into finding and developing the next generation. The aim was a conveyor belt of talent rather than one expensively assembled successful team.
Crucially, they weren’t asking Greg or the board for a fortune. Piotr believed the first stage could be achieved largely from the club’s growing income. What they needed was trust, patience and permission to build. Almost the entire current squad had already agreed to increase training to twice a week, a substantial commitment for players balancing football with jobs and families. The two who had declined would be allowed to leave. It wasn’t punishment; they simply weren’t prepared to make the commitment the next stage required.
Something else was already happening. Players elsewhere were beginning to talk about Denham Phoenix. At this level, where football often amounted to expenses and a few beers rather than meaningful wages, reputation could be more powerful than money. Talented young players wanted somewhere progressive, somewhere enjoyable and somewhere they believed would make them better. Dean and Piotr sensed Denham was beginning to become that place.
That was where Dean’s particular strengths became important. Piotr saw the football and the identity of the club as inseparable. If Dean, using his media presence and skills, could make Denham Phoenix one of the most talked about non-league clubs in the area, recruitment would become easier. Good football would strengthen the club’s reputation; a stronger reputation would attract better players; better players would improve the football. If they got it right, one would continually feed the other.
Big Mal eventually raised the obvious question about the two players unwilling to train twice a week.
“They don’t know it yet,” Piotr said with a grin, “but they’ll be leaving.”
The room laughed, although Piotr was serious. Nobody was being forced to make the commitment, but neither could Denham build an ambitious squad around players who didn’t share its ambitions. That, ultimately, was all Dean and Piotr were asking from the board: stick with them, trust the process and resist the temptation to throw money at every obstacle.
Dean had allowed Piotr to do most of the talking, but finally added something simpler. He had never enjoyed football as much as he was enjoying it at Denham. He wasn’t merely a manager or a board member anymore; emotionally, he had bought into the place completely. He wanted people across Sussex, and eventually much further afield, to know about Denham Phoenix.
Ideas were already forming: marketing, community projects, events and probably a few things nobody else had thought of yet. Dean’s ambition was to make Denham the football club people talked about, wanted to visit and, most importantly, wanted to play for.
Around the table, something had changed. Only a fortnight earlier they had been trying to steady a newly formed club after a difficult start to the season.
Greg remained behind for a few moments after the meeting, letting it all settle in his mind. This was not another village football club trying to win a few more matches, but a genuine attempt to transform a small community club over five years. What impressed him wasn’t the ambition so much as the method. Dean and Piotr hadn’t arrived with a shopping list of expensive players or asked him to find a fortune. Their proposal was patient, sustainable and, perhaps most importantly, affordable: develop young players, improve them, create value, sell occasionally, reinvest and repeat.
Greg knew Dean well enough to understand that the football would only ever be half the story. Dean loved creating excitement. Marketing, community projects, daft little gimmicks. If anybody could turn Denham Phoenix into the fashionable little football club everybody suddenly wanted to play for, it was probably him.
Yet one part of the discussion had been conspicuous by its absence: the commercial side. With Michael Hall gone, the club had lost more than a board member. There was now a sizeable hole in its administration, bookkeeping and financial organisation. If Dean and Piotr intended to professionalise matters on the pitch, Greg realised he needed to do the same off it.
He wasn’t contemplating an expensive chief executive. Denham was nowhere near that stage. A part-time employee for perhaps twenty hours a week would be enough: half the time devoted to finance, bookkeeping and administration, the rest to commercial development. Sponsorship, advertising, local business relationships, fundraising and partnerships could all be brought under one roof. The football operation was becoming match fit; now the business side needed to catch up.
By the time Greg walked Catherine home, the ideas were taking hold. Rather than immediately saying goodbye, they wandered into a the Red Lion and continued talking. They could both see the potential in Dean and Piotr’s plans, although neither of them was naive enough to imagine everything would work.
There would be aggravation, setbacks and ideas that looked brilliant on paper and failed spectacularly in practice. Dean and Piotr were still only a handful of matches into their management careers. The board’s responsibility wasn’t to applaud everything they suggested, but to give them time, support them when things went wrong and intervene sensibly if something genuinely wasn’t working.
What reassured Greg was that they weren’t gambling the club’s future. Nobody was demanding ridiculous playing budgets or proposing that success should be purchased at any cost. They were trying to create something capable of paying for itself, and as long as that remained the philosophy, Greg was prepared to give them considerable freedom.
For the first time since founding Denham Phoenix, he no longer felt that the future of the football club rested entirely on his shoulders. Leadership was beginning to spread naturally through the organisation. Dean and Piotr had the football. Others were finding their own roles. Greg was beginning to understand his.
As he lay in bed that night, tossing and turning, he began to formulate plans, only to cancel them as he realised he would have to put all his eggs in one basket. At the end of the day, if it worked, this would be amazing and if it didn’t, the club could go back and start again. The thought that finally sent him off to sleep was that they looked fairly certain to get promoted whatever happened, and that had been the aim, and if there was a load of noise in the process, he had Catherine sort of by his side and my, she really did empower him and as he thought of her, he drifted off.
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