- Calogero Scannella, 22, bought the soccer team he’d supported as a boy with six of his friends.
- Walton & Hersham FC traces its roots to 1895 and played at Wembley, but it had fallen on hard times.
- The team now has more TikTok followers than TikTok-sponsored Wrexham AFC.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Calogero Scannella, the managing director and coowner of the Walton & Hersham football club. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My first memory of football was when I was 5 and my dad took me to watch Walton & Hersham FC play AFC Wimbledon. It was expected to be a tough game, but we won 3-0.
I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders and watching the crowd go crazy.
One Saturday in 2018, I decided to take a break from my university studies and watch a Walton & Hersham FC match with my dad. Football has become a large part of my life — I’d played for another local team and also coached school teams. But the club I saw that day wasn’t the one I remembered.
It was fighting relegation and there were just 40 fans on the ground. As there were so few people there, I met the owner, who said the team might fold if it was relegated.
I couldn’t bear the thought of a team with such a storied history disappearing
Walton & Hersham FC had the football legend Sir Stanley Matthews as its president and had played in front of 40,000 people at Wembley in 1973. After that game, I set up a WhatsApp group with six of my school friends — Thomas Bradbury, Reme Edetanlen, Stephen Karidis, Ben Madelin, Jack Newton, and Sartej Tucker — and said, why don’t we buy the club?
It took at least a month to persuade my friends I was serious, and then once they were onboard, we took our proposal to the owner.
The owner wanted to sell it to someone who had the club’s best interests at heart. We said our goal was to get the club back to where it belonged and make it sustainable, so it had a future. It also worked in our favor that there were seven of us who would act as a team.
Between us, we bought 100 shares at £1 each to purchase the club in June 2019. While we bought it for a nominal fee, we were taking on all the liabilities, such as the contract for the lease of the grounds and the payment of players. We then set up a new company, Walton & Hersham 2019 Limited, and each of us invested around £2,000 of our savings to help relaunch the club and pay for its running.
We sought legal advice in terms of taking over, but we didn’t hire anyone to guide us through the finer details on how to run it. We were all just determined to try and learn from every single person we met, whether that was our team manager or visiting owners.
At first, the fans thought it was a joke that 7 students were taking over their club
But once they saw how serious we were about it, they gave us their support.
As owners, we’re in charge of everything apart from what happens on the pitch. We hired a manager, and we left him to do his job.
We divided up the roles by playing to our strengths. As I’d been involved in non-league football the most, I became the managing director and club secretary; Jack is an accountant, so he took care of the finances. Any one of us might need to film TikToks, reach out to sponsors, or work in the burger van.
Fraser Logan Photography
As the team had been relegated, all the players left. We held open trials to find new players.
The first season was a huge learning curve. The fans were rightly upset when we changed the club’s logo without consulting them. It also took us a long time to work out how to pay the fines for red and yellow cards, so we incurred more penalties for late payment than we did for the fines themselves.
In winter 2019, when we were watching the team play, Jack showed me on his phone that we only had £0.13 left in our bank account. We’d paid the players their wages by that point, but it wasn’t a nice feeling, thinking we could still fail. We needed to invest the money in the club to help it grow. But the club still did OK, finishing third that season.
In 2020, we went into overdrive. As the pandemic had halted the season, my friends and I used this time to plan.
We installed a new manager, who used to be the assistant manager at my previous club. We launched a TikTok channel, which now has more than 870,000 followers, and after our first season without any income besides the gate, we started to sign sponsors and advertisers.
Our first partnership was with Classic Football Shirts, a company we followed on social media. We asked if they’d sell our shirts, and they agreed. They’ve sold them to fans as far away as the island of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, near Newfoundland.
We created different advertising packages that we sold to local businesses. Depending on whether they chose bronze, silver, or gold, they could receive ads in the match program or shout-outs on social media. When we took over the club, there wasn’t any advertising on the grounds, now there are 40 hoardings around the pitch.
In 2021, the team was promoted. We were delighted, but as it happened during the pandemic, we were notified by email, so it didn’t feel real. But when we were promoted again in 2022 in front of a record crowd, it was a real pinch-me moment. Fans were running onto the pitch.
This year, more than 1,000 fans walked through the turnstile for an FA Cup match.
Fraser Logan Photography
The club has continued to grow. Devan Tanton, a defender from Premier League Fulham FC‘s under-21 team joined us on loan and we have invested even more money in the ground. Our biggest outlay so far, after the players’ wages and rent for the ground, was £20,000 for our new food truck, which is a converted shipping container.
We also launched a beer stand and installed a tannoy, or public-address system, that we use to play music at halftime. Promotion to a higher league also brings new financial challenges as the players’ wages increase, and we also need to factor in a larger travel budget.
My friends and I hold boardroom meetings like any other club and try to stick to the agenda. We also have a WhatsApp group.
We are all obsessed with football. When we’re not at the ground, we will go to the pub together to watch a professional game or go and play five-a-side. We lost Reme as a coowner in October 2021 as he now plans to spend a year abroad, but our friend George Corey joined in his place.
I’ve watched every single football documentary. We were filmed by “90 Minutes” for a few days during our first season. It was lots of fun, and we used clips from the show to launch our TikTok. But the first year was such a learning curve for us, I’m pleased the whole season wasn’t filmed.
We’re not on the same scale as “Welcome to Wrexham,” but we recognized the financial anguish that comes with owning a football club.
As owners, we haven’t yet taken a wage, because we have ambitious plans and we need all our finances for that. We all have other jobs. I coach school football teams during the week and referee on weekends.
Our goal is to build as much as possible in the next few years. We’ve raised the quality of our social media by hiring a company to film our games.
We also plan to sell merchandise abroad ourselves, so we are currently working on our plans for an online shop.
They say if you do a job you love, it doesn’t feel like work. I’m not sure that’s right — it definitely feels like work.
But when I’m driving to watch a match with my best friends in the car, there’s no better feeling.
