They arrived early from Devon, because what better reason is there to make a weekend of it than this? Eight thousand people stood and sang in an away end enlarged for the occasion. The result didn’t matter because they knew that before they got here, which is just as well given the margin of the 10-1 defeat.
At full-time, players and manager stood and looked up at the biggest gathering of Exeter supporters in eight years. You could see their embarrassment quickly giving way to pride at the sheer strength of the cheers and applause. It wasn’t about the FA Cup. There are bigger challenges to face than Manchester City away, if you can believe in such a thing.
Exeter City made somewhere between £250,000 and £400,000 out of their tie at the Etihad. It would have been more: the club’s Supporters’ Trust – the owners – made an official request for Manchester City to offer their share of ticket revenue as a gesture of goodwill. City’s response was no, which is a bit rich for a club owned by the royal family of a Middle East state
Exeter are one of only two majority fan-owned clubs in the Football League (AFC Wimbledon the other). They are struggling. Over the last two years, Exeter overspent despite receiving sell-on clauses or transfer fees for several high-profile players. It caused the departure of chairman Nick Hawker and chief executive Joe Gorman. Manager Gary Caldwell is working on a reduced budgets.
Then, in November, a fire at St James Park caused £100,000 of damage. The Supporters’ Trust has loaned the club £600,000 in two installments, but there will be further cuts next year and that will involve redundancies. None of this is pleasant.
“It hurts deeply seeing the club in its current state,” says Jordan Rogers, an Exeter supporter and Supporters’ Trust member.
“Hearing comments about the possibility of not even seeing out the season was genuinely frightening – those aren’t things supporters should ever have to contemplate. It’s a feeling that too many fans have already faced up and down the country.
“Exeter City isn’t just a football club in the traditional sense. It’s a community, built on the idea that ordinary people can come together to protect something they love. When that community is under threat, it feels like part of the city itself is at risk.”
Wimbledon have similar concerns. In November, they announced that their current club structure was unsustainable and that talks would be sought for a new minority investor after the club announced annual losses and projected more.
None of this is surprising. Exeter and Wimbledon have both risen up from non-league football to League One, a division where the finances have shifted significantly – and alarmingly – over the last half decade: higher wages, higher losses, roughly similar revenues, several owners prepared to fund so heavily that it shifts the framework of the competition.
That is the fragility of this model. It’s not just that fan-owned clubs have less flexible, and almost always lower, budgets that makes coping after promotions difficult. It’s that their mistakes are magnified 10x more than anywhere else and recovery times are far longer and more arduous.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the rarity of the model means that each of those mistakes takes on unfair significance. When a billionaire refuses to keep funding a club and it hurtles towards the cliff edge, nobody suggests that the private investment model of club ownership is broken and should be abandoned. Fan ownership does not possess the same privilege. Critics immediately point to the alternative solution.
“I still believe in the fan-owned model, absolutely,” says Rogers. “It’s part of who Exeter City are as a club. That said, the fanbase is probably more split on it now than it has ever been. The financial situation has tested everyone’s faith and it’s understandable that people are questioning whether it’s sustainable long-term, especially with more cuts coming.”
There are no easy answers and no magic wands hidden in a drawer inside St James Park, but I desperately hope that this works out. Staying in League One this season would help, but even if Exeter need to go down to find their natural place, so be it.
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That isn’t defeatist. It might be a little romantic, but when there’s a literal heart painted on the terraces that your fans stand on to represent their ownership, romance should be championed. There aren’t many clubs left in the game that can say they are truly owned by their people, and that gives Exeter City something that money simply can’t buy. It’s just a shame that money makes their world go round.
It also matters for football itself. Fan ownership represents an escapism, a promise of something different when you have a ne’er-do-well private owner. It should be the ideal, were everything else equal. To be taught that this utopia is no longer possible in English league football would be deeply worrying.
As such, Exeter City are a litmus test for English football’s future. Perhaps they are even its most important league club. That is why they stayed at the Etihad, to the confusion of a section of the home support who chanted “Why the f___ are you still here” on 80 minutes. They were here at the beginning and they will stay to the end. Pray that it never comes.
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