Is another football club possible? The rise and rise of Clapton Community Football Club, ft. Sukhdev Johal

What can a football team do for its community? Is it possible to re-imagine the role of  football clubs? In this episode Guy and Francesco talk to Sukhdev Johal from Clapton CFC, East London's fan-owned football club with a strong social and political profile. From the iconic Second Spanish Republic-inspired jersey to Clapton's campaigns against homophobia, racism, sexism and intolerance and what it means to be a community club, including an invaluable Hardship Fund during the covid pandemic, Sukhdev tells the story of Clapton Community Football Club (and a bit of its future too!).

Transcript

Is another football club possible? The rise and rise of Clapton Community Football Club, ft. Sukhdev Johal

Francesco Belcastro 00:09
Hello and welcome to football, the podcast where football meets politics. I'm your host Dr. Francesco Belcastro and here with me as my co -host Dr. Guy Burton. 
 

Guy Burton 00:18
Hello, how are you today, Francesco? 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:20
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm very excited for today's episode. You know, who our guest is today, Guy? 
 

Guy Burton 00:26
You're about to tell me. So what are we talking about today? 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:29
I'm about to tell you the title of our episode, that today is: Is another football club possible? And we got the best possible person to talk about it, Sukhdev Johal from Clapton Community Football Club.
 Francesco Belcastro 00:43
For people, for listeners who are not aware of it, Clapton Community Football Club is a club based in East London. They are good on the football pitch. They look great because of their jerseys that I've no doubt Sukhdev is gonna talk about.
 Francesco Belcastro 00:56
But they also are very good in their community. They are a social club and that they are community active and they do a lot of interesting stuff. So Sukhdev, welcome and tell us a bit about your club. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 01:11
That's for others to decide whether we're popular or interesting. But we're kind of a football club that's set up in 2018, although there's lots of internal disputes when we actually started. But hey, we'll start with 2018 because nobody here to argue with me on that point.
 Sukhdev Johal 01:28
We're a football club that is actually a community benefit society. So we're actually governed by the FSA. We have to do annual kind of audits. And we're one member, one vote. And we are totally volunteer run. 
 

Guy Burton 01:47
And the FSA, the Football Supporters Association, right? 
 

Sukhdev Johal 01:51
FSA, Football Supporters Association helped us in terms of our governance structures, in the way that we actually set our governing document in. I should have said FSA, which is the financial services or whatever it's called now, which ensures that we have the same kind of things that say a charity would have in terms of audit and we're governed by that body.
Sukhdev Johal 02:19
This isn't like just file your accounts at companies house, no one ever looks at them. There are kind of audits that go on in there. 
 

Guy Burton 02:28
Now, you're talking a little bit about governance, and obviously, that's kind of the external dimension. But I think one of the interesting things about Clapton CFC is kind of the internal decision -making process.
 Guy Burton 02:37
So you could talk us a little, take us through a little bit about how that works. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 02:41
Absolutely. Right, we're a one -member, one -vote club and this club is organised around committees. We do have a board of directors, we call it now a general organised committee, but that itself doesn't have the power.
 Sukhdev Johal 02:58
The power is devolved down to all of the committees and there's lots of committees, comms, merch, grounds, match day, community. It goes on endlessly. Even the teams themselves are actually within the committee kind of structure.
 Sukhdev Johal 03:18
What that essentially means is that you become a member and you can become a member for £5, £10 or £20. The £5, if you're down on your luck, £10 is the normal kind of membership, makes no difference between the five of the £10 or the £20.
 Sukhdev Johal 03:34
The £20 is solidarity. You just give an extra bit in. But whichever membership you take out, you get one member, one vote, you have an equal voice. You have the right as anybody else to propose the direction of the club, direction of policies, join any committee you want.
 Sukhdev Johal 03:56
We do actually encourage that you don't join more than three because then essentially it's a full -time post. That's how we govern and we've grown organically. We do actually encourage people to become members, but that's so you...
Sukhdev Johal 04:13
We produce a weekly newsletter and you get access to the weekly newsletter of what the club is doing, the things that it's planning to do, votes. You also get to vote at the AGM. It's about bringing democracy right down into the grassroots and everybody having the say.
 Sukhdev Johal 04:35
It's not just talking skills that are important, but it's also listening skills. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 04:41
That's fascinating. Can I ask you how it all started? 
 

Sukhdev Johal 04:44
How did it all start? You may actually laugh at this, but this may be one example where pub talk actually turns into something. Now, we've been going to football games since 2012. It started off kind of very small, and then it kind of just grew partly because of the energy and the creativity of what used to be known as the kind of Clapton Ultras.
 Sukhdev Johal 05:12
And they subsequently kind of dissolved themselves because they set up a kind of a new club. But it started around about 2012, but it really did start to kind of gel as an idea around about kind of 2016, where the group were kind of boycotting the games for the team that they supported.
 Sukhdev Johal 05:38
That was around kind of governance, transparency, and also kind of raising entry prices and kind of trying to kind of understand where the money went. Standing in alleyways and peering over the fence and watching kind of games and cheering them on.
 Sukhdev Johal 05:56
And that clearly is really exciting for the first two or three times where you stand on kind of, draws and everything. But in December, when it's cold and it's raining, it was simply, you know, we did it for a kind of a season that was actually flawless.
 Sukhdev Johal 06:18
The boycott was kind of flawlessly observed by people who were actually involved in the groups. But that clearly was going to be unsustainable. So, decided to set up a new club. So in 2017, there was kind of a vote of what we were going to do.
 Sukhdev Johal 06:35
And we kind of formally kind of set up a kind of a company. And then 2018, we formally said we wanted a team. And we were going to start playing in the league in 2018, but we had no team, no manager, essentially, no ground, no nothing.
 Sukhdev Johal 06:50
That's what happened. And then in 2018, I guess the story begins. I mean, we're going to find a start point in history. Let's pick on 2018. 
 

Guy Burton 07:01
And then you were mentioning a little bit about the decision making process. So decision making was that sort of extended to the pitch, to the selection of the team as well, or primarily just behind sort of that sort of backroom stuff. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 07:16
Because we're organised in committees, there is actually a first team, men's first team committee, a women's first team committee, and there are managers. This doesn't mean just because you're a member of the team, the club that gives you the right to select the team.
 Sukhdev Johal 07:34
It's devolved down into kind of committees and then further kind of responsibilities given on that basis. So if you're, for example, around on kind of merch, you'll decide kind of what merch you want.
 Sukhdev Johal 07:48
You know, I mean, to give you an example of the democratic decision making kind of merch, you know, we've been selling kind of winter scarves in summer. So the committees and the way it's kind of governed is the committees have the responsibility.
 Sukhdev Johal 08:05
They are then self governing. Obviously, big decisions that will affect different other committees and the whole club will then have to go to kind of AGMs for decision making. But kind of the day to day kind of operations that devolved down into kind of committees and they are at that moment, sovereign.
 Sukhdev Johal 08:22
So if any other committee wants to make a decision that affects another committee, they have to seek, you know, their not permission, but their understanding of what's been suggested and whether they agree with that. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 08:35
You mentioned the ground and this is my moment to brag about the fact that I was there last week and I really enjoyed and it's great. I mean the ground in itself, it's a story that perhaps we can tell to our listeners.
 Francesco Belcastro 08:48
But I also wanted to ask you, how important is the ground as a kind of physical place to club from community football club and to your idea of a football club?

Sukhdev Johal 09:00
There is, I mean, I must kind of actually also emphasize, I'm intermixing what the club believes in with my own kind of opinions as well. Okay, so for me, it's really important that you have organizing spaces.
 Sukhdev Johal 09:16
And one of the kind of great triumphs of kind of say, Thatcherism has been the the the the demolition, the the non -existence of kind of social kind of spaces, organizing kind of spaces. The ground is important for the club, for the teams, we have somewhere to call home.
 Sukhdev Johal 09:37
When we come there, it's ours, you know, and you know, we don't have kind of fedoras and cigars and you know, and sheepskin coats, but we are owners of this club. Collectively, we own this. It's given us a home, it's given us a base, it's given us something from which we can build on.
 Sukhdev Johal 09:57
And that's been the kind of the key here for us, because for the first three seasons, we've, and for the men's team, four seasons, we have been largely kind of nomads, because we didn't start playing at the Old Spotted Dog Ground.
 Sukhdev Johal 10:15
The women's team played last year, but they played because we received dispensation for the women's team that they could play at the ground, even though the dressing rooms were in a school across the road.
 Sukhdev Johal 10:31
So I don't know what reason that the the league decided that the men's team were unable to cross the zebra crossing into the ground, so therefore they couldn't play there. And it's given us a home, it's given us an identity.
 Sukhdev Johal 10:48
It is the oldest senior football ground in London. It is a ground that we bought and without recourse to public funds, and I grant money involved in that moment, we bought it from a subsidiary of Heineken for £100,000 during the pandemic. 
 

Guy Burton 11:11
And because he also mentioned the merch, talking about the merch committee. I mean, I wonder how much, because obviously we want to get into talking a little bit about the merchandise that's associated with Clapton Community Football Club and how much that contributed towards, you know, the purchase of the ground. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 11:27
 I can answer that kind of directly. I'll take the last bit of your question first. How much of the kind of the merchant then I'll get into kind of the shirts afterwards. No, no, we borrowed all the money, the £100,000.
 Sukhdev Johal 11:39
We borrowed it from the cooperative and community finance organization, a cooperative that lent us 100% of the cost to buy the ground. We didn't use any money that we had made from that to buy the ground, which is a bit of a surprise because we actually had that moment, £100,000 in the bank as a result of selling our away shirt.
 Sukhdev Johal 12:11
We're at that stage, I think this is kind of where memory kind of struggles against forgetting. I think at that point we'd sold about five nearly 6,000 of our away shirts at that kind of moment. Sold for £25, we made approximately about a tenner, a shirt on that.
 Sukhdev Johal 12:34
So as a consequence of selling the shirts, we had the money in the bank. So for the bank, I mean essentially, it was a zero risk in terms of the cash was there, we could buy it, but we didn't want to use the cash to buy the ground because one of the key features implicit rather than explicit was that when we set the club up, we actually also realized that we would have to raise the funds to run a football club.
 Sukhdev Johal 13:03
A football club and what it wants to do does not run on air. So there was some kind of understanding of capital's kind of principles. This isn't just you know, we put cap in hand all the time and we operate in that fashion, although kind of our entry up to this season has always been by donation.
 Sukhdev Johal 13:23
So yes, we had shirts and I can, if you want to, I can discuss the kind of shirts and how it kind of connects kind of various things and there's a whole story in that. 
 

Guy Burton 13:35
No, no, absolutely, because you mentioned particularly the away shirts. So obviously, I mean, that's the best seller, but... 
 

Francesco Belcastro 13:42
That I proudly own, Guy, can I add.
 

Guy Burton 13:42
Yes, which Francesco now is unfortunately not wearing today, but I'm sure it will make an appearance in a future episode. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 13:53
Oh, okay, Kieran has been wearing it, when he kind of goes on to the BBC as well. Right, so. Look, the shirt starts off with, we have a competition, amongst the kind of membership. Remember, we've just started off, we don't have a team, but we've got to decide in which colours we're going to play.
 Sukhdev Johal 14:15
We'd already decided what we were going to do for the home shirt, so that was done, because that's largely kind of a follow -on from the past. But we had a kind of competition for the members, right, to design an away shirt that would be voted on by members, and the winner would become our away shirt.
 Sukhdev Johal 14:35
Now, it starts off with a kind of competition with 20 shirts. There's a kind of, there is a kind of, should we say kind of, a kind of favourite other team, right? But there was this one design that did quite well, didn't always win in all the rounds.
 Sukhdev Johal 14:58
Remember, we had a knockout kind of stage, right? So, you had to kind of keep going. The shirt never, didn't always win, but it was always near the top. But it was in the colours of the second Spanish Republic flag.
 Sukhdev Johal 15:14
That is, I mean, if those are not familiar with it, I mean, if you've read kind of anything from George Orwell, he talks about the Spanish Civil War, right? And that kind of is, that is homage to those volunteers who went to Spain, and also those who actually were Spanish and fought in the Spanish Civil War.
 Sukhdev Johal 15:39
There was no kind of grand design or anything. This was no grand kind of strategy or anything. So that design won, and I must say, personally, I was really delighted. So we had to decide how many do we need?
 Sukhdev Johal 15:56
How many do you think the fans would buy? So we come to a grand total of 30. Not for the team, the men's team. At this stage, we'd only set up the men's team. The men's team were going to get their own shares, but we reckon we could sell 30.
 Sukhdev Johal 16:11
So on a kind of a balmy August day in 2018, we had a shirt launch. And our shirts are produced by Rage Sports in Italy. And he actually even came over and the shirt launch. So we're at this bar, and the beer was kind of great.
 Sukhdev Johal 16:30
It was a really kind of balmy evening. I got there a little late, and all the shirts were sold out. Others were moaning, so we decided we'd put a few shirts up online to see, you know, the last few let's see how many we need to do.
 Sukhdev Johal 16:45
So we put them up on the website, and initially kind of a few of them was sold, more than 30 can sold. But then that team, after playing its initial match, I think it was on the 21st of July in 2018, that was an away game at Holland FC that inaugurated their half a million pound kind of clubhouse as well.
 Sukhdev Johal 17:10
But there was a photograph taken of two of our players celebrating the goal. And that photograph was two players wearing this shirt in the colors of the Second Spanish Republic. Just so happens that it was picked up.
 Sukhdev Johal 17:27
The picture was picked up by a an Irish journalist working in Spain, working in sports, and he tweeted it. We thought nothing of it. I mean, you know, every day kind of people retweet stuff, and they tweet out.
 Sukhdev Johal 17:47
And then we noticed something on our website. The sales started to increase, and that's that kind of kind of increasing. And when the initial thought was we'd been hacked, right, you know, shit, right, you know, what are we going to do here?
 Sukhdev Johal 18:03
But then it keeps increasing. And while we were on a kind of a, I think it was a Zoom call, and it wasn't a Zoom, it might have been, it might have been Skype, I think. The shirt sales were asking somebody who was actually on the website, on the online store, how many have we sold now?
 Sukhdev Johal 18:20
And they kept going up, and they kept going up, you know. What are we going to do? And some later in that con stage, PayPal got in touch and said, well, we're going to, you know, they've closed their account.
 Sukhdev Johal 18:34
Well, yeah, they've closed their account, because they've seen all these kind of transactions of 25 pounds and 30 pounds going through. thinking, what's going on here? They've sold nothing. Since they opened, and all of a sudden, inside a week, you're getting all these kind of sales.
 Sukhdev Johal 18:54
So then one of our kind of members at the finance committee had to get in touch with PayPal, and they had actually looked on the website of what actually happened, and they realized that it was a shirt, so we were able to reopen the kind of the store, and then sales kept going up.
 Sukhdev Johal 19:11
And then we faced our next problem, our next hurdle. Remember, we are people who don't run kind of businesses, right? But we actually become aware of the £75,000 threshold for VAT, if your sales are at £75,000, you're going to have to register for that.
 Sukhdev Johal 19:28
So there, you know, remember we operate in kind of committees also, but we're rather small at this stage, and we're deciding we should close sales because we're never going to have enough sales to ever register for that, we should just stop.
 Sukhdev Johal 19:40
But the consensus was that we should continue and register, and that's what we did, we registered, and then the shirts went up from £25 to £30, because we had to now include the VAT in this, and the sales kept going up, and then eventually we got to about £5,000.
 Sukhdev Johal 19:57
And there were all pre -orders, we had no shirts to sell. Right? And then we stopped the sales in the beginning of September 2018. Because in fact we had 5,000 orders, and what the hell were we going to do here?
 Sukhdev Johal 20:17
And then we had to put an order in to Rage Sports. Remember, this guy is one person at this stage with a sublimation kind of printer, he designs the stuff, and he's looking at this, he's thinking, what the hell's happened here?
 Sukhdev Johal 20:36
And I think he gave up sleeping then for the next month. Finally, I think we got our shirts by end of beginning of November, and then we had no idea how to pack, and the thought of kind of queuing up at post office with 5,000 kind of parcels to put postage on.
 Sukhdev Johal 20:57
There was another member who was aware of a business that could actually pack for us. So initially they started to do the packing for us. So that allowed kind of 5,000 to kind of clear. And then in 20, yeah, in all that kind of period, from September up to January, we had closed sales.
 Sukhdev Johal 21:20
But we kept kind of receiving emails, and I do let us know when the shirts can become available. And then eventually we just made a form and said, fill your details in, put your email address, and when they become available, we'll email you.
 Sukhdev Johal 21:35
So in January, 2019, we let everybody know using MailChimp. Because there's IT, you can especially sell on board as well with us. And we sent the emails out, and on one day we sold 148,000 pounds worth of shirts in just one day.
 Sukhdev Johal 21:58
And this is kind of continued. I mean, obviously it ebbs and kind of flows in terms of kind of merch. It ebbs and flows, but I think we're just over 18 and a half, maybe 19,000 shirts sold now. In fact, there's another kind of mini boom that's going on now, but we stopped pre -sales because people start emailing us.
 Sukhdev Johal 22:21
Amazon have spoiled everybody by saying, well, actually, look, I've ordered today, and why isn't it here by the evening? The lag that we've got is because remember the shirts are made by Rage, they're produced by an ethical kind of producer who pays a living wage to people who put it together, and then it comes across from Italy.
 Sukhdev Johal 22:47
So there's always a five to seven week lag in this. But the shirts sales continue. We keep kind of, this season we budgeted for, I think, 7,000 pounds worth of merch sales, just kind of last month we sold shirts, 2,000 pounds worth of shirts. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 23:07
And I would just add for our listeners that they're gonna have the opportunity to learn more about Rage in a few weeks, because they are on our on our list of guests. So, so we'll learn more about their story, which is fascinating. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 23:19
Rage themselves have their own kind of history as well. And it's Maurizio and, you know, and who, there is a political project underneath those kinds of shirts as well. The belief in kind of ethical kind of production, yes, living wages.
 Sukhdev Johal 23:38
And the belief that embeds, I mean, it's an anti -fascist shirt producer, probably the only one in the world as well. 
 

Guy Burton 23:51
And actually, this kind of brings us, if I may, to some of the other things we wanted to talk to you about. So, you know, obviously, we've been taught, you've been touching upon the fact that there is this importance of the social and social and political dimension to football, which very prominent and at the forefront when it comes to Clapton.
 Guy Burton 24:06
So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, obviously, the story of the shirt is something that's got a lot of attention in the media, especially in the years after the club was first set up. But thinking more recently, over the last couple of years, and particularly in relation to the pandemic, you know, some of the some of the activities that Clapton has been involved with, you know, either during the pandemic or after, I think, for example, you had a hardship fund that was set up, I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about that as well as any of the other activities that the football club's involved in. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 24:37
The important thing is that we support each other. The shirts have been kind of a bonus. They've been a blessing and also kind of a headache as well at the same time, but we're kind of, good fortune has shined.
 Sukhdev Johal 24:49
But during the kind of pandemic, some of our members really faced an astonishing level of hardship because they were self -employed and they got no kind of furlough payments and there was no work coming in.
 Sukhdev Johal 25:04
Initially, it started with one member suggesting it and a lot of people then diving in to kind of support this, which was to set up a hardship fund. And this hardship fund would be, we would appeal to members and others with the wish to kind of donate to a hardship fund.
 Sukhdev Johal 25:22
And these funds would be distributed to members, obviously on the kind of first kind of basis, but also that you started with the position you were believed. I wasn't part of the distribution of the funds and I don't know how they were done.
 Sukhdev Johal 25:39
I don't know who received them and quite rightly we shouldn't know who received them. But that was important because we raised £15,000 plus during that period, during the pandemic. And that's something to be kind of really kind of applauded.
 Sukhdev Johal 25:55
I rate that as higher than what the shirts as high as setting up the kind of the club, the moment that we needed each other, we were there to support each other financially, not just with time, not with our energy or creativity, but also with money.
 Sukhdev Johal 26:13
And that was really, really important. And I'm immensely kind of proud. And I know a lot of our members are immensely proud of what we can have achieved in that. In fact, we were not that we set out to do this, nor did we actually apply for it, but we won a lock down heroes award from the FSA too.
 Sukhdev Johal 26:32
But at the same time also, we had this kind of problem. And remember, we weren't playing kind of football and no income and donations coming in through kind of matches as well. But we also had a leaking, a profusely leaking roof in the clubhouse, the clubhouse that we just bought.
 Sukhdev Johal 26:50
And here was the kind of the fabric of the building beginning to kind of dissolve if it continued. So we needed also to raise £20,000 for the roof. However, even though we've moved away from kind of the shirts, the shirts coming to this as well, not that we use that money for that, because it was important that we had the reserves, just in case lockdown went on longer, and that we could actually continue with all the activities that we wanted to do, and we had the income to ensure that we could pay the bills for the interest and principal kind of payments for the ground.
 Sukhdev Johal 27:31
Remember, we owned the ground now, and now we had monthly kind of payments to make. The shirts also, we sold lots of shirts during lockdown as well. I could tell when Donald Trump mentioned Antifa, because our shirts sales would go up, because somehow it could be in America.
Sukhdev Johal 27:51
And we had become, the shirt had become the icon for Antifa movement. Not that we knew that. I mean, it just seemed to be kind of a link. Every time you'd mention it, a shirt says, go up. And that allowed us to kind of generate kind of income, so we didn't have to use our reserves at that moment to pay the banks and also kind of the other charges that normally come in with when you own a property.
 Sukhdev Johal 28:18
So the lockdown was kind of challenging, but also we also demonstrated how mutual aid could work. 
 

Guy Burton 28:29
The club is known for campaigning on a wide range of social and political issues, LGBT issues, anti -sexism, obviously you've been involved. I've seen some prominent images in the wake of the Women's World Cup final. 
 Guy Burton 28:44
 But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about beyond just the campaigns and the support of that, the other activities that the Clapton is involved in. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 28:53
For me personally, it's always a conduit to something else. It's also about kind of bringing community together. Also, it becomes kind of an area for kind of creativity and ideas. The club is kind of driven by its kind of members and what interests them.
 Sukhdev Johal 29:09
So if it's kind of campaigning, the clubhouse has given us an opportunity to also to invite other groups, not necessarily Clapton, but have kind of community kind of aims to come in and use the clubhouse as well.
 Sukhdev Johal 29:23
And they've started to use that. And remember, we're kind of at the beginning, but in terms of kind of the campaigning, all our teams this week were there to support Jenni [Hermoso, the Spanish women's football captain] in the campaign. But when you talk about kind of the campaigning and you've not mentioned it, but I'll mention it on your behalf, I mean, we're a left wing club.
 Sukhdev Johal 29:44
Well, I don't think we are a left wing club. We are just normal. I mean, why would you be against this stuff? Is the way we look at this, you know, why wouldn't you make this a welcoming kind of place?
 Sukhdev Johal 29:55
Why should kind of people be kind of, you know, suffer kind of injustice and intolerance because of the color or the gender or whatever. And our resource has been based around that and the campaigns have come from kind of the membership.
 Sukhdev Johal 30:11
This isn't some kind of leadership group saying, okay, today what we're going to do is we're going to do this. This grows organically from the membership who suggests it and then kind of committees kind of go and get behind this.
 Sukhdev Johal 30:24
And that's kind of really important. And in terms of kind of the campaigning, the campaigning is not simply on kind of social causes, but it's also about kind of holding some of our institutions to account here, including kind of, you know, the charity commission, including the insolvency service.
 Sukhdev Johal 30:42
So we have dealt with all of these. We have the support of our local authority. Rokhsana, the Mayor of Newham has been particularly kind of supportive as has Lyn Brown MP for us. Because it's not only from the kind of campaigning that good things happen, but other things have also happened in terms of using the skills of our membership to see if we could actually buy the warehouse behind the ground that we had.
 Sukhdev Johal 31:16
Because I didn't mention it, but we bought a ground. The ground didn't have dressing rooms because they were in a warehouse behind, which is part of a liquidation and did not belong to Heineken when we bought the ground.
 Sukhdev Johal 31:29
So we bought a football ground without any dressing rooms. Initially, we were going to build kind of dressing rooms. Initially, we had that £100,000. Remember that £100,000 we were talking about? We had that £100,000 that we were going to use to build the dressing rooms.
 Sukhdev Johal 31:44
And after kind of all the hoo-haa during kind of lockdown and trying to get kind of planning permission, we finally get planning permission. And then we've appointed a contractor only to find, as a week before it's going to begin, that most of the workforce of the contractor has gone off to Ukraine to the war.
 Sukhdev Johal 32:06
And then we sought out another kind of contractor. And what we found was that everything had gone up in price. And so much so that we couldn't build dressing rooms for less than £200,000. Here we had a ground, no dressing rooms.
 Sukhdev Johal 32:23
And what we did was we went out and spoke to the insolvency service and we bought a dressing room, the warehouse for £250,000. Again, most of it from borrowed funds, but we did use about £90, £97,000 of our reserves.
 Sukhdev Johal 32:42
We went to our reserves to buy the warehouse. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 32:47
Can actually ask you a last question. I know I actually have a lot of things to ask, but I'll kind of want to ask you. So what next for Clapton Community Football Club? Obviously the future of the club. 
 

Sukhdev Johal 32:59
I would say I want it to be a community hub, use seven days a week, but that would be for the membership to decide, not me. I'm just one voice. We're having a consultation at the moment, we're gonna go much broader into the community, but we want to redevelop the warehouse so it becomes a community and organizing space.
 Sukhdev Johal 33:18
A football club that truly has community embedded within it, not only in its name. 
 

Guy Burton 33:25
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Sukhdev, for giving us your time and talking about, you know, Clapton and what it means, you know, both to you as well as the wider community. It's been fascinating.
 Guy Burton 33:35
And also a couple of really nice things there about, you know, Rage Sports, who, you know, Francesco and I are going to be talking to subsequently in later dates. Francesco, is there anything else you want to add before? 
 

Francesco Belcastro 33:46
Yeah, I wanted to ask you if you could share your birthday with our listeners. So if anyone wants to get you a Clapton Community Football Club jersey as a sign of appreciation for your hard work for the podcast Guy, that would be ideal. 
  

Sukhdev Johal 33:59
I'd say become members, not just merch, don't make it a kind of transactional relationship. www.claptoncfc.co.uk. Websites update it all the time. There's the comms committee, thank the comms committee for that, and also the members for putting in the text as well.
 Sukhdev Johal 34:18
Have a look around if you like what you see and do come and visit this. 
  

Guy Burton 34:23
Yes, and your location is? 
 

Sukhdev Johal 34:25
It's in Forest Gate. We're not in kind of Clapton. We're based in kind of Forest Gate, in the oldest senior football ground in London, the Old Spotted Dog. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 34:35
So, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll have you back at some point to discuss how the season went and talk a bit more about football, maybe. Okay, that was absolutely great. Guy, anything else? 
 

Guy Burton 34:49
Well, yes, I mean, if you've managed to make it this far, we always appreciate it if you would like the podcast, share it with other people, subscribe to it. And even, you know, maybe get in touch with us and tell us if there's a topic and some guests, maybe even a club that you would like us to look at.
Guy Burton 35:04
You can actually access us at a number of different places. So we are on Twitter or X as it's now called under the Football Podcast. We also have a Facebook page. We also have recently joined with Blue Sky.
 Guy Burton 35:16
And you can also email us at thefootpollpodcast@gmail.com.
 

Francesco Belcastro 35:20
I think we even have an Instagram, don't we? 
 

Guy Burton 35:22
We do have an Instagram. We just don't use it enough, but it's there. Maybe you could maybe maybe listeners could send in pictures of themselves listening to the podcast and we can post them up. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 35:32
That would be great. That's a great idea. 
 

Guy Burton 35:35
Wearing their jerseys, of course. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 35:37
The Clapton jersey, of course. 
 

Guy Burton 35:38
Exactly. And okay, so that's that's that's all taken care of. And I think the last thing to just say is, of course, we look forward to seeing you again next week, when we're going to be talking to Professor Matthew Taylor of De Montfort University about why there is no British football team.
 Guy Burton 35:52
That episode will be dropping on October the 23rd, which is next Monday. So we look forward to seeing and hearing you then. All the best. Take care. Bye. 
  

Francesco Belcastro 36:01
Bye.