by Chris Harris
Everywhere felt like sheer bedlam. It felt like a supermarket with two assistants left to run the whole place. The pop star story was beginning to build momentum. It was no longer just South Korean television taking an interest. Other news channels were becoming intrigued by what was rapidly developing into a worldwide story, and the club simply did not have the people or infrastructure to deal with it.
There were two immediate problems. The first was the logistics of Saturday and the second was the overwhelming amount of administration and everything else that came with the sudden attention. Sean Powell at Pear Tree Farm had refused to help and instead offered the car park to the club for a conditional five hundred pounds a day. He was perfectly aware of their predicament and made it clear that the field would remain chained up until they agreed a price to his liking for the club to purchase the land.
They had absolutely no idea how many people might turn up for the game. Social media warnings were already going out, telling supporters there would likely be long queues and that anyone without a particular reason to attend might be better off swerving it altogether. Economical Tony was having none of that.
“We can squeeze two thousand in here, so let’s make it all-ticket and sell the lot. We can’t have only a thousand people turning up because we’ve put everyone else off coming. Apart from anything else, we’d look really silly on national television with a half-empty ground.”
Nobody had a particularly convincing argument against that. The only problem was that their ticketing arrangements had been designed for a small non-league football club where everybody simply turned up at the gate and paid to get in. A proper electronic ticketing system was now clearly going to be necessary, not merely for Saturday but for whatever happened over the following few months. Greg was immediately onto one of his contacts to organise it.
“We’ll probably get a handful of people turning up without tickets anyway, but we’ll just have to contain that. We’ll do the coach service from Lewes station again.”
Meanwhile, the club email account did not stop pinging. Media requests, advertising requests, commercial requests and charitable requests. Nobody had been employed to deal with anything remotely on this scale, so everyone simply picked up whatever they could and tried to keep things moving.
Piotr continued attempting to keep all of this excitement away from the players, repeatedly reminding them that, regardless of television crews, sponsors and South Korean celebrities, their actual job on Saturday was to get three points. The Korean star himself was becoming increasingly embarrassed by the attention. He was clearly a very humble person and, while the optics of having him at the club were extraordinary, it was already obvious that Denham Phoenix was completely ill-prepared for everything that came with him. Just two days after signing on the dotted line, he quietly suggested that perhaps it would be better if they called the whole thing off.
Greg was having none of it. “No, we can do this. At the end of the day in the years ahead, if we ever progress in the FA Cup and get a big Premiership team down here, we’re going to have to deal with all of this anyway. So we just plough on and learn as we go along.”
The tickets for the game against Horsham Park went on sale on Thursday morning. To everyone’s disbelief, all two thousand were snapped up within an hour, not disbelief that the tickets sold, but that they sold without a glitch.
“Well, that’s another ten thousand quid this signing’s added to the pot.”
Catherine Brown shrugged her shoulders.
“Christ, we’re going to need a load of food and beer. We’re going to need more staff as well. I’ll, get onto the agencies, go round the pubs in Lewes and see if they can help out. I’ll speak to the Supporters Club as well.” Everyone knew the catering under Catherine would be the one thing that would definitely work seamlessly.
That led the conversation towards Lewes Football Club, a club renowned for attracting decent gates but not always being particularly adept at serving large numbers of people quickly. What began as a conversation about catering then developed into something rather more significant when Economical Tony came out with one of his hunches. Everybody laughed at first, but within five minutes they had decided that it perhaps wasn’t such a ridiculous idea after all.
“They’ve got a much bigger ground, capacity three and a half thousand, they’re right next to Lewes station, and they’ve got that huge grass bank. It wouldn’t be difficult to put a temporary stand on there and raise the capacity to five thousand. Why don’t we groundshare with them for the three months?”
Everyone looked at him. They’d already agreed to the Sussex Senior Cup quarter-final being played at the ground.
“Apart from anything else, it’s going to cut down on all the disruption here while we’re building the new stand and clubhouse. As long as we do all our interviews, meetings and everything else here, it’ll be fine. Can you imagine if we actually sold those games out? Five thousand people. We could be talking four, maybe six home games with gates of five thousand.”
He paused while everyone started doing the calculations in their heads.
“I don’t need to tell you what that could be worth. We should get a groundshare. We’d have to do the catering ourselves because they haven’t got a clue, but we could potentially make another fifty or sixty thousand pounds.”
“Leave it with me. I’ll give their chairman a call.” Greg declared.
Lewes Football Club had always been slightly rough around the edges. It had a great history, but it was fan-owned, run largely by supporters and had spent much of its existence operating without a great deal of money to spare. Under the fan ownership model it was unfortunately run by fans not very good at running a football club. Denham Phoenix suddenly had a problem Lewes could potentially solve, while Denham had something Lewes was unlikely to turn down.
The proposed offer was ten thousand pounds for the groundshare. For Lewes, it was money they could ill afford to refuse. Already bailed out this season by Denham Phoenix, it looked like lightning may well strike twice.
That evening, Greg and Stephen found themselves sitting in the Elephant and Castle in Lewes with the chairman of Lewes Football Club, Tarquin Pipples. Fan-run clubs are run by fans, and in Lewes’s case by fans who were not always particularly good at running a football club. Tarquin didn’t think he was one of them, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage.
The disadvantage became apparent when he started laying out impossible terms and conditions and tried to increase the agreed £10,000 rent to £20,000. Stephen pointed out the considerable commercial advantages of the arrangement to Lewes. Denham would be bringing thousands of people to the ground, along with television coverage, sponsors and publicity, to a club looking for commercial investment while seemingly oblivious to how to attract it. It became increasingly difficult for Tarquin to justify doubling the rent.
Anyway, Tarquin still had the TV access and rights card to play. Stephen reckoned this might be worth another £10,000 or £20,000, but unbelievably it had not even occurred to any of the fan-owned board that this would be a huge income stream and one they were entitled to.
By the end of the meeting, Tarquin was eating out of their hands. Stephen had quickly worked out that he was a hopeless negotiator and, much to Greg’s slight annoyance, decided to push his luck. He even managed to persuade Lewes to buy any food and drink Denham had left after their final game, meaning Denham wouldn’t be stuck with the stock and would get some of their money back.
Tarquin left believing he had pulled off an excellent deal. In reality, he had agreed to almost exactly what had been negotiated beforehand while missing TV opportunities to make considerably more money from it. Stephen did not need to point out to Greg; they were going in to negotiate paying Lewes £10,000 for a groundshare and they left possibly £10,000 up.
Later when he was with Catherine, Greg expressed his annoyance at Stephen’s ‘sharp’ tactics. It wasn’t how he wanted to run the club. But he was a godsend at the moment, and when this was all over he could tell him to cool it or move on.
The chaos never arrived on the big day.
Greg stood in the shadow of the evolving eco stand, surveying the rammed ground. The week had been so hectic that he had been dreading a day of complete chaos, but it simply never came. The ticketing and entrance system had worked perfectly. The drinks and food were running smoothly. The television crews were up in the scaffolding gantry. He could hardly believe that this was the same place where he used to play rugby in front of a couple of dozen people.
The week had been absolute bedlam, but Greg had set up showrooms on tight schedules before and knew there was always a pinch point where there was simply no more you could do. The chaos of setting everything up eventually dissipated, and that was what was happening now. The ground show was sorted.
He was simply left to marvel at the skill of the South Korean K-pop star, without any doubt the best player who had ever played on that pitch, and quite possibly the best who ever would.
He took it upon himself to dominate the right side of the pitch, tracking back to defend, showing real guts, then sprinting forward and dribbling past everyone before plonking the ball onto the centre forward’s head, with varying degrees of success. One of them worked, though, and Denham Phoenix went in at half-time 1-0 up.
For the second half, Dean and Piotr moved him into a more central role, partly just to see what he could really bring to the team. The answer was two goals.
The final score was 4-1.
At the end of the game, the bar was temporarily closed for half an hour. A quick backdrop carrying the Denham Phoenix logo and those of the main advertisers was fixed onto an impromptu frame, and Dean, Piotr and the South Korean star held a press conference for half an hour.
Then a chauffeur-driven limousine arrived to take him away and the bar reopened.
It was freezing outside, and the assumption that the fans would hang around and keep the till ticking over was misplaced. Big Mal said to Greg, “Hey, we all know what we are doing is brilliant for the club, but we’ve got to remember, when this is all over, these fans are our bread and butter. At least the other games will be at The Dripping Pan where they can facilitate the media better.’ But Greg confided to Catherine that seeing fans locked out of the bar was not the progress he wanted. He hot-footed it to the Red Lion, where most of them had gone instead and put five hundred pounds behind the bar for the football crowd and circulated around members of the Supporter Club to apologise.
The media bulletins covered the story to varying degrees that evening and on Sunday, but Greg wasn’t watching. He spent the Sunday with Catherine reorganising his house and compressing the operation to his living room and conservatory to bring some semblance of sanity back. Removing the sleeping over option for Stephen. After his unpleasantness of screwing Lewes FC over, his short-lived friendship would have to become purely professional for now; the friendship not irredeemable, but time would tell.
Welcome to Denham nr Lewes 