In episode #326 of Unofficial Partner we spoke with Daniel Lambert, COO of Bohemian FC and Harry McCann of sponsor Dublin Bus.
Bohemian FC is a member owned club from the Phisborough area of Dublin famous for its uncompromising stance on values. Having gone to the brink of insolvency with the prevailing commercial model for pro football, Bohs decided to rebuild the club on sustainable principles. Slowly, on its own terms, the club has built back its reputation, its balance sheet and its fanbase.
Dublin Bus is now their partner in diversity, accessibility and inclusion – and poised to add value to the club’s environmental credentials.
In this post, we focus on Daniel, to understand Bohs’ journey back, how their model works and what success looks like for them.
As usual, the transcript has been slightly edited for ease of reading and a few links have been included for context.
NB We’re very indebted to Matthew Campelli and The Sustainability Report for his brilliant feature on sport and climate justice. featuring Jessica Murfree and Seán McCabe, Climate Justice officer for Bohs. If you enjoy the Unofficial Partner podcast, you should certainly have a listen.
“Bohemians is the oldest football club in the League of Ireland, established in 1890 as a co-operative model.We’re essentially, you know, a totally fan owned football club with a cooperative model based on active citizenship. So, the members or fans elect the Board,who then run the club with no financial remuneration, and no money can be removed from the club in any way. So if the club makes a profit, which thankfully it has in the last couple years, that profit must be reinvested into the football club.
I suppose that model is quite a simple model and operated in quite a simple way from 1890 to 1970. In 1970 Bohemians become the last major Irish team to turn professional. Up until then, we were an amateur organisation with a men’s football team, raising money with a bar and stadium. In 1970 the club turns professional and that changes things obviously, with payments to players and other things. In 70 we’re in a big football stadium in quite good condition, Dalymount Park, which was an international stadium at the time.
We’ve quite big crowds across the League of Ireland but through the 1970s and the 80s the crowds plummet because of the impact predominantly of Premier League TV rights, you know, televised games, mass marketing and at the same time a lot of things happening in our society, like people were drinking Harp lager in the 70s in the 80s and 90s, start to drink Heineken.
So international marketing starts to impact upon Ireland, previously a poor country especially in the 80s and Bohs find themselves in a position in the 1990s and 2000s where the stadium is in quite poor condition through lack of investment, crowds are quite poor and other clubs are far more successful than we are on the pitch and it enters into a period where property prices begin to rise in the Irish economy.
So the value of Dalymount at its peak is about 70 million Euros for quite a small site in Dublin City. And what happens is the Board of the club, with the membership who voted – it’s a democratic system – then begin to think we could sell the stadium, move to the periphery of the city and use all this money to become the most successful team. And this plays out several times where the club tries to sell the stadium, gets a better deal, cancels the current deal, with property values increasing massively in the Irish Celtic Tiger.
The net result is 2010/11 we essentially go balance sheet insolvent. A deal collapses and the stadium goes from being worth 70 million to 3 million within a week, with the collapse of the Irish economy. And we have a debt of 4 million to a Swiss bank and can’t service the interest, let alone the capital.
There’s still some clubs who I think have the mantra that a successful team on the pitch will create a successful club off the pitch, which is totally false, obviously.
For us, there was no prospect of a successful team on the pitch. That was an impossibility. It was far more likely that we’d get relegated and the club has never been relegated, touch wood, in its history.
So I suppose we began to realise okay, what we’ve sold people before is now over. And what are the natural kind of attributes of the club we’ve got, our active citizenship model. We’re not really what modern football has become because we’re against private ownership. And, you know, private investment that return. So that put us against most of the models structurally.
And then I suppose we were thinking, why do people get involved in a football club? And you speak to people and really break it down and say, you know what are your memories? I spoke to our older players, and asked them about playing for the club in the 90s and they remember the people, they don’t remember lifting the trophy.
And really what it is, is it’s a community of people who are getting together to enjoy football and while enjoying football they can also do good things. And I think if people feel that it’s doing positive things then I think they’re more likely to want to do more for that organisation.
So what happened then is the execution of it and you get to do quite unusual things, like appoint a club poet, a choir, set up a clubs arts officer and a graffiti group.
My kind of thinking at the time was, if there’s people in this area, who are talented at what they do, or they need a space to, you know, to do their thing – whether that was a choir rehearsal or somebody doing a mural – and the club had a good platform, why couldn’t we give them a platform, bring them in, whether they loved football or didn’t like it at all, and begin to bring more people into the club who exist in the local area anyway, and allow them to, you know, follow their creative or otherwise endeavours through the club. And whenever we did anything, like even our graffiti spray jams, they get reported in all media here because it was something different.
So you know, if you won the league, which we couldn’t do in Ireland, the newspaper would report on the back page for one day. But we’d have these strange and wonderful activities that are getting us coverage everywhere and we weren’t winning anything. We haven’t won anything since prior to that collapse. So I suppose our membership started to grow, crowds started to grow.
And we realised I suppose that by obviously imagining good things to come back at you and the more we got involved in positive activities, and people seem to want to come to Bohs to become commercial partners to help us and then it did snowball there was a tipping point around 2016 17 where our crowd s really began to gather exponentially grow, our membership is now 600 times higher than it’s ever been in our history. And just there’s a waiting list for membership and there will be next year people turned away so now it’s at a point where we have outgrown the stadium.
Now in Ireland unfortunately the way property is and precarious finance, and the fact that most people are turned away from the Church for obvious reasons, all people used to be part of a community which existed geographically, now nobody can afford rent.
People used to go to church, but now the church beside us is empty. Paradoxically in the 80s when Dalymount was empty, the church was full, and now the church is empty, Dalymount is full. And I suppose all of these connections that people had, had been lost.
So you could, I suppose take the natural values of the club, and propose to people that we’ll do good while enjoying football as a community of people who can have a shared experience and a sense of purpose. Then that might mean that more people would come and get involved in the club. And if we didn’t win the game on a Friday they’d be disappointed, but it might not be the only reason they were there. They would still be really proud of the club, even if disappointed with performance on the pitch.
Most pushback against our values tends to be on Twitter. No one’s ever really spoken at an AGM so the internet’s a funny place. You know, some right wing activists would target Bohemians, racists really for me. And I suppose some things we’ve done like we’ve had the shirt Refugees Welcome on it, which kind of called on the government to change our asylum system, which got us into the political arena. But that was something the Club were comfortable doing, the Board supported, and we raised the issue. It was announced the the system would be changed, though it hasn’t yet. And we partnered with Amnesty International on that.
We’ve worked with migrants since 2014/15, and it started with a fan, one member. He was basically showing the African Nations and he was calling into stores, there’s a lot of African stores in Dublin, so he was calling around. I helped him a couple of times, where we’d just call in to see people from Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, and offer to come to the stadium to watch football and that kind of led us into a bit more knowledge about the asylum system.
And this member Kevin began to raise money to finance to bring people to the games. Now we raise each Christmas about 100,000 Euros for gifts for people in the asylum centres and it’s become a big part of each year and lots of members get involved.
But for the shirt itself, our main men’s partner, Des Kelly interiors, we approach them and and ask them would they think about coming off the shirt and we put this message on, we partner with Amnesty International and we had an explicit call for the government to change the system with a percentage of the jersey sales going to a migrant organisation.
And then yeah, it got a lot of good coverage everywhere, across Europe and the Euro News and BBC, Guardian, accusations that this was bringing sport and politics together. Look, they’re already together.
So we’re really proud to have done that. And I suppose when you do something like that, I felt that it does mean that more, more of your membership and your membership growth has similar values.
Our merchandise is a very interesting. We would have sold like, you know, 80 grand a year of merch before we do these things and at the moment, now, it’s seven figures. And, most of the sales are outside of Ireland and so they’re not fans.
I’ve always viewed it like, if you exist in a global football market and you’re just selling football, it’s very difficult because you know, you’re not going to compete with Arsenal or Spurs or Chelsea.
But if you’re basically pursuing common values, well, it’s such a big global football market, your potential to reach people is enormous. If they share your values, then you know your ability on the football pitch is sort of secondary.
And so we found that and you know, the T shirt we did with Amnesty was huge in FIFA and the Bob Marley shirt was I think the biggest in FIFA for that year and this year with the Palestinian shirts, for kids in Palestine got picked up – a lot of Irish are quite strong on the rights of Palestinians.
This kind of happened accidentally. I should say that we didn’t set out I didn’t say that. You can say that was to say Oh, well, let’s try them, you know, grow our merchandise to such a large figure that will benefit organisations and causes and also the Club. It just happened accidentally.
What’s most interesting to me and the follow up I’d have found them is that they’re non perishable now which is very interesting. So we never discount and we sell. We’ll sell shirts today from 2019, 20, 21, 22. Because people buying them don’t come for the most part of the game, they’re buying them for values. So when so you don’t expire, which is a great position to be in. So and we only we maintain all distribution as well. So we don’t we don’t sell to any third parties.
My motivation was that it isn’t privately owned and I wouldn’t do this job if it was. I don’t think it’s fair to say you can’t do good as a private organisation. But I think that the authenticity is essential and the vast majority of things globally now have no authenticity. You know, you think of something like Volkswagen telling everyone about their emissions and this happens all the time.
And where people are kind of hoodwinked, whether it’s greenwashing, pinkwashing, whatever kind of washing, it’s done on a huge scale, everywhere. It’s hard to decipher what’s real and what’s not.
And I think that ultimately if your ownership structure is one where there can be no personal profit, you couldn’t be more upfront than that about your motivations.
So I think some good things can be done by privately owned clubs but I don’t think it has the same authenticity to it because they’ll always be I suppose accusations that it’s been done for somebody to derive personal gain.
We’ve been approached by quite a few production companies to do something similar to Wrexham and we’ve met four or five companies and kind of decided they have a predetermined story that they want to tell rather than the real story.
I think, where we’re kind of coming from is that if you engage people in a real way that has real impact, and purpose to it, that you can change the trajectory of your club, which ultimately, I should say, ultimately massively improves things on the pitch.
We’ve got greater resources, and better programmes, everything that when we spoke about. Harry (from Dublin Bus) talked about the manifesto, and say one of the things under diversity and inclusion is an increase in the club’s activities with the amputee team, the LGBT support group, and it talks about things like Dublin Pride. So we were in Dublin Pride last week as the only professional football team in Ireland and our LGBT Sports Group set up a committee that has full say over what the club is doing with the club’s support. And all the new Dublin bus kits this year, we’ll be playing the amputee Champions League later on this year in November.
So I suppose these things, that people don’t see day to day, they take a lot of time, a lot of effort by your staff, volunteers, fans, but if you do them properly over a period of time, there’s great, big impact whereas the flip side of just bringing in a production company, it brings entertainment value but I don’t know how much depth it has.
But again, that’s a global capital model. It’s a quick win for the lowest cost. Whereas you’re doing something with a very old football club. We can’t seek private investment, we’ve far more solid foundations, I suppose than a quick documentary. So not knocking it, like it’s been successful for them. But I suppose our route is a little bit more long term.
We’ve a player handbook, that’s issued to all players. And inside it talks about the history of the club. It talks about a recent colleague who passed away and his life because his name was on a shirt. There’s a section in it, which says what makes us different. And there’s a line there, no billionaires, there’s no vulture funds, no investment funds, it’s given to the players.
It does go into bits that I won’t disclose, it talks about the ethos of management and training and codes of conduct around what the manager expects from the team and a lot about values as well.
Do we expect the players prior to sign up to become an activist on the rights of children in the West Bank in Palestine? No, we don’t – you know, they’re there to play football. Do we expect them to respect the values of the clubs and champion them and not act against them? Yes, we do – we expect the players to behave in a certain way because they represent the club.
My experience with players is that they are setting out to be the best football player they can be. And they may or may not have an interest, like anyone else in society, in other issues. But the more we’ve had clear, strong values I think that impacts maybe on players joining the club, but also players when they are here, because they might be exposed to some things they haven’t been exposed to before.
And I think the work we do maybe in the prison besides we collect prison, a large prison besides us, Mountjoy prison that we have in the past, players who’ve, who’ve done voluntary work for the club in prison, have transferred to other rival clubs and have stayed to work for Bohemians in the prison. Which is great because it means it wasn’t about the Club it was about the work itself
So I suppose that my role at the Club is to tell the football story. We have a very proud and long football tradition. And we’ve unbelievable training grounds, where both our men’s and women’s team train – and this was in the manifesto and something that Dublin Bus were very keen on and really sped up for us was to bring our men’s and women’s team to use equal facilities both on match day and on training.
I think that players join football clubs to be the best footballer they can be. And to try and win trophies, whether that’s to excel in the League of Ireland, or for a lot of young players to get a move, you know, to a bigger League, which we always try and assist them with. But I think the overall health of our club is gonna be based on the numbers of members.
And so it’s basically you know, if you look at the main income streams : matchday revenue is mainly memberships now, because we sell few general tickets. So why can people become attached to this? Why would they want to become attached to this club? Why would they want to hand over, you know, large amounts of money each year and have an affinity? I think that that’s going to be driven mainly by purpose, also by football, but I think if the purpose is strong, we have greater numbers of members and we can be better at football with better resources.
The second big income stream has become merchandise and, you know, merchandise around values. As we’ve seen, a Bohs shirt sold five or six years ago outside of Ireland was to somebody who left here to work somewhere else. Now the names are you know, all over the world from Middle East, South America, Eastern Europe, they’re just people who live with our values.
And then we look at I suppose, commercial income, stronger commercial partners than we’ve ever had, very low turnover and everyone renews their contracts. So we think of our main partner, Des Kelly has been with us now five or six years. Likewise, Dublin Bus was the main women’s partner and diversity and inclusion, it’ll be six years the end of this year. And then others NG, Credit Union, and DHL, all renewing and we don’t work with betting companies.
And then under football, like in football revenues and from transfer fees. Because we’ve become a stronger Club, which I think is largely down to values, we have greater resources to put into training facilities, coaches, full time heads of Academy and things we didn’t have a few years ago – which ultimately creates better players, better environments and better transfer fees.
So, my philosophy on that would be the football staff should sell the football side but the club behaving as an overall club, I think focusing on behaviour off the pitch, will deliver greater revenues to all areas.
And I suppose when you speak to somebody whether it’s a university partner, or with anybody else outside of the core football area, we can absolutely guarantee how we can behave off the pitch and we tell them how we hope to perform on it. But there’s one constant area, our behaviour off the pitch can be guaranteed and committed to.
To be honest, all the work that we’ve done off the pitch has been self-financed, it was all volunteer led. So Seán was a neighbour of mine locally, he lives at Morris in the same street and is a proper international expert on climate justice and sustainability and would advise the government at the UN and then I was speaking to him and tried to explain I suppose, if you bring a an issue, and there’s no bigger issue obviously than climate, football kind of amplifies it, because people like football, they want to hear that and you can reach new people. And the same with James our community manager – it was volunteers, people with good ideas and expertise.
And you know, it kind of it’s self sustaining because we can then approach local or national government for funding or different mechanisms – we’ve a partnership with Liverpool Foundation as well – and demonstrate the impact that we can have, and people have been really willing to support that.
When we speak, speak to our Board and staff and communicate to people the unbelievable work that Seán would do, or James, and they end up becoming part of the conversations with the commercial partners who people see as the football partners. But I don’t think we have one commercial partner who is a partner of ours to see us win the league. They’d love to see us win the League but they partnered with us because they they know how we’re going to behave off the pitch. Seán calls it a positive virtuous cycle.
So basically, you’ve got purpose for our members, you get more of them and then you get better income because of the way you’re behaving and better commercial partners and better players and it just self sustains with no real negatives to it.
Going for growth?
Daniel’s podcast challenges so much of about contemporary sport and sports marketing.
Firstly, it revisits the intrinsic purpose of a club and its relationship with local community. While most professional clubs largely interpret that role as building a community of followers, Bohs has focused on actively representing the values of its community too . Paradoxically, its hyper local community focus is enabling Bohs to reach an international audience.
Secondly, it addresses ownership structures. Daniel is pretty clear from his POV that the ownership structure is the most powerful guarantee of a truly sustainable approach. Across the spectrum of private ownership there are plenty of variations of intent and execution, all the way from benign to rapacious. But the big test is time – because, with the best of will, people, organisations, plans and ownership change. Taking the long view, it’s difficult to see how any other structure – or at least a structure which definitively precludes private profit – can offer the same levels of assurance about direction.
Authenticity has been a buzz word in marketing for many years now – which inevitably means it’s applied widely, used and abused. But the authenticity of a business which no individual can own or profit from cuts very deep – because it removes any doubt about motive. I can feel in myself the timbre of emotional response it evokes. It’s rock solid.
Daniel also challenges the belief that the success of a club is wholly dependent on on its trophy cabinet. Bohs direct experience is that it’s the club’s overall behaviour that determines success.
In many ways, this is the fundamental point : a values-led approach allows a club to transcend its on pitch performance. The more a club subordinates everything to winning, regardless of environmental performance or ESG activity, the more it will remain dependent on football performance – because only this will maintain fan goodwill.
Daniel’s clear sense – he didn’t speak of any formal measurement – is that fabs see the club in the round and so balance football performance with everything else the club does.
He also talks clearly to the importance of club culture and its impact on performance – and we 100% agree with his belief that club culture should lead performance on the pitch and not vice versa. Club cultures in our experience easily inhibit performance.
Maintaining individual peak performance is a mammoth physical and psychological undertaking. In the case of a team, the relationship between all parts of the system are an additional, equally critical, level of complexity – technically and psychologically. Club culture sets the safety rails for those relationships.
Bohs posted a surplus in 2022 of €733K, bringing the Club’s reserves to a little under €2.7M, according to The Irish Times. A grand achievement, given they were technically insolvent in 2012, which puts them in the lower half of the Championship in terms of turnover. Although this is not generally the scale that the sports industry like to talk about, as Ben Wells’ Unofficial Partner podcast The Squeezed Middle argues very clearly, the rump of the industry dwells here.
But as Philip Buckingham writes in The Athletic, ‘The Championship has become the division of financial strain and distress. The majority of its 24 clubs are now conditioned to accept loss-making. Money spent on wages consistently — and comfortably — exceeds the collective revenue each year.’ In terms of rate or growth, Bohs’ financial performance is pretty enviable.
Bohs might not be a proven model for the top league, but there are clearly lessons to be learned at Championship level.
Shared values in sponsorship
Looking for partners with shared values is a popular ambition these days, as rights-holders respond to increasingly values-conscious social audiences and the recognition that sustainability
The Sinek Qua Non of sponsorship
The Psychology of Sponsorship #3 The third post in our theme of the Psychology of Sponsorship explores how sponsorship narrative can be strengthened by understanding
Adding value to fans
Adding value to the fan is a mantra of sponsorship nowadays. A mantra that emerged in response to sponsors who viewed sponsorship only as an