“I hope one day we don’t have to have special days and every single day is International Women’s Day,” says Claire Rafferty. It is a sentence that sums up the former England player’s involvement with Lewes FC as a board member, because in their corner of East Sussex equality is not a gimmick or a T-shirt slogan; it is enshrined.
In 2017 the fan-owned club committed to equal investment, support and pay for their women’s and men’s teams. In 2021, 100 years after women’s football was banned by the FA, and 50 years after the ban was lifted, Lewes are still the only club in Europe to have taken the stance. “It’s shocking really, isn’t it?,” says Rafferty, who was a part-time analyst with Deutsche Bank when she played and now works for her former club Chelsea, in the commercial team. “I’m always very proud to say that I’m involved in Lewes because of it. It has been quite nice going back into training, and then just getting a gauge for the culture of the team and the environment, that’s where you can see it working. It’s easy to say we’re treating the teams equally on paper.”
The recruitment of Rafferty to the board and her more recent participation in the Championship side’s training – “The majority of sessions I was just apologising for my poor passes and my lazy running” – shows Lewes are as ambitious on the pitch as they are off it. Sporting success is critical to the success of the equality project.
“It’s absolutely key that we’re now pushing our way up the table,” says the club’s general manager, Maggie Murphy. “We don’t want to be thought of as an equality project that doesn’t have football at its core. We are really serious about doing well. We already have more points now than we’ve ever had in any campaign previously.”
Rafferty adds: “One thing Emma Hayes used to say was: ‘If you’re winning, it’s easier for me to ask the board for more.’ People do listen more when you’re winning and the product is of a higher quality.”
Murphy, who worked in anti-corruption and human rights and is a cofounder of Equal Playing Field (an organisation that campaigns for sporting equality through the breaking of world records) was attracted to the club by its equality USP.
“For me, there wasn’t any other football club that I was interested in joining. It wasn’t really about football, it was about changing football,” she says. “Joining the club, a little bit was about putting my money where my mouth was and to try and see if it’s possible to create a better type of club. Lewes had already done all the hard work, they’d already established the equality principle in 2017. So for me, this was like, well, let’s see where I can help to take it next.
“Football has so much potential to influence and impact culture. If we don’t engage with football as a vehicle for social change, we’ll get there, we’ll get wherever we’re trying to go, but we might just get there 10 years later than if we had used football as that vehicle first, because in this country it is so powerful.”
Lewes are thriving. A six-figure sponsorship from the clothing brand Lyle and Scott has been gamechanging. “The fact that they were willing to back us with such an investment in the middle of a pandemic was a huge validation for us of everything we’ve been putting into place for so many years,” says Murphy. Fans have responded, keen to back companies that back their sport. “In the US, in the summer, fans were buying [NWSL sponsor] Budweiser to give to the Houston Dash players. Women’s football fans are very loyal to brands that back the product,” explains Murphy.
Sponsorship is reaping rewards. “We’re already planning for next season,” says Murphy. “We are hoping to be in a position to be able to go full-time and really push hard on being a contender for promotion. That’s obviously good for our football and we hope it’s good for our message that equality can drive performance on and off the pitch.”
They are also looking to reinvent the club’s pathway and academy structure. Building their own unconventional way means the small club are, to some extent, a thorn in the side of football. “Not because of our equal pay stance,” Murphy says. “But for pointing out that we can do football differently and that we don’t need to follow the same cookie-cutter model.
“Women’s football is on a path to professionalism, and that professionalism looks like men’s Premier League football. So there is quite a push for us to create a glossy, finished product that is ready for broadcast immediately, so we can be sellable in the way that we understand and see the Premier League as being sellable.
“The danger for that is that the more progress that women’s football makes, the more dependent we become on men’s football, because to finance some of the requirements we need capital upfront now.”