The Supporters Club AGM will be taking place on Thursday 23rd January in the Lewes FC boardroom, from 7:30pm. All are welcome to attend. Ahead of that meeting, here is our annual report on what the Supporters Club has been up to for the past 12 months – and how we’ve spent the money you’ve helped us raise.

Message from the chair

Without parping our own bugle too loudly, it’s been a hugely successful year for the Lewes FC Supporters Club. More than £20,000 raised and spent on vital projects around the club; thousands of volunteer hours put to good use; an increasingly productive relationship with the club’s board and management; and truly heroic quantities of tea and biscuits consumed.

All of this is achieved by a small band of people who put in the hours out of sheer love for the club. To everyone who’s contributed to the Supporters Club this year – whether it was chucking a couple of quid in a bucket, a few hours manning the car park at the junior football tournament in the summer, or hundreds of hours as part of our Thursday Maintenance Crew – you have my sincere thanks.

We’d love to see more supporters at our meetings. They’re roughly once a month, they’re almost recklessly informal, and they’re always within easy reach of a bar. You won’t be nagged to volunteer. It’s just nice to see as many faces and hear as many different opinions as possible. Please keep an eye on the socials for meetings announcements and join us online if you can’t make it in person.

Right, enough of my flannel. Here’s the meat and bones (vegan options available) of what we’ve been up to in 2024.

Barry Collins – Chair, Lewes FC Supporters Club

Supporters Club membership numbers

Supporters Club membership is at a record high, with 318 members, up slightly from 304 at this time last year.

Honestly, we don’t think we’ve done nearly enough to increase Supporters Club membership over the past year, and one of our key priorities for 2025 is to boost this number northwards. If you’re not already a member, you can join here for free. All we ask is your name and email address.

Membership of the Lewes FC Supporters Club group on Facebook has grown massively over the past year, up from just over 1,400 members this time last year, to almost 2,000 now.

X (Twitter) followers have grown steadily, from just shy of 1,300 last year to 1,383. That’s not bad considering the bonfire that X has become, with many people abandoning the site. We are looking at shifting to BlueSky, but it currently lacks the features to bring audio match commentaries and more.

Traffic to our website has taken a sizeable dip from 2023. That’s almost exclusively because a certain match report published in 2023 went viral, and we’ve not seen that happen in 2024. The website had 12,700 visitors and 22,700 page views in 2024, the majority of that traffic coming from match reports.

Our Data Dashboard will keep you abreast of membership and financial information every quarter, if you’re a stats nerd.

Fundraising

We are pretty damned good at parting you from your cash. In the calendar year of 2024, we took the following:

Raffle – £7,752 (up £522 on last year)

Golden Goal – £4,641 (up £536)

Pan For Gold – £3,904 (up £420)

Badges – £790 (up £183)

We’re changing our financial year, from July-June to Jan-Dec to reflect where our AGM falls, but we started July 2024 with £8,667 in the bank and December 2024 with £12,475.

That doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on the cash, as you’ll see from the expenditure below, but we do have a decent kitty to keep improving facilities at The Dripping Pan.

If you want to see our detailed month-by-month accounts for 2024, click here.

Where did the money go?

Here is a brief summary of our major expenditure in 2024:

£25,000 towards the building of two new toilet blocks at The Dripping Pan, hugely improving facilities for female supporters in particular.

£1,442 on a new glass washer to help clean the reusable beer cups introduced this season.

£1,200 on a new washing machine, to help club staff keep the playing kit clean without relying on an external laundry,

£1,080 on anti-slip matting for the new toilet block behind the main stand, preventing supporters from going base over apex when the decking is wet or icy.

£870 on new fencing between the car park and the new toilet block. Our Thursday Maintenance Crew also helped install this, saving further cost to the club.

£750 on a new defibrillator for the 3G pitch.

£350 on a new leaf vacuum for the 3G, improving the state of the surface for all of our teams.

And… we’re just about to spend more than £2,000 improving access to the main seated stand for all supporters, including those in wheelchairs.

You’ll notice that none of the above is what you might call glamorous. It’s not the stuff that’s going to get our photo in The Guardian. But it’s the essentials that make an appreciable difference to the fan experience at The Dripping Pan and saves the club itself from having to find the money.

Community and charity collections

Not everything the Supporters Club does directly benefits the club. We’re also keen to do our bit for the wider community and 2024 has been a stellar year for community contributions.

The monthly Supporters Club quizzes (masterminded by Barry Haffenden) raised £4,800 for good causes in 2024, including local food banks, homeless charities and hospitals. Huge thanks to Liz and her team at The Elephant & Castle for hosting these.

In 2024, we raised £2,373 via raffles, collection boxes and quizzes for The Brain Tumour Charity, in memory of our former chair Dave Evans.

Every quarter, a gaggle of Supporters Club members join groups from all over the town in collecting for the Lewes Food Bank, which has seen tens of thousands of food items collected and distributed in 2024. Lewes supporter Mark Perryman deserves a knighthood for organising these (not that he’d accept one!).

If you know of a local charity that could do with our help, get in touch.

Ground maintenance

The Dripping Pan is regularly voted as the best football ground in the Isthmian League/Non-League/World/Known Universe (delete as applicable) and that’s in no small part down to the Supporters Club volunteers who turn up every Thursday and more to complete the litany of jobs that need doing around the place.

Work starts in the summer with our Paint The Pan days, in which tens of volunteers appear in a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt even the charity shops would turn away to help slap paint on walls, strim weeds off the bank, splash creosote on fences and more.

But work continues all year round, with the Thursday Maintenance Crew taking on all manner of tasks – mending fences, cleaning dugouts, installing seats, righting wind-battered electronic scoreboards – in all weathers.

The Thursday Club don’t only save the club tens of thousands of pounds each year on repairs, they provide a purpose and a ‘place to be’ for volunteers that we know has huge benefits for people’s mental health and sense of wellbeing. They are genuinely some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

So, if you want to get your hands dirty on a Thursday and think you can cope with six cups of tea an hour (on a slow day) then get in touch.

Match day volunteering

Match days simply wouldn’t happen without volunteers staffing the gates, operating the PA, organising hospitality and more.

The Supporters Club organises the volunteers for match days (with the brilliant Jan Gormley organising volunteers for women’s match days), and we’re always on the lookout for people who can spare an hour or two. If you’re willing to lend a hand, please do get in touch.

Representing the fans

It might seem odd that a fan-owned club needs a Supporters Club to represent the views of the fans. But the ownership is a very different demographic to the core supporters who turn up week after week, and part of our role is to make sure their voices are heard.

We meet regularly with the board, the chief operating officer and other club staff to discuss issues around the club and how we can improve conditions for all supporters.

We’d like to thank the board members who’ve taken the time to attend our meetings and, in particular, to Kelly Lindsey, who has gone out of her way to make sure the views of the Supporters Club are heard.

We’ve also made representations to other clubs when we’ve felt their facilities have not been up to scratch or even endangered the safety of our supporters. If there’s anything you’d like us to raise, do drop us an email or sidle up to one of our committee on the terraces.

What else do we do?

There’s a whole host of other things we’ve achieved in 2024, such as:

• Launching our online museum, which now contains scans of programmes dating back to the 1940s and profiles of “legends” who’ve played for the club down the years
• Continuing to deliver in-stadium commentary for supporters with visual impairments, as well as match commentaries on X (where possible)
• Regular quiz nights, not only with Barry Haffenden’s charity quizzes in The Elly, but Nick Geall’s quizzes in the Rook Inn
• Helping with the junior football tournament in the summer, with volunteers manning car parks, welcoming players and their families, ferrying scorecards back and forth, and so on
• Building relationships with the new Lewes FC Foundation
• Sending care packages to seriously injured players (speedy recovery Sammy and Marcel!)
• Installing a new “thinking bench” at the top of the bank in memory of Dave Evans
• Representing the club in the media with radio and newspaper interviews
• Did we mention the tea and biscuits?

What’s next for the Supporters Club?

There’s plenty more that we want to achieve in 2025.

Firstly, we failed to improve our representation of the whole supporter base, particularly among female supporters, which we pledged to do at last year’s AGM. That will be a top priority this year.

We want to do more with the online museum, digging back into the club’s history and digitising photos that will otherwise crumble and be lost for ever.

We desperately want to run more social events too. Sadly, nobody applied for the committee post we created for this, but we’ll attempt to recruit someone for the job in 2025 or make a better fist of doing it ourselves.

We can always do with more hands, so if any of this appeals to you, do reach out and see how you can get involved.