Introducing Lewes FC, the world’s solely gender-equal soccer membership, and the Australians who play there

From a distance, the city of Lewes seems like nearly another nestled into the countryside round Sussex, a area in the south-east of England.

Sliced in two by the ribbony river Ouse, every half of the city is crosshatched with previous cobblestoned streets and splotched with dense inexperienced gardens. Modest pink brick cottages and gray stone castles sit aspect by aspect, their darkish chimneys and historic spires pointing up and over the hills into the vivid, open farmland past.

Lewes’ city centre, the Excessive Road, is dotted with used bookstores, doily tea outlets and pubs with heavy curtains within the home windows. It’s a type of storybook city, a remnant of a time long gone, “mendacity like a field of toys below an ideal amphitheatre of chalk hills,” based on 18th century poet William Morris.

However if you happen to look somewhat nearer, there’s something totally different about this quiet city tucked away within the misty hills; one thing way more revolutionary than what seems on the floor.

And it may be present in a sunny nook of Lewes’ major soccer floor, The Dripping Pan.

Simply inside its wooden-gate entrance, standing towards a flint-speckled wall of stone, there may be an eight-foot-tall statue. Titled “Inexorable”, it depicts two girls fused collectively on the shoulder and hip, the unfastened hair of one of many figures fastened without end in a breeze.

They’re Anne Bonny and Mary Learn, two trailblazing girls pirates from the 1700s who dressed as males “to flee poverty and patriarchy”, finally falling in love with one another as they stole ships, treasure, and hearts round Jamaica and the broader Caribbean.

Initially, the statue, sculpted by artist Amanda Cotton, was meant to be positioned in Devon, a county in England’s south-west. However the native council rejected it, deeming its illustration of two empowered, rebellious, queer girls as “inappropriate”.

That is when Lewes FC, the one soccer membership on the planet with gender equality between women and men gamers, stepped in.

“As pioneers of gender equality in soccer, identified for our radical stance on smashing gender stereotypes, we hope our neighborhood might be impressed by this unbelievable murals,” Lewes FC director Karen Dobres stated on the statue’s unveiling final 12 months.

“We expect Anne and Mary will really feel very a lot at residence within the city of Lewes.”

It is a becoming image for a membership that, along with equal pay, has equality threaded all through its whole organisation: its senior gamers obtain the identical pitch, the identical coaching services, the identical advertising finances, and the identical minimize of match-day income. The gender illustration of its present administration workforce can also be break up 50:50.

The ladies’s first-grade workforce performs within the second-tier Championship, one stage under the top-flight Ladies’s Tremendous League, whereas the lads’s workforce are within the seventh division.

Regardless of being one of many oldest soccer golf equipment within the nation, tracing its founding again to 1885, Lewes FC can also be, on the identical time, one of many latest and most forward-looking in its unapologetic pursuit of gender equality by means of structural change.

In 2017, the membership launched a marketing campaign referred to as Equality FC, changing into the primary membership on the planet to equalise enjoying budgets and sources throughout their senior groups.

Nearly instantly, they noticed an uptick in attendances, sponsorship, and media protection — a pattern that has accelerated as girls’s soccer has flourished throughout the nation, most not too long ago within the record-breaking Ladies’s European Championships final 12 months.

The membership have leaned into their progressive social ethos much more since then, main the dialog round equalising FA Cup prize cash, which traditionally was so low for girls’s groups within the competitors that a few of them misplaced cash only for collaborating.

Because of their advocacy, in March of final 12 months, England’s Soccer Affiliation introduced they might improve the ladies’s prize fund tenfold.

Nonetheless, unhappy by incremental adjustments, the membership earlier this week printed a letter they despatched to former Lionesses participant Karen Carney, who’s presently main a overview into English girls’s soccer, as soon as once more asking for an #EqualFACup by way of prize cash.

“It might permit golf equipment to speculate extra funds in participant wages, services, tools, medical care, staffing, journey prices, and all the pieces the ladies’s soccer pyramid must thrive and develop.

“Put merely, it should permit us to concentrate on soccer.”

Along with their work on gender equality and anti-gambling initiatives, Lewes FC additionally embodies the worth and advantage of democratic governance and possession. 

As extra soccer golf equipment are wolfed up by large companies, nation-states, and billionaires, Lewes FC is 100 per cent fan-owned, volunteer-run, and not-for-profit.

There isn’t a sense of precarity or worry that the lack of a single main investor will result in whole liquidation, which many English golf equipment have skilled up to now few years. As a substitute, they’re run by, and for, the neighborhood; one of many final bastions of the romantic thought of what a soccer membership can (or ought to) be.

The Dripping Pan itself is a type of symbolic patchwork of this grassroots ethos: its match-day menu consists of a number of vegan choices; its company containers are repurposed seaside huts lining the previous stone partitions; after video games, gamers mingle with followers on the clubhouse bar that serves locally-brewed craft beers, ciders, and prosecco on faucet.

Their anti-establishment philosophy can also be seen of their match-day posters that pay homage to revolutionary figures, artwork, music, and popular culture together with Che Guevara and the Intercourse Pistols.

They also have a brass band, full with trumpets and drums and saxophones, that performs continuous from whistle to whistle. Afterwards, everyone — followers and gamers and coaches alike — return to an area pub to mingle and speak concerning the sport.

Like quite a lot of soccer individuals, Aussies Isobel Dalton and Libby Copus-Brown had heard whispers of a membership in England doing issues in a different way. But it surely wasn’t till they each arrived to Lewes’ unassuming entrance gates as gamers that they realised simply how particular the membership actually was.

“I am initially English, so I knew quite a lot of English groups and had heard Lewes had equal pay and all the pieces like that, however I by no means regarded into them past that,” Dalton, the previous Brisbane Roar and Napoli participant, advised the ABC.

“It wasn’t till I used to be trying to transfer again to England [from Australia] that I used to be like, ‘that is truly a very cool membership.’

“They’re tremendous progressive, they’ve very community-based, and I am additionally a part-owner. I feel they’ve hit practically each nation to have an proprietor, which is large.

“However right here, I do know quite a lot of the administrators and the individuals who personal the membership, which is essential as a participant as a result of they’re the individuals which can be investing in you. So it is good to have that connection and know who these individuals are which can be investing their money and time into making our careers what they’re.

“You’re very, very valued right here. Typically you might be at golf equipment the place no person has any thought if you happen to’re a participant or a workers member, whereas at Lewes, the individuals take the time to know who you might be. They care about who you might be and what you do and the place you come from. It is good.”

Copus-Brown joined the membership final 12 months in her first-ever stint abroad. Following a number of seasons in Australia with the Newcastle Jets and Western Sydney Wanderers, the 25-year-old had watched Dalton’s journey overseas with curiosity and, having been born in Brighton — about 20 minutes south-west of Lewes — got here full-circle when she arrived.

“It simply appears like a giant household, to be trustworthy,” she stated. “We work together with the lads’s workforce rather a lot, I do know the workers rather well. I really feel like I’ve identified them for years simply because they’re round on a regular basis.”

“It is also simply actually tiny issues, like your garments being washed and laid out earlier than video games. [In Australia], we might stroll into the lads’s change rooms and see their stuff was pristine, laid out, able to go, however ours was simply dumped within the center.

“These items are small, however they do sit behind your thoughts the place you are like, ‘Why do they get that and we do not?’ And there is by no means actually a solution, it is simply the way it’s all the time been.

“So it makes a giant distinction not having to fret about it on a regular basis now.”

Dalton and Copus-Brown are additionally each members of the non-profit charity Widespread Purpose, based by former Spain and Manchester United star Juan Mata, whose members pledge 1 per cent of their earnings to tasks that equip and empower communities world wide to propel causes together with anti-racism, gender equality, local weather motion, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion.

Recognising how carefully each organisations align with their values off the pitch, the Aussie duo are planning to start out up their very own free soccer clinics because of a Widespread Purpose grant, partnering with Lewes to carry it to life.

“That is probably the greatest issues about Lewes: when you’ve got one thing to say, they’re there to hear,” Copus-Brown stated. “They will do no matter they’ll that can assist you obtain your personal objectives.

“There’s so many passionate individuals within the membership. The best way that they talk about issues, you may inform that they honestly imagine what they discuss and so they’re actually pushing to make a change.

“Having a bunch of people that all assume the identical manner is unbelievable. You do not actually get that a lot in soccer: more often than not it is a handful of individuals making an attempt to do one thing, then a pair who aren’t actually bothered.

“However the entire of the ladies’s workforce — the workers, the gamers — got here collectively to write down this FA Cup letter. There wasn’t a single individual that did not need to be a part of it. I am so proud to be a part of it and watch everybody push and work collectively for this.”

In that sense, Dalton recognises that she and Copus-Brown are a part of one thing a lot bigger than themselves.

“We’re part of historical past,” Dalton stated.

“We’re the one membership on the planet that gives equal pay to each women and men. We’re trailblazers in doing what we’re doing, and it is good to be recognised and to be one in every of their gamers.

“And this inclusive tradition has a type of domino impact. When you get right here and also you’re embedded of their values, you carry that out inside your self. After which it flows on to all of the individuals round you and everybody else who joins. It is infectious.

“Regardless of who you might be right here, everybody will get alongside, everybody’s received that connection. There is no hierarchy in any respect; everybody’s equal. We’re all collectively and we’re all preventing for a similar factor. All of us need the identical factor. There’s one thing actually particular in that.”

Whereas they’re used to creating historical past off the pitch, Lewes are additionally beginning to make historical past on it.

Because of their equal alternative method, the ladies’s workforce grew to become full-time professionals in 2017 and have since seen regular enhancements to match-day attendances, resourcing, and enjoying requirements, climbing up the tiers to now being inside touching-distance of the top-flight.

It is a far cry from the wheelie-bin ice baths, car-park change rooms, and self-purchased strapping tape Dalton skilled whereas enjoying part-time in Australia’s A-League Ladies just some years in the past.

“The usual is getting higher and higher,” she stated.

“We’ve groups that may get promoted into the WSL. We have performed friendlies or Cup fixtures towards WSL groups and have competed with them. It simply reveals that, inside England, soccer from the WSL all the way in which down is structured so properly: anyone can compete with anyone.

“I am glad to have come right here as a result of my soccer has improved a lot. In any other case, I’d have all the time been like, ‘What if I did not go? What if I did not strive it?’

“The funding in girls’s soccer in England is large. They need everybody to succeed.”

Earlier this month, they certified for the quarter-final of the ladies’s FA Cup for the primary time ever.

On Monday morning, they’ll host Ladies’s Tremendous League powerhouses Manchester United on The Dripping Pan’s model new pitch, which they have been in a position to construct because of a 750,000 pound grant from the Premier League in recognition of their off-field work.

And whereas there lingers the query of simply how far Lewes FC can climb up the pyramid earlier than they’re merely out-resourced by their Premier League-backed rivals, there isn’t any doubt that Lewes’ larger mission is what lies past the 4 white traces.

“That is greater than a soccer match,” Copus-Brown stated.

“We have solely had a handful of massive golf equipment which have come to Lewes earlier than — Chelsea, West Ham, now Manchester United — so it is undoubtedly going to provide us a giant platform to indicate who we’re and what we stand for.

“When you’re at a membership the place you are the one one who needs to voice how you are feeling about sure issues, it makes it fairly tough to alter something. We will discuss all of it we would like within the change rooms, however that is not the place it occurs. It is advisable to say it out loud.

“So being at a membership the place everybody has the identical values and is pushing for a similar factor has undoubtedly opened my eyes to the ability of soccer.”