Underdog Stories / Football history

How Did Clapton Community FC Start? Fans Built Their Own

How did Clapton Community FC start? Fans boycotted a season, then built a member-owned club and bought London's oldest senior football ground.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · September 9, 2026

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The average home crowd at Clapton FC in 2017-18 was 52. The season before, it was 366. Chris Horwedel points out on Why We Love This Club that even the 52 often included officials and visiting supporters. That leaves very few locals.

Clapton Community FC started in 2018, when supporters of the old Clapton FC, after boycotting a full season of home games, set up a member-owned club of their own with the surviving life members of the older club. Every member gets an equal vote, and the finances are published.

The fans hadn't lost interest. They had decided that the one way left to hurt the club was to stop paying to get in.

How did Clapton Community FC start, exactly?

It started with a crowd that had been rebuilt from almost nothing. After a group of ultras formed, Clapton's home attendances rose from an average of 20 in 2011-12 to 335 by 2015-16. Those were the people who then stayed away.

The trigger was a charity. The voluntary liquidation of the charity that held the ground's lease was announced in March 2017. After a vote in a local community centre, the fans called a boycott. One organiser told The Londoner that people came for the noise the ultras made, so if the ultras stayed out, nobody else would show up either.

They also went to court. Wikipedia's entry on the club says supporters won a High Court injunction against chief executive Vincent McBean in July 2017. It didn't settle things. A court order to wind up the charity was issued in February 2018.

Horwedel's line on this is hard to improve. A boycott tells people what you're against. Eventually the supporters had to show what they were for. Wikipedia dates the new club's formation to 27 January 2018. The episode puts the public announcement in the summer, and the club itself says it was established in June 2018.

Is Clapton Community FC the same club as Clapton FC?

No, and the episode spends real time on this. Clapton Community is not the old club under a new name. It isn't a rebrand by the old directors, and it isn't the charity that leased the ground. The colours, songs, supporters and sense of place carry over. The legal bodies don't.

The old club has plenty to carry. It was founded in 1877 as Downs Football Club. It won the FA Amateur Cup five times between 1907 and 1925. Walter Tull played there as an amateur in 1908 and joined Tottenham the next year. He became one of England's first Black professional footballers. He was killed in France in the First World War.

The new club doesn't claim him. When members named the walkway behind the ground Walter Tull Way, they said plainly that Tull never played for Clapton Community. They were honouring the place, not the résumé.

The two clubs later met on the pitch. In October 2023 they were drawn against each other in the Eastern Counties Football League, one freshly promoted and the other relegated. The original club withdrew from the non-League pyramid at the end of 2023-24.

What did the Charity Commission find?

The boycotters had their reasons, and they weren't petty ones. The Charity Commission eventually agreed with them on the main points.

The charity in question was Newham Community Leisure Trust, which leased the Old Spotted Dog. The Commission opened its second inquiry on 18 December 2013. It took a long time. The inquiry concluded more than nine years later.

The report came out in April 2023. The regulator found the charity badly governed and badly run, with poor financial management over a long stretch. McBean was both a charity trustee and the football club's chief executive. The Commission found no evidence that this conflict had been properly managed. It disqualified him from holding any trusteeships for 12 years.

McBean doesn't accept the outcome. He told Civil Society he was unhappy with the inquiry process and was considering his next step.

The report arrived five years after the new club was founded. Horwedel's point is that it showed the fans' worries were about who controlled a community asset and who could hold them to account. Results on the pitch had nothing to do with it.

“The people buying tickets, pouring drinks, painting fences, running social media, coaching young players, and clearing weeds are not customers waiting for an owner to explain the plan.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

How does a fan-owned club like Clapton CFC actually work?

There is no owner and no chairman. The club began as a cooperative and later registered as a community benefit society. Members vote at general meetings and in club-wide ballots. Committees spend their own budgets, and a general organising committee coordinates them in place of a board.

Membership is open. As of August 2026 the club says it has more than 1,500 members across 30 countries. The cheaper membership tiers carry the same vote as the solidarity rate. The men's and women's teams sit on equal footing, with no hierarchy between them.

None of this makes decisions easy. Horwedel says democracy "just produces long meetings" sometimes, and that the meeting is the point. The people running the bar and painting the fences are the club.

The extras are specific. Monthly finances are published. A hardship fund has paid out more than £14,000. Children under 13 get in free. Concessions pay what they can.

Why did the 'No pasarán' away shirt sell in the thousands?

Members voted on the design. The shirt drew on the International Brigades and the flag of the Second Spanish Republic, and it carried the phrase "No pasarán", which means "they shall not pass". It honoured the volunteers who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War. It also suited a crowd that was already openly anti-fascist.

Orders came from around the world, especially Spain. The episode says 5,500 had sold by the end of 2018 and the total reached about 15,000.

The numbers depend on who is counting and when. Wikipedia says 11,500 away shirts sold in the debut season, 5,500 of them to Spain. The club itself later put the figure at nearly 17,000 since 2018. Nobody disputes that it was a lot of shirts for a team playing at a temporary ground in Walthamstow.

I'd say this was the luckiest part of the story. The members chose the design, but nobody could have planned the demand. It still mattered. The Football Supporters' Association said the money from the 15,000 shirts played a big part in funding the ground purchase.

How did Clapton CFC buy the Old Spotted Dog Ground?

It happened quickly once it started. In early August 2019, the freeholders, Star Pubs & Bars, repossessed the ground over unpaid rent. On 16 September, the club was told its lease proposal had beaten two other bids.

Then the plan changed. The offer to buy the freehold came up unexpectedly in February 2020. Members voted unanimously to make an offer. A £100,000 loan from Cooperative & Community Finance covered securing the freehold and some legal costs. On 24 July 2020, Clapton Community FC owned the oldest senior football ground in London. The club later said it had paid £96,000.

Owning it and playing on it were different things. The site was run down, the pandemic slowed the work, and volunteers spent years raising money and fixing it. In April 2022, an in-house exhibition match drew 300 members, volunteers and neighbours. Players from the women's and men's sides were mixed across both teams.

There was one more hitch. The warehouse next door held the changing rooms and wasn't part of the sale. The club bought it from the Insolvency Service on 23 December 2022 for £250,000. The pitch came first and the dressing rooms came two and a half years later.

A separate charity, the Old Spotted Dog Ground Trust, runs the site day to day. Horwedel calls that a sensible guard against the ground becoming anyone's private property.

What can fans do when their club stops listening?

Clapton's answer took years and wasn't tidy. They boycotted, organised, went to court, formed a cooperative, sold shirts across Europe, bought a neglected ground, and picked up the tools. Horwedel's summary is that the club didn't inherit stability. Its members built it.

It also helps to be good at it. The women's first team plays in Tier 6. The men's side is in the Essex Senior Football League at Tier 9, and manager Geoff Okren has overseen three promotions in the men's first six completed seasons. None of that was the point of the exercise, but nobody turns down a promotion.

The ground has its own house rules. There are hygiene bank collections and reusable cups, and a free hot drink if you bring your own cup. Dogs are encouraged. In Horwedel's words, "The dog gets in free." The ground is called the Old Spotted Dog, so that seems only fair.