Thousands of parents will be able to relate to being sucked in after volunteering at your kids’ youth football team and finding, before you know it, that your life revolves around the club. Very few, though, could imagine building that club into a professional outfit, competing for a place in the top flight and attracting investment from two EuroMillions winners.
That is what Lee Sanders and Dawn Hepple have achieved at Durham Women after sticking it out for more than 20 years to construct a team that are three points off a promotion place to the Women’s Super League. Now they say they have a “springboard to go on” after two long-term supporters, the lottery winners Patrick and Frances Connolly, acquired a 25% stake.
The Connollys, from Hartlepool, were sponsoring and helping Durham for several years and had got to know Sanders when their daughters were playing grassroots football, before they won their fortune in 2019. The club had been under Durham University’s ownership until last summer when first Sanders then Hepple, who had been running it as directors, took shares. The Connollys came on board in December, though their investment was announced only this month, and when the players were told of their involvement their first reaction was to joke: “When are we going to Dubai for warm-weather training?”
Sanders laughs off any such lavish spending but does have grand ambitions. “It’s going to be the first part of a transformational era for the football club,” he says. “Are they going to come in and splash like tens of millions of pounds? No, but it gives us a really good platform to be able to look at that next level and the grander plan, building a stadium and building a training facility.
“This isn’t just a case of them coming in this season and chucking some money in. This has been a slow build of a partnership, to take our football club to the next era.”
Sanders wants Durham to move from their 2,400-capacity home at Maiden Castle into a new stadium in the next 18 months. “We’ve hosted a number of games over the last few years where we know we could have got four, five, six times the amount of spectators, so there’s a need for it,” he says. “We need to have an independent facility that we run, and future-proof that for generations to come … We have a plan to move aggressively and quickly.”
Their most recent home game ended in a 3-2 win over Blackburn, courtesy of a 97th-minute goal from Beth Hepple, the all-time leading goal scorer and daughter of Dawn. The family has “lived and breathed” the club, says Dawn, who knows how much Durham’s growth means to the long-serving players, including Sarah Wilson, who signed in 2014 from Newcastle. “They deserve this,” she says.
Durham joined the second tier that year and they have stayed there, finishing in the top four five times, punching above their weight to become the highest-ranked club from the north-east. London City Lionesses are the only other Championship team not affiliated to a professional men’s club.
“We’ve always had that underdog mentality,” Dawn Hepple says. “There’s a grittiness about the players, that they will grind out results and just keep going. And a lot of it is probably defiance, because I think they want to prove people wrong. Lots of things have been written about us across the years but the players have an extremely good work ethic. Football’s just in your blood up here, isn’t it?
“We’ve probably always been regarded as poor relations in football, because of a lack of cash investment that maybe a big men’s club would have given us, and [the players] they do appreciate that we’ve not been big spenders in the past, but we’ve always had that wrap-around care and almost family-feel around the girls, and tried to do things better every year.”
Sanders credits much of their progress to the loyalty of many players and staff, who spent years on “not great salaries, or part-time salaries in the past, and stuck by us”. At a time when the 12 WSL clubs have affiliated men’s sides in the Premier League, Sanders and Hepple believe it is “vitally important” for the women’s game that stand-alone clubs thrive.
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“Being independent allows us to do things that maybe other clubs that are owned by men’s clubs can’t,” says Sanders, who had a decade as the manager. “We’re not dictated to what’s on the front of the shirt or which banking partner we can go with. It’s actually Durham’s super-strength.”
Sanders and Hepple evenly share 75% of the club but appear eager to attract further investment. Hepple cannot resist a smile when Sanders, in answer to whether they have a time in mind to reach the WSL, says: “2018. There shouldn’t be a team in our league that shouldn’t want to win the league, because that’s what it’s all about. That’s certainly what the players want, and should want to hear from any club.”
Getting the one promotion spot will not be easy. “We need to see more jeopardy in the second tier and the opportunity for more teams to be promoted,” Sanders says, “because ultimately, with no playoff opportunities like there are in the men’s game, with so few games, the margins for error are just getting smaller.”
In a wide-open title race, seventh-placed Newcastle are nine points behind the leaders, Birmingham City, with two games in hand. Durham are currently third, three points off the top. Sanders and Hepple, despite their joy at announcing the ownership change, have no desire to put their feet up in a directors’ box and watch from afar.
“Absolutely not,” Hepple says. “I’ll be pacing up and down and still in the merchandise shop helping out. I’d much rather be hands-on. I think you have to be, to drive the standards. So it’s definitely not a ‘sit back’, not at the minute. It’s a 24/7 commitment to driving where we want to be.”
