Non-League Football Thread (Rolling)

This guy is very good on Non League football, a Three Counties Radio journo who cuts through all the bullshit.

Just clubs getting their solidarity payments now instead of August.

Not in any way going to give way to conspiracy theories amongst fans…

Bet Victor have mercifully ended their sponsorship of the Southern, Northern and Isthmian Leagues.

It appears a negative reaction to the deal and some clubs at Step 3 & 4 failing to comply with their requirements were the main reasons behind the end.

Leaves those leagues in a bit of a bind trying to find new sponsors, but Bet Victor can absolutely get to fuck. @anon76851889 can attest to the level of bullshit they expected clubs to comply with in terms of website requirements, never mind some of the additional hoops they expected clubs to jump through.

Bit of an own goal all round, really.

Is there an article about this anywhere? I don’t think I have heard anything about it and I’m intrigued now!

This is probably the best thing to read.

https://www.betvictoristhmian.co.uk/betvictor-sponsorship-to-end-61808

There was also an article in the Sunday Times back in January, I think (probably behind a paywall) that talked about when Bet Victor came up with a request that clubs are ‘required’ to link to Bet Victor in news items, and write specific match previews linking to their sites encouraging supporters to bet.

Hours before the article went live, ‘following discussions’ they rowed back and ‘encouraged’ clubs to do the above.

That went down really badly at Hendon, and I imagine at clubs such as Lewes and Carshalton where the ownership had taken a public anti-betting stance.

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The “guidelines” (in actual fact requirements) were crazy - don’t use the league’s name alongside players under 25 except you MUST have the league logo on your squad page - which just happens to picture players as young as 18.

You MUST add an age protected banner to your website, here’s the code. By the way, it’s not GDPR compliant and it probably won’t work with your layout. Sorry lads.

You need to start writing match previews with betting odds before every game. Odds not available yet because we tend to put them up about 24 hours before the game? Tough luck.

They ran (no kidding) to over 12 pages of A4 by the time they’d finished writing them and required volunteers compiling programmes, doing websites and so on to have quite detailed knowledge of the dos and don’ts of betting advertising legal niceties. It was completely unworkable before they even signed the deal and I’m completely baffled that any of the three leagues thought it was going to be worthwhile for the relative peanuts it was worth.

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The National League season has been concluded.

The clubs in the National League North and South are now being polled to determine the outcome of the campaign in their divisions after which National League sides will undergo a similar poll.

Q1) Would you like to be promoted?
Q2) How about the playoffs?
Q3) Would relegation suit you?

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Would much rather.

Select one option per question

Q1) Should Wealdstone go up?

  • No
4 Likes

I think you missed the second optio…

Oh, I see!

They should promote Yeovil. It’s been a good season but I miss semi competent refereeing so we need to go back to the league now.

Kthnxbai

Latest clear-headed thinking from the National League.

They’re polling clubs on whether the play-offs should go ahead behind closed doors.

There is a heavy caveat that the second promotion spot would only apply from the National League into League 2 if the EFL complete their season.

It’s quite something when you’re making the FA look halfway competent by comparision.

So they want to run their convoluted playoffs with the potential prize on offer being… nothing?

Seems about the size of it.

Last year, the winners of the Northern Premier League play-offs (Warrington) came away with nothing…

Oh, the playoffs at step 3/4 last season were ridiculous. At least the clubs involved got the benefit of some gate receipts though. The prize on offer here appears to be the chance to get into more debt.

Yikes, that’s a fair point. I wonder how it even works from an employment point of view, if any of the players are furloughed?

Just read an interesting statement from Dulwich’s chairman that includes…

“During the past five weeks, the future of the club has been at risk, and all our efforts each day have been spent solving the short-term financial problems without compromising our long-term future.”

I know Dulwich are media darlings and do an astonishing amount of brilliant work around diversity and inclusion, charity and in the community - they’re a brilliant club that most should be looking to emulate - I find that admission pretty astonishing. I know big crowds equate to bigger overheads and outgoings, but I can’t fathom why a club getting the level of matchday income that they would be in the 7th tier should be talking about short-term financial problems.

There’s a couple of guys involved heavily on matchdays and with the Supporters Trust I know socially well, they mentioned that the playing budget had been set based on gaining a certain figure as an average crowd this season. When the season began, they were a long way short of that figure.

There are probably hidden costs that they’ve had to cover, particlarly in terms of wages of matchday staff and such like during the last six weeks or so, but I’m amazed that given everything they’ve been through over the past couple of years, they haven’t been more prudent. If I was a supporter, I’d be asking serious questions of the board. By their own admission 15 months ago, when the new Chairman came in, they’d been sailing perilously close to the wind when they were sharing at Tooting financially, without knowing at that point whether they were going to return to Champion Hill.

A bit TL;DR, I know.

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To be completely frank, the amount of money they were looking to raise just to keep the lights on at Tooting was quite mindblowing when you think about what we needed to do the same at Harrow or Wembley.

Same goes for Ruislip Wanderers over the last year or two tbh.