“I told them if they bring a drum, I will buy them a pie,” was the message from the new Sheffield FC chair, Jon McClure, to young fans. The Reverend and the Makers frontman is Steel City born and raised, a Wednesday fan by nature and extremely proud of his home town’s history. Becoming involved with the world’s oldest club was an opportunity not to be missed, and McClure knows how to create some noise.
McClure wanted to link up with Sheffield FC eight years ago, but says he was not “in a mature enough position in my life to look after what’s essentially a kind of cultural and civic institution in the country and in Sheffield”. Since last month he has been at the heart of the ninth-tier club’s boardroom, part of a new minority ownership group alongside David Bianchi, the co-founder of Various Artists Management, reviewing the state of things and seeking improvement.
The allure of a local celebrity will shine the light on the club, who attracted their record league attendance of 1,172 for the recent defeat by Tadcaster, who they host again on Saturday in a playoff semi-final, after finishing third in the Northern Counties East League.
“I don’t want it to be like KSI [at Dagenham & Redbridge] or Wrexham, I’m not that famous for a start,” says McClure. “It has to be something a bit more considered. And some of the challenges we’re facing is that coming into it you’ve had years of sort of dysfunction.
“It’s very difficult for a club of this size to operate effectively and turn a profit. There’s a bunch of people there who maybe aren’t used to what we want to do and there’s a bit of a culture shock. It’s going to take a minute to stabilise it and then to start growing it because there’s a danger of putting rocket boosters on a three-wheeler.”
It is a story flickering in the embers of footballing romance, one McClure believes can spark a tourism boom. Founded in 1857, the Club, as they are affectionately known, have hardly been an unbridled success, often a footnote among the trials and triumphs of United and Wednesday. Being FA Vase runners-up in 1977 is arguably their most noteworthy on-pitch achievement, but trinkets are never what the game is truly about.
“It’s the club that invented football and I don’t think that story has been told adequately or correctly,” says McClure. “I didn’t even know the club was a thing until I was about 18 years old and I’m a football fan. It’s been a historic problem for the city of Sheffield that we don’t shout about ourselves or tell our own fables in the way the Mancs do or Scousers do.
“There’s an element to which Sheffield FC is arguably the most important club on Earth. We invented the global game. The rules were codified in Sheffield by virtue of the fact there’s only two clubs in the world with the Fifa order of merit, Real Madrid and Sheffield. We had the first football kit. We are co-owners of the sort of IP [intellectual property] around the first football rivalry, the first derby, the home of football, all of them things. That enables a lot of opportunities to communicate globally.”
As a showman, McClure is aware of the inspiration a bouncing audience can have. Free entry for children has been one McClure-led initiative to swell attendances, which are usually between 300 and 400 in a division where they played one away game to 60 people. One issue facing McClure is that Sheffield FC’s The Home of Football Ground in Dronfield, Derbyshire, does not sit inside the correct county, let alone the city limits.
“One of my long-held ambitions is to create the conditions politically in the city where we can bring football home,” McClure says. “I’ve started singing ‘football’s coming home’. We need to return this club to a multi-purpose venue in the city centre, ideally, to the place where football started. The political class in the city are great, engage. In a way there’s a generational opportunity to do something in the city.”
Whereas Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mac have brought Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd to Wrexham as their celebrity friends, McClure invited the Sheffield music legend Richard Hawley to a recent match. The Blades manager, Chris Wilder, is a close confidant, despite being on the opposite side of the best-known Sheffield divide.
McClure’s brother, Chris, created and plays the role of the viral sensation Steve Bracknall, the angry assistant manager of the fictional team the Royal Oak. Bracknall’s social following is in the millions and when the Royal Oak played a real match for the first time last week, Sheffield FC hosted. The “biggest game in Sunday league history” was attended by more than 2,000 and watched online by another half a million, including Robbie Williams.
It is a reminder of how the industry is evolving, with McClure eager to tap into new markets. “People are sort of yearning for something a bit different experientially,” he says.
There are plans to strengthen the club’s junior and women’s sections. “It’s about building an ecosystem where they all prosper and an 1857 academy anchored to the world’s first football club that could scale globally, if we do it right,” McClure says. “There’s lots to go at and I’m only one guy. I don’t need to think it’s all me; there’s a bunch of other people holding my hand, grownups who are doing it with me. I wouldn’t try and attempt this alone, that would be very foolish. I just happen to be the kind of figurehead of it all and a general gobshite.”
Becoming heavyweight champions of the world is beyond Sheffield FC, but promotion to the Northern Premier League will do.
