British Tennis Forum - Celebrating 20 Years!

Top 5 Steps 3 & 4 Boxing Day attendances:
Bury 5,337
Worcester City 2,360
Mossley 2,007
Warrington Rylands 1,924
Ashington 1,488

Hednesford 4784 v FC United in NPL on the saturday.

Hednesford have suddenly become a big club - new owner, fan base has grown massively in last 2-3 years

My team Walton & Hersham beat Chertsey 2 days ago in front of about 1300, we're top of the Southern Premier with an astounding 57 pts out of 66. Our manager was cherry picked by Yeovil about a month ago, but it doesnt seem to have affected our form.

It's a really interesting story actually. I've been supporting them for 30 odd years. They've got a great history (won the FA Amateur Cup at Wembley in 1973, beating Brian Clough's Brighton 4-0 at the Goldstone Ground in the FA Cup etc) but from about 2008 to 2020 had dropped right down to a level not much above park football. 7 local lads (18 year olds) "bought" the club and the rise since then has been insane. 3 promotions in 4 years took the club from Combined Counties Div 1 to top of the Southern Premier.

They got 2 things massively right - hiring an old player as Manager who had a very progressive passing game unseen at that level of football, and who brought in all his old mates who were capable of playing at a far higher level but were just happy to play with their mates, and hitting the social media angle at just the right time, with covid breaking out. The club has something like 1.2m followers on TikTok and sells shirts to 45 different countries. Totally insane. Every game was filmed as well, and often streamed live.

As the club progressed and became more serious, most of the lads dropped out because of the time and financial commitment required. They brought in Chris Corey, a football entrepreneur out in Florida who had been bugging them for ages to be involved. He's led the Miami World Cup bid, and has now set up a Walton & Hersham Academy in Florida. Yes, hundreds of kids wear Walton shirts in Florida, again totally insane.

Everyone thinks we have a massive budget because of the quality of football we're playing but it's only just about top half budget. A few decent players on maybe £500/week I guess, but a lot of very young ones on nothing like that. We've had a few league games where our entire back 5 is 21 or under which is pretty mad.

One massive problem though, Council own our ground. We had our own home for 70 years Stompond Lane, but we were forced out by the council who sold it for housing, and built as a purpose built hub adjacent to the out of town leisure centre. 3g pitch, great facilities for a Combined Counties league club but not really suitable for a team hopefully heading to the National League South. Pitch is rubbish (10 years old, but hopefully being replaced this Summer), floodlights are rubbish, and while we have an excellent main stand holding 350, there is no other cover on the other 3 sides. We really need covered terracing behind the goals to both create some decent atmosphere, and for health & safety - the last thing you need is a crowd of 1500 and it pouring with rain and everyone trying to get under cover. We get the gate money and (eventually) revenue from pitchside advertising hoarding, but we don't get any of the bar money at all. We're probably losing out on £100k a season here, at the play-off game alone last season against Gloucester we had 2,200 attending and turned £20k at the bar - didn't see a penny.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I planned. Hope it was interesting!

Very interesting - if you keep rising, you need to sort out either a new ground or better arrangements with the local council otherwise you will be stuck with ground grading and revenue constraints.

All 4 national league teams drawn away.

Danny1312 wrote:

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Away to Marine AFC for my lot!

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 Its a dump. Plastic pitch - 3 sided. 2300 capacity with only 250 tickets for away supporters.

Not sure how the ground meets league regulations.

 

Good job Southport werent drawn at Marine - we could have sold the away end out at least 3 times over...