Some football grounds stand atop hills, allowing their congregation to stare up during the midweek from all four sides. Exeter City’s St James Park is not one of them. As you turn off Old Tiverton Road, the road sign is your only clue of what lies on – Stadium Way. The single-tiered stands, nestled down, offer the impression of shyness and humility. That fits us perfectly, the locals would no doubt say.
At the back of the empty Big Bank, the terraced Kop that accounts for half of the ground’s capacity, a large red heart has been painted into the hard grey steps. They know that to some it may seem a little twee, but it represents that this is the heart of the football club. Without the fans, it would literally be nothing.
From the back of the Big Bank, you can take it all in: the glorious view over Exeter city centre and then the start of the Haldon Hills in the distance; the Cowshed, its seats bleached by weather, that backs onto the old sandstone school building that still bears the telltale signs of its history (the entrances back into the club have “infants” and “girl” written above the doors); the metalwork of the away end, bought from Barnet in tighter times on a deal by which Exeter paid a pound for every away supporter until a certain total had been reached.
Newest of all is the Adam Stanfield stand, running only half of the length of one side of the pitch. It holds 1,600 people, cost £3m to build and, so the truth-laced joke goes, was bought by Ollie Watkins after his moves to Brentford and then Aston Villa. It goes without saying: there is a hotchpotch beauty to all this that punches you in the soul and makes you long for matchday.
Exeter City are the highest-ranked fan-owned club in English football, a board of directors split equally between independents and supporters trust members.
This year, they celebrate 20 years of trust ownership, and extraordinary achievement in the current climate. Having been bought by the trust for £30,000 in 2003, by 2022 the club’s assets were valued at a hundred times greater.
One of the typical elements of community football club ownership are their origin stories: born out of financial emergency, decay or mismanagement. Exeter know more than most the aching irony that links calamity and calm.
“As traumatic, chaotic and downright embarrassing that period was,” says Gary Andrews, football writer and supporter.
“Without the near collapse of the club, there would be no Trust ownership, no Paul Tisdale, no holding Manchester United to a draw at Old Trafford and no relative stability, at least compared to other clubs.”
Still, you wouldn’t wish those times on anyone, least of all your beloved. The guilty pleas to fraudulent trading by Mike Lewis and John Russell, who took over the club in 2003 and brought a circus with them, left Exeter City in non-league and on the brink of collapse. One construction firm went public after a cheque bounced and most supporters accepted that liquidation might be inevitable. When the trust took over, it discovered unknown debts of £4.8m.
The only solution was damn hard work and a few quick wins. An FA Cup replay against Manchester United, and the draw that secured it, have pride of place because the proceeds may just have saved Exeter. On the ground, the indefatigability of an army of volunteers, fundraisers and supporters got Exeter through to the first game of a new era. Even that was a mini-miracle.
“One of the tenets at the start was to make sure the club was around long after we’re gone,” says Andy Gillard, now club secretary and then one of the many saviours.
“Having Exeter in 20 years in 2003 was just a complete unknown, a fantasy. We lived day by day, week by week hand to mouth and with every one of us trying our level best. We have survived and we haven’t just survived and that’s a testament to every person who contributed then and has since. Everyone pitched in, a sea of volunteers.”
The paradox of Exeter City as a fan-owned club, and so many others like them, is that the magic is built upon intangibles, the breaking down of the walls between the person in the stands and the person on the pitch to create a deep connection that they will pass on.
This is emphatically a family club. And yet, because the model is necessarily self-funding, the bottom line of the annual accounts is more important here than anywhere because there is nobody to bail you out.
“You cannot be frivolous,” Gillard says. “Tight is the wrong word, but prudent definitely isn’t. We have nice-tos and need-tos in every aspect of what we do. We would all like to say yes to things, but sometimes that isn’t possible. You can take it down to the paperclips if you want: put them back in the box, we’ll reuse them!
“It’s a silly example, but the point is the same. You have to retrain your mind here to appreciate that everything has a knock-on effect. And as the club evolves, it’s our job to maintain that spirit.”
Everybody I speak to is happy to concede that progress comes slower here, because there can be no debt and some money must always be saved for a rainy day. But progress does come. In 20 years Exeter have been promoted three times, played at Wembley on five occasions and developed academy graduates such as Watkins, Ethan Ampadu and Matt Grimes.
They have built two new stands and invested in the growth of the women’s team. From their beginnings, with no money and few concrete plans, it is seriously impressive.
But it is the work behind the scenes to make this work, the legs kicking under the water, that is most special. Elaine Davis, a former trust board member for a decade, is too humble to call herself a master fundraiser but everyone else thinks she is and that is good enough for me. It started with needing £12,000 for brighter floodlights and went from there.
“I had long been volunteering doing practical things because the ground and club were in such disrepair, and it felt fantastic because the club only existed because we saved it. I was invited onto the trust board and wasn’t convinced, but spoke with my family – I was still working full-time – and said I’d do a year. I think people liked that I was a supporter not a suit.”
Exeter’s latest gem is their new Cliff Hill training complex, plans for which began in 2014 and was finally opened earlier this year. It is a magnificent complex that wouldn’t look out of place in the Championship, an opposite world to the old, rickety, unsafe facilities it replaced.
The money was – just about – generated over years and sales of players to build Cliff Hill, but not equip it. Cut to Elaine doing her thing. The principal expertise, it seems to me, is understanding why and how this matters.
“Everything here has to be done with a personal touch, so I created a shopping list of everything we needed so that donors could see specifically where the money was going. It gave them a connection. I had one lady, who lives in Norwich and comes to maybe one game per season. She gave us some money and said that it was for the crockery and cutlery at the training ground canteen. She said to me: ‘I just want to buy something that I know every boy will use’.”
Fan ownership without those achievements would be special. But when you combine a club’s history with a more tangible sense of self and evidence of sustained growth and sustainability, you have your golden ticket. I spend the day working in the one-room Exeter City museum within the Main Stand.
Every matchday programme has been catalogued. There is a season ticket in leather pouch from 1920 and Tony Kellow’s gold boot for being the country’s top goalscorer in 1980-81 sits in its leather adidas display case. Almost everything here has been donated by supporters because they believe that the museum having their precious items is more special than them keeping them.
Those reminders of history, modern and more ancient, are crucial and Exeter realise it. Every space on the walls is adorned with a poster or a frame or a canvas. The words “We Own Our Football Club” sit underneath the name and crest at the new training ground. There is no other choice. As Clive Harrison, a current board member says: “The work is far harder and takes far longer so that the rewards are sweeter”.
You have to boast about those rewards, from the rooftop of the old school house and the new Adam Stansfield stand, because it is not always easy to convince everyone that it is the right way.
Exeter were top of the league in September but are now hovering far closer to the bottom four in League One. Manager Gary Caldwell is under pressure. When times get harder on the pitch, patience can grow thin, particularly amongst younger supporters who hear about the history but did not live it.
“We are tremendously fortunate in what has been achieved over the last 20 years compared to the previous 80,” says Gillard.
“I never ever thought that I would see Exter at Wembley. But if you’re a kid of 12, you just won’t realise that we have crammed that into 20 years. It still has to keep working for them too; we must educate, remind and tell.”
“I guess I spend 40 hours a week as a volunteer,” says Harrison.
“If you didn’t love the club or enjoy the work then you wouldn’t do it. And you do get stick. It’s easy to criticise the board at the moment, but we were top of League One not long ago. But it’s not their fault: they see the Premier League and they see the spending.
“They see the Championship doing the same. They see the budgets of other clubs in our division and they have been hardwired to want all that. But we have to make sure we are financially sound a decade from now.”
The fan-owned model has been relatively commonplace in English football as a response to adversity but has usually been abandoned eventually in favour of private investment and ambition. It is seen by many as a make-do model, a temporary solution. Sometimes those sales work, sometimes they don’t: Brentford wouldn’t be in the Premier League had the Trust not voted to give control to Matthew Benham and Notts County almost went out of business after they were sold to Munto Finance. There are others across the spectrum.
But there are three things that jump out as I sit in the Exeter City museum surrounded by memorabilia that makes my tummy fizz as a procession of people come in to detail what they do and why they think it matters. The first, and it’s something that everybody around me believes as a very tenet of their love for this club, is that it has to mean more if you literally own a piece of it. Andrews says it better than I could:
“Players, managers, and directors can come and go but the fans will always endure. The fact that when you walk into the ground you know that there are hundreds of others in the ground with you who are invested in the club at a much deeper level is so special. The fact we now have a very healthy bank balance is testament to the enduring legacy of the Trust.”
The second is that I cannot fathom why any Exeter City supporter who can afford it isn’t also a member. That question gets wry smiles every time I ask it, and of course they would like the membership to increase.
You would be getting to own a small part of your football club, you would be contributing to its disposable income and safeguarding its future by guaranteeing yourself power within a democratic system. Is this not the dream?
Finally, I am persuaded that Exeter City are the most important Football League club in the country and I don’t even think I’m being hyperbolic.
They have no debt. They do not, and will not, spend beyond their means. They have sustained fan ownership for 20 years and, despite all of the challenges, have returned the club’s joint-highest league finish in 90 years. They are surrounded by overspending, by wage-revenue ratios that make accountants sweat.
We have had a fan-led review, and we may soon have an independent regulator. But the unpleasant conclusion is that the majority of EFL clubs have an unsustainable business model and would enter economic emergency if their owner walked out of the door. Exeter City’s is different.
That model gets harder and harder to maintain, as impatience inevitably grows and those who remember the worst times become a lower proportion of the matchday attendance. The more you exist as an antidote to the mania, the more people wonder if it’s not better just to succumb to it.
So if Exeter City can keep proving this works, stay in the Football League and continue to grow stronger and more stable, they are a blueprint for a football movement. The best bit? The harder the work and the longer the wait, the better the prize.
