‘Real life Ted Lasso’ plans major upgrades at Eastbourne Borough FC

The new owner of Eastbourne Borough FC is looking to launch a huge renovation scheme at the club’s Priory Lane ground on the South Coast of England.

Simon Leslie is working with AND Architects on the design and build of a new Main Stand and a revamp of the rest of the ground in the seaside town.

Eastbourne Borough FC competes in National League South, the sixth level of the English football league system. They play their home matches at Priory Lane in Langney, Eastbourne.

Leslie completed the purchase of Eastbourne Borough in September last year after scouting various clubs in the football pyramid from League One to non-league. He told SVB:

I turned up at Eastbourne and just thought ‘Wow there’s a real opportunity here.’

A lot of the clubs you see in non-league are wedged in between housing estates but this was situated in 11 acres of grassland and so there’s lots of potential to do more with the stadium.

Leslie had never been involved in the world of football club ownership before and comes from a background in media publishing where he established Ink Group, a travel media company with interests in everything from inflight magazines to inflight TV and TVs at airports. He said:

The fundamental thing I did in in my business was building teams up and getting them to perform. Hopefully they performed better than they thought they could. I wanted to bring the same principles to football.

They’re calling me the real-life Ted Lasso because I really want to do it with niceness, with kindness and with less toxicity. Football is a very a short career and I just wanted to bring players, managers and the chairman together.

Leslie’s first season in charge was testing, with Eastbourne spending the majority of the campaign in the National League South’s relegation zone before recovering to finish 19^th. He said:

We went through every emotion. We had more injuries than any other team in any league which put a lot of pressure on us as a group. But we came through in the end and the fans went from hating me to loving me.

In the last 11 games we only lost once and the irony of the game that we lost was we scored such a wonder goal that it went viral and had millions of views on social media. Even when things didn’t go well, we seemed to come out OK.

Stadium renovations

Leslie is now looking to push the club onto the next level with newer and better facilities. He added:

Right now it’s a very non-league club set-up with one main 600-seater stand and three standing stands. My ambition is to make it an all-seater stadium, or certainly an all-round stadium, not necessarily all-seater.

We’ll certainly have a lot more seats, a lot more hospitality and create a lot more in non match-day revenues and make the stadium work much harder. Eastbourne doesn’t have very many good restaurants so I would love to put a nice restaurant in here so people could come here and have lunches, entertain guests, have parties and all that sort of thing.

He said he has already been approached by a couple of celebrity chefs interested in taking the project on.

The long injury roster has also spurred Leslie on to want to build a wellness centre where the players can rehabilitate and recuperate.

My goal is to build the site properly so we will have a state-of-the-art wellbeing centre in the new stand with all the latest biohacking and innovative machines to help the players recover.

As well as a new restaurant and the wellness centre, the new stand will also have many more spaces available for conferences and entertaining. Leslie added:

The new stand will have 2,000 seats and will incorporate the hospitality, the restaurant, the match day hospitality and also outside-of-matchday hirings. We currently do a lot of weddings and other events and we’ll probably have another marquee this summer for the Euros and Wimbledon.

On match days we have live music for most games. I’ve tried to look at the American model of making it more than just a game of football but a day out as well and make it fun for the whole family.

Part of our development plan is how can we get people in and out of the area as efficiently as possible. We’re working with the local council and suppliers just to make sure that we can have enough parking because the local residents would be annoyed if I suddenly bring another couple of thousand people in and they can’t get to their houses on a Saturday or Tuesday.

Eastbourne Borough FC’s average attendance was about 1,600 last season, even though the club was in a relegation battle. Leslie added:

I think we were third or fourth in the league in terms of attendances. Our social media is number one in any league in the National League plus half the way up League Two. We’ve got a really good following of people from all over the world.

There really is an appetite for football in the town. With the exception of Brighton there isn’t really any league football until you get to Gillingham or north to Crawley who are not getting much more than a couple of thousand fans every week either.

There’s talk of the tennis (Rothesay International Eastbourne) leaving Eastbourne or certainly being scaled down to a 250 tournament, so you won’t get any of the good players here.

I want to make this the sporting Mecca of the town and get everybody up and excited about it. Twelve years ago we were playing Wrexham and Brighton and fans have seen how much Brighton has transformed. I definitely feel like we can create our own little mini- Brighton as well.

Shovels in the ground

Leslie said the club has had very positive conversations with the local council about getting the stadium revamp underway:

We’ve talked to the builders about being able to do it while the season’s going on as well. There’s no reason we can’t do that so as soon as we get a green light from the council then we can crack on, hopefully this year, certainly within the next 12 months.

The Main Stand will come first and it will have everything built in there. The current main stand is a 650-seater. The new stand will be built opposite the current Main Stand with other stands to follow. We want to have a proper first-class stadium.

Hopefully we can try to get a bit of a cauldron effect because we’re next to the Pevensey Flats and every Saturday at 3pm the wind seems to get up and you watch the ball go looping around. We want to try to create a slightly wind-protected site that will help the quality of the football.  It will create an arena atmosphere as well.

I think once Main Stand is done the others will just follow quickly. I want it to be like a jigsaw. I’ve got this vision.

Leslie is working with AND Architects on the project who have been involved with other stadium projects including at Charlton Athletic and Luton Town. He added:

Commercially, we’ve done brilliantly compared to the rest of this league and I think we could sell out the hospitality boxes before they’re even built. The rest of the work around the ground will follow on from that.

The new stand will include 12 boxes including two large ones, as well as a boardroom. The boxes will hold eight, while the new restaurant will host 150 fans on a match day.

Leslie concluded:

As a venue it should be one of the better places to go in Eastbourne and the goal is to make it a real destination that people want to come to for birthdays, weddings, parties and celebrations. I want this to be the heart of all good stuff that happens and create an environment of happiness.

Sports Venue Business has launched a raft of new offerings under the SVB LIVE banner for 2024, including Networking Events and a Webinar Series, the pinnacle of which being the 2024 SVB LIVE Conference & Exhibition. The next Networking Event is taking place at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, Australia, on June 25th.