Tag: Clapton

Something is a-stirring at one of London’s oldest football clubs, as Mike Bayly finds out.

The Essex Senior League is eight divisions from the Premier League, but the world of its clubs is so far removed from the glamour and glitter of the elite that they may as well inhabit different universes. This is football as a hand to mouth existence, where players are seldom paid much more than expenses and clubs subsist on crowds that often fail to even reach three figures. It is also a level at which clubs that have fallen upon hard times find themselves in. One such club is Clapton FC. Twice winners of Isthmian League and five times winners of the FA Amateur Cup, Clapton have finished in the top half of any division of which they have been a member just twice since 1936. So winning might not be everything for this East London club, but it ongoing existence is under threat as a result of the mismanagement of its owner and this threat is, perhaps unsurprisingly, related to the club’s home ground, the Old Spotted Dog Ground. The club signed a 100 year lease on the ground in 1992 through a company called Clapton Trust Limited, which was subsequently renamed as the Newham Community Leisure Trust Limited in order to emphasise the difference between it and the football club, and in the same year it acquired charitable status. Vincent McBean was co-opted onto the board of...