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Dulwich Hamlet and Coronavirus

Roger D said:
At least two Freedom of Information requests have gone in asking for details of all relevant meetings/communications between DCMS/FA/National League to see if anything is recorded about the basis for any payments beyond December 2020.

Watch this space as they say.
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This press release on the official government website was widely reported two months ago. The £11m for the National League is there but it's a bit ambivalent, because an earlier paragraph referring to the overall figure of £300m for all sports says the funding will be "largely comprised of loans":

www.gov.uk

Government announces £300 million Sport Winter Survival Package to help spectator sports in England

Major spectator sports in England will receive a combined £300 million cash injection to protect their immediate futures over the winter period
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

Frankly though, if I was negotiating to secure an eight figure sum of funding on behalf of an organisation representing 66 small and medium sized enterprises, I think I'd want to have at least an email of confirmation before I sat back and waited two months until the funding was actually needed.

I'm sure it was also reported back in October, when the original £10m grant was negotiated, that the money was coming from the National Lottery as the government could not award a direct grant of this nature, only a loan.

I'm not a supporter of this government by a long chalk but on the face of it they appear to have been fairly straight with us on this. Yet again I'll say I think it was a big mistake to begin the season behind closed doors in the first place. I don't feel it's achieved anything worthwhile, other than allowing a few hundred jobbing footballers to sign new contracts and get paid for an extra season, and it may well have caused lasting damage to some clubs.
 
DCMS is public so it will have gone to them. I suspect it will cover minutes of meetings they own, letters sent by them etc.

It may well be redacted to within an inch of its life to remove names.

Edited to say the FoI requests have not yet been accepted and may be rejected if DCMS believe they will take too long to answer
 
Pink Panther said:
This press release on the official government website was widely reported two months ago. The £11m for the National League is there but it's a bit ambivalent, because an earlier paragraph referring to the overall figure of £300m for all sports says the funding will be "largely comprised of loans":

www.gov.uk

Government announces £300 million Sport Winter Survival Package to help spectator sports in England

Major spectator sports in England will receive a combined £300 million cash injection to protect their immediate futures over the winter period
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

Frankly though, if I was negotiating to secure an eight figure sum of funding on behalf of an organisation representing 66 small and medium sized enterprises, I think I'd want to have at least an email of confirmation before I sat back and waited two months until the funding was actually needed.

I'm sure it was also reported back in October, when the original £10m grant was negotiated, that the money was coming from the National Lottery as the government could not award a direct grant of this nature, only a loan.

I'm not a supporter of this government by a long chalk but on the face of it they appear to have been fairly straight with us on this. Yet again I'll say I think it was a big mistake to begin the season behind closed doors in the first place. I don't feel it's achieved anything worthwhile, other than allowing a few hundred jobbing footballers to sign new contracts and get paid for an extra season, and it may well have caused lasting damage to some clubs.
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Personally with this current lot in charge I would have asked for confirmation signed in blood with a couple of elderly relatives as hostages until the money arrived...
 
Article from The Times:

www.thetimes.co.uk

Fighting for survival is the new normal in non-League

Funding disputes, quarrels with government, Covid-19 fears, league suspensions — is another National League campaign about to fall victim to the pandemic? “I th
www.thetimes.co.uk www.thetimes.co.uk

Funding disputes, quarrels with government, Covid-19 fears, league suspensions — is another National League campaign about to fall victim to the pandemic? “I think we’re looking at the collapse of the National League season, and with that, I fear that there are some clubs who won’t make it through the summer,” Steve Thompson, the Dagenham & Redbridge managing director, says. So how on earth did it come to this?
On Saturday the National League North and South fixture lists — Step Two of non-League football — were a sea of postponements, just 24 hours after the divisions had been halted for two weeks so funding and coronavirus testing concerns can be addressed. The National League, at Step One, elected to play on for now but its future is also in doubt if the government does not change its stance.
Back in October, you may recall, the National League only agreed to kick off its season because of a £10 million grant, brokered by the government and secured through the National Lottery promotional fund, to cover lost revenue over the first three months of the season.
Clubs say they were led to believe that grants would continue for as long as supporters were denied access to stadiums. In November, Mike Tattersall and Mark Bullingham, the chief executives of the National League and FA respectively, left a meeting with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) with the same impression.
Now, however, the DCMS refute that funding was “promised as all grants”, and have offered £11 million of low-interest loans instead. “The majority of clubs across all three divisions indicated that they didn’t want the league to mortgage its future, which would be a millstone round our neck for the next 20 years, to finish the season,” Thompson, who is also a National League board member, says.

By Thursday, meanwhile, a number of clubs, including Havant & Waterlooville, had already taken the decision not to play their upcoming fixtures until routine testing had been implemented in line with other ‘elite’ leagues. The Havant kit man, Richie Pope, spent eight days in intensive care with coronavirus before Christmas. Their chairman, Derek Pope, and his wife, Sue, were both seriously ill. The father of their winger Roarie Deacon died.
Fixtures are piling up and there are genuine fears. Darlington’s players and staff travelled 700 miles on one coach to play Weymouth in the FA Trophy nine days ago. On Tuesday night, the floodlights failed midway through Kettering Town’s FA Trophy tie against Leamington. After a two-hour wait in the cold, or in cramped facilities, the FA insisted that the tie be completed on the night and the game finished at 11.22pm.
All levels below the National League have been suspended since November, where another season looks likely to be lost to the pandemic. If the National League follows suit, however, the £10 million National Lottery grant may as well have been poured “down the drain”, as Marc White, the Dorking Wanderers chairman/manager, says. And as White suggests, the cost to the taxpayer of furloughing staff would exceed the cost of a grant by several million pounds.
King’s Lynn chairman, Stephen Cleeve, told The Non-League Paper: “Let’s just say this was a limited company, and I said it would cost £17 million to do this, or £11 million to do that, which would you rather do? You’d pay the £11 million,” he said. “What the DCMS say is, ‘We’ve got our budget and our budget is more important than the greater good.’ That’s wrong. They just look at their own little budgets. It needs someone at ministerial level to look at it.”

Football’s governing bodies, however, do not come out of this mess smelling of roses either. The distribution of the first three months of grant money, which ranged from £30,000 to £95,000 per club per month, was met with a wave of protests, with some clubs arguing that their losses were not covered, and others making substantially more than expected.
Tattersall resigned from the National League in December. There were calls for the chairman, Brian Barwick, to follow suit. Publication of an independent review into the saga, led by David Bernstein, the former FA chairman, was delayed and pointed to conflicts of interest. And now this ambiguity between grants and loans. “I just can’t believe that, when you’re talking about ten million quid, no minutes [of the meeting] were taken,” Jason McGill, the York City chairman, says.
So what to make of it all? The pyramid, woven between cities, towns and villages across the country, is a treasure. But in non-League it is also a vast, labyrinthine and disparate landscape. For most this is about survival.
“Unless some money, in the form of a grant, materialises, I don’t believe there will be the appetite in our league, or the National League South, to play on,” McGill says. And at Step One there may well be a split. “What if six or seven clubs say they can’t afford to carry on?” Thompson says. “Do you expunge their records, and ask the rest to continue? Or do you run them into the ground?”
In the coming week, clubs will be consulted about whether or not the season can continue and they are urging supporters to lobby their MPs to push for a government rethink. “The government have performed enough U-turns this last ten months. We want them to make one more — which is actually going to save them money,” Thompson says.
“This is my 40th year involved in the running of Dagenham & Redbridge. I’m passionate about my club, and I’m passionate about non-League football. We started off with 66 community clubs. We intend to finish with 66 clubs.”
 
The league have written to all North and South clubs confirming the league restarts on 6/2.

Stand by for open warfare.
 
It’s a no brainer really. The season is over.
So many businesses will be having to start up again from scratch once it is safe to do so, non league football included. Potentially racking up huge depts, putting players, staff and their families at risk, just to complete the season, when no fans have been able to attend seems unnecessarily and risks all clubs’ futures.
 
Whilst the tone of our club's statement may be slanted to reflect the club's stance, the comments regarding the National League's handling of the whole crisis are extremely damning unless categorically incorrect, which I doubt.

They pushed everyone to start the season amid great uncertainty. They were deceitful about the funding they secured, leading clubs to believe there were up to 6 months of grants available when the second half of it turned out to be loans. Then they ignored the Sports Minister's directive to distribute funds according to past matchday gate receipts in favour of their own simplistic flat fee system, with an arbitrary 20% bonus for a handful of better supported clubs including ourselves. Why exactly did they do this after requiring clubs to go to the trouble of submitting the necessary data to implement the government's recommendation? Who exactly decided to do this and why?
 
StephenMac said:
Genuinely baffled as to why so many clubs are keen to carry on in these circumstances. Having a so far civilised debate about it with the chairmen of Hungerford and Eastbourne. Dream lockdown Sunday.
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I can only assume some of the medium and smaller clubs have lucrative sponsorship income and have already been compensated for all or most of what they would have budgeted to raise on matchdays in a normal season. With average attendance of 350 or so, Hungerford can't raise much more than four or five grand on a matchday which equates to no more than £100k gross per season. They've already had a £90k grant and are occupying a play-off place.

A Dorking Wanderers fan on another forum reckons they have around 60 sponsors contributing a total of around £700k for the season, the bulk of it from two or three major sponsors presumably with close links to the club's owner/directors, while others are probably paying anything from a few hundred quid upwards for ground and programme advertising. That sort revenue dwarfs what they would normally take on a matchday with average attendance of 700, therefore the loss of matchday income must represent a relatively small proportion of the normal budget. I would imagine most clubs in the division, including our own, have several dozen sponsors paying various amounts but I doubt many of them amount to anywhere near Dorking's figure.
 
Pink Panther said:
I can only assume some of the medium and smaller clubs have lucrative sponsorship income and have already been compensated for all or most of what they would have budgeted to raise on matchdays in a normal season. With average attendance of 350 or so, Hungerford can't raise much more than four or five grand on a matchday which equates to no more than £100k gross per season. They've already had a £90k grant and are occupying a play-off place.

A Dorking Wanderers fan on another forum reckons they have around 60 sponsors contributing a total of around £700k for the season, the bulk of it from two or three major sponsors presumably with close links to the club's owner/directors, while others are probably paying anything from a few hundred quid upwards for ground and programme advertising. That sort revenue dwarfs what they would normally take on a matchday with average attendance of 700, therefore the loss of matchday income must represent a relatively small proportion of the normal budget. I would imagine most clubs in the division, including our own, have several dozen sponsors paying various amounts but I doubt many of them amount to anywhere near Dorking's figure.
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Listened to an interview with Marc White earlier. He said that Dorking's overall sponsorship for the season is £500k. Still an awful lot though.

He also came across less villainous than he sometimes does. On one hand he talks about taking legal action in the event of an amalgamated NLS & NLN vote leading to the season ending now, if the NLS only vote points towards continuing. On the other hand, he gets why the likes of us don't want to take on debt to complete the season. His solution to this is that those clubs who wish to stop now should be able to do so without penalty, while the rest carry on. How that would work is anyone's guess but I suppose it would certainly address fixture congestion. Don't know how it would deal with relegation either, assuming the Isthmian ever gets restarted.

Will be interesting to see the results of the club's survey of season ticket holders and Trust members, but going by Twitter (which obviously nobody ever should) there seems to be considerable appetite for telling the National League to shove its season up its arse and taking the consequences.
 
Hopefully more will follow.

That said, Concord's rather obnoxious chairman was gleefully telling clubs like ours that we should have budgeted better when we were screwed over in the grant shambles.

The fact he blew their ludicrous windfall on bringing in players who have brilliantly taken them to 18th is some source of amusement in these most unamusing of times. Concord should be at the bottom of the pile of clubs deserving of sympathy.
 
StephenMac said:
Listened to an interview with Marc White earlier. He said that Dorking's overall sponsorship for the season is £500k. Still an awful lot though.
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Plus they had the £90k share of the lottery funding, so near enough £600k in total. I would imagine that's plenty to cover an entire season at this level, with the low overheads of playing at a modern council owned ground. I would also think most of the sponsorship money comes from companies closely associated with White himself, or other directors.

Our own preferred model is totally different. I found some notes I took at a supporters forum in May 2019, at which the directors stated that the club had banked £480k gross from matchdays since returning to Champion Hill the previous December, split roughly 50/50 between gate receipts and bar/catering sales. There were 11 league matches plus a couple of county cup ties during that period, which equates to gross income of around £40k a match, or around £800k a season. All we've had to compensate for that is £108k from the lottery funding. Obviously some of that money would have disappeared in taxes, matchday staffing costs, stock replenishment etc. but we must be looking at a substantial six figure shortfall

Everything looked so different just over a year ago when the club chairman addressed another supporters forum, telling us that we had a "top six playing budget" (albeit with a bottom six team!) and that the club was debt free. At that time the only great worry was the uncertainty over the ground, which was happily resolved in July.

I'm sure it was also mentioned that the club wanted to increase the number of directors (which has happened with the addition of two representatives of the Supporters Trust) but that any newcomers had to fit in with the club's existing ethos. I've seen supporters of other clubs suggesting online that we should be charging for the match streaming if we're short of cash, or that we should make more effort to seek sponsorship. However the sort of people who are willing to invest six figure sums on an annual basis tend to want a degree of control and influence over the club's direction. They're the sort of people who took charge of a string of former National League clubs including Kingstonian, Canvey Island, Grays Athletic, Hornchurch, Fisher Athletic, Whitehawk, Margate etc. with a variety of unfortunate consequences. I wouldn't put Marc White into that category. He founded the club and has defined its direction and ethos but there may still be scope for the wheels to fall off if if he's ever unable to continue, as happened to Rushden & Diamonds after Max Griggs walked away.
 
Pink Panther said:
Plus they had the £90k share of the lottery funding, so near enough £600k in total. I would imagine that's plenty to cover an entire season at this level, with the low overheads of playing at a modern council owned ground. I would also think most of the sponsorship money comes from companies closely associated with White himself, or other directors.

Our own preferred model is totally different. I found some notes I took at a supporters forum in May 2019, at which the directors stated that the club had banked £480k gross from matchdays since returning to Champion Hill the previous December, split roughly 50/50 between gate receipts and bar/catering sales. There were 11 league matches plus a couple of county cup ties during that period, which equates to gross income of around £40k a match, or around £800k a season. All we've had to compensate for that is £108k from the lottery funding. Obviously some of that money would have disappeared in taxes, matchday staffing costs, stock replenishment etc. but we must be looking at a substantial six figure shortfall

Everything looked so different just over a year ago when the club chairman addressed another supporters forum, telling us that we had a "top six playing budget" (albeit with a bottom six team!) and that the club was debt free. At that time the only great worry was the uncertainty over the ground, which was happily resolved in July.

I'm sure it was also mentioned that the club wanted to increase the number of directors (which has happened with the addition of two representatives of the Supporters Trust) but that any newcomers had to fit in with the club's existing ethos. I've seen supporters of other clubs suggesting online that we should be charging for the match streaming if we're short of cash, or that we should make more effort to seek sponsorship. However the sort of people who are willing to invest six figure sums on an annual basis tend to want a degree of control and influence over the club's direction. They're the sort of people who took charge of a string of former National League clubs including Kingstonian, Canvey Island, Grays Athletic, Hornchurch, Fisher Athletic, Whitehawk, Margate etc. with a variety of unfortunate consequences. I wouldn't put Marc White into that category. He founded the club and has defined its direction and ethos but there may still be scope for the wheels to fall off if if he's ever unable to continue, as happened to Rushden & Diamonds after Max Griggs walked away.
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Completely agree that clubs need to be particularly vigilant at the moment about dodgy white knights riding to the rescue. Think it's right to separate Griggs from the clowns that screwed up the clubs you mention purely due to the longevity of his stay at R & D but ultimately they still ended up in the same boat.

Marc White is quite the enigma. I get the suggestion that Dorking's sponsorship may largely come from companies he's connected to but I've never actually seen the evidence. I think they have 75 sponsors which seems pretty spectacular, although I'm sure the majority are relatively minor. Who knows how far they and he will go before it goes wobbly.

For us, I think absolutely the only thing that should matter to our club at the moment is financial stability. Everything else, including what league we play in, needs to be secondary at best.
 
Bugpowder Dust said:
Anyone else feeling guilty about thinking it wouldn't be all bad if we got expelled from the national league and had to start back down at the bottom of the pyramid?
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I've no idea how grave the current situation is but I'm sure there must be several other clubs in the division in a similar situation to ourselves.

If the League was to expel half a dozen clubs who would they replace them with? (Don't forget the league is already 6 clubs short because the North and South Divisions were supposed to increase to 24 clubs each last summer, while the demise of Bury and Macclesfield has left two further vacancies.) Are there numerous clubs in the regional leagues robust enough to step up and satisfy all the criteria for this level during the current climate?

I just don't know how all these clubs who want to press on regardless are finding the money right now. If anything I'd have thought sponsors would be less forthcoming than usual, as many of them must surely be struggling with their own operating difficulties during the pandemic.

It took us 14 years to reach this division after it was formed in 2004. I always thought it was the right level for our club to aspire to. A stronger version of the Isthmian Premier Division from which we were relegated in 2001, with a few clubs from the Midlands and South West and no room for the makeweights of the Isthmian League.

The longer we spend in the National League the less I like what I see. It started before we even played our first match when we were made to replace two sets of brand new kit because the League sponsor's logo had been printed on the left sleeve instead of the right, even though it was no less prominent or visible.

Football supporters are prone to moaning and criticising people within the game at any opportunity: players, managers, directors, referees, opponents. However the clowns running this shitshow have truly surpassed themselves this season with an astonishing litany of clueless and incompetent decisions, compounding the situation with evasive responses and a refusal to answer for their mistakes.

The Isthmian South East Division is little more than a Kent superleague these days, while the Isthmian Premier no longer has any clubs from Suffolk or even North West London, but all I really want right now is to get back to watching matches in a sensibly run league once we're allowed to have the crowds back.
 
Last edited:
I have no inside knowledge but suspect the reason the league has offered members a vote on ending the season is that a substantial number of clubs informed them they cannot finish the season. If so, we are potentially looking at numerous resignations in the worst case scenario.

I hope we and everyone else are still tier two next season. A substantial number if resignations would have a massive impact lower down the pyramid. We wouldn't have been too impressed if five or six tier two teams voluntarily dropped down to the Isthmian South when we were stuck there.

Voluntary demotion should only occur / be permitted where necessary to save a club. I would totally support it under those circumstances.
 
Roger D said:
I have no inside knowledge but suspect the reason the league has offered members a vote on ending the season is that a substantial number of clubs informed them they cannot finish the season. If so, we are potentially looking at numerous resignations in the worst case scenario.

I hope we and everyone else are still tier two next season. A substantial number if resignations would have a massive impact lower down the pyramid. We wouldn't have been too impressed if five or six tier two teams voluntarily dropped down to the Isthmian South when we were stuck there.

Voluntary demotion should only occur / be permitted where necessary to save a club. I would totally support it under those circumstances.
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Yes, whilst the survey issued to supporters a few days ago hinted that taking a demotion to avoid long term financial distress would be considered I'm sure it's an absolute last resort, and there surely must be other clubs who would be forced out of the league one way or another before we are.

The thought that occurred to me this morning is that if clubs are prepared to play on without another grant it effectively means they don't need paying supporters turning up at the ground, they can manage without them. In which case why have they been charging spectators all these years, with prices consistently rising ahead of inflation? Why, for instance, do St Albans charge 18 quid ground admission to have a 5,000 capacity ground less than 20% full? When we're back to normal they may as well drop the price to a five, or even make it free, to see if they can fill the ground.
 
Roger D said:
There are reports online the league have threatened "action" against any club who fails to play on Saturday.
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This Is risible. Our last scheduled match was postponed at 4 hours notice because one player reported coronavirus symptoms. Presumably he would then have been tested, but not necessarily found positive. (The season was suspended before it was announced whether or not a positive test had occurred, which would have meant postponing further matches.)

All officials and volunteers (and presumably players) have to submit an online form before each match, basically confirming they have no reason to believe they may have the virus or have been in contact with anyone who has. If players have still been training together it's only going to need one of them to tick a relevant box and the game should be off.

(In case anyone has lost interest, we're scheduled to play away to Braintree on Saturday.)
 
A League Board member speaks. (Spoiler, it's all Boris' fault apparently.)

He also basically admits the league assumed grants would continue and didn't ask for confirmation of this before starting the season. Oops.

www.portsmouth.co.uk

Chairman of one of Hampshire’s three National League clubs ‘feels let down’ by the Government over funding crisis

The chairman of one of Hampshire’s three National League clubs feels ‘let down’ by the Government over the funding crisis which could see the season curtailed.
www.portsmouth.co.uk www.portsmouth.co.uk
 
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