When Lewes welcome Manchester United to the Dripping Pan on Sunday, many will view it as a David v Goliath type battle, of Championship minnows against Women’s Super League title contenders. But while the visitors will be favourites to progress to the FA Cup semi-finals, to bill it as a mismatch is slightly unfair.
“We’re still in the top 20 teams in the country,” says Lewes’s chief executive, Maggie Murphy. “We are little Lewes, but remember we are also an elite team. We shouldn’t undermine the incredible achievements of the players who have got us this far. They have already created club history by getting this far. This is a huge game for us. It shows the progress that we as a club have been making over the last few years.”
The almost £2m wage bill of Manchester United’s women’s team in 2022 was more than the entire turnover for Lewes’s men’s and women’s teams. Yet the East Sussex club are far from being a failing one. In fact, they are the envy of many in the top two divisions of women’s football .
“We know that we make a lot more money than many other clubs with much bigger football brands,” explains Murphy. “That’s because our attendances are good, it’s because our matchday experiences are great, it’s because people buy our food, they buy our tickets (we don’t give them away, we put them at a proper price) and we play in our own ground, which I think is important. We are also authentic which means sponsors like us, so we have a lot more sponsorship money coming in. We are actually making a lot of money.”
The difficulty for a fan-owned club such as Lewes is that despite achieving a level of sustainability each season, the bar keeps being raised, even though most clubs operate at a loss. “The problem is we’re not making as much money as is just being slid across the table from [the] men’s side of [other] clubs into the women’s,” says Murphy.
“If the requirements to stay in the game continue to inflate above the rate at which we can make money, then our survival is threatened. For me, it just doesn’t feel right that a club that is incredibly well backed, internationally renowned, has a unique business model and it makes lots of money, could be under threat. It just makes me sad.”
What, then, should a successful club look like? “The expectation of women’s football players, administrators and fans are rising, but perhaps not in parallel with the revenues that are coming in,” says Murphy. “When there is a call for undersoil heating, for example, it belies the fact that, actually, the game is not as stable as we think. Most clubs, if not all, are struggling to provide decent mental health or psychological support or medical care. The cultures in some clubs still need a lot of work too.
“I think there’s lots of things we haven’t even thought about yet in terms of the way that we govern the game. I don’t think we’ve thought about means testing, for example, when the grants come from the central pot.
“I don’t think we’ve really thought about whether the distribution between the WSL and Championship is really appropriate, because I feel like women’s football has this opportunity to think completely differently from men’s football, and really support the pyramid and the wider ecosystem.”
Murphy is on the working group put together by the FA to explore what the future of the women’s game should look like, alongside the Arsenal CEO, Vinai Venkatesham, the West Ham vice-chair, Karren Brady, and Manchester City’s chief football operations officer, Omar Berrada, as one of two representatives not linked to a men’s Premier League side.
They have met once so far. “There was a lot of conversation about thinking fresh, new and differently, and making sure that it doesn’t replicate men’s football, so that’s good. However, we might think about those things differently,” says Murphy. “At the moment it is still too early to tell where the pinch points are actually going to be and also what the outcomes will be.”
Does Sunday’s result matter? “The result definitely matters, but only if we win,” says Murphy, with a laugh. “No one expects us to win, maybe that’s the best way for us to go into that game, knowing that people don’t expect much of us.
“We want to prove we can pull off a great game on and off the pitch. I hope that people are pleasantly surprised if they’ve never been to the Dripping Pan by how full of character it is, I hope they love our food, I hope they love our drink, I hope they love our new merch lines that are coming out just for this game, I hope they spend a lot of money.
“But ultimately, I just want them to have a brilliant time and I want them to walk away thinking: ‘I wish my club did that.’”
