I wouldn’t take Premier League cash if it meant putting meat on the menu!
Maverick club owner who backs new regulator
DALE VINCE says he does not really feel pride. It is not the way the Forest Green Rovers owner and renewable energy tycoon is wired. He prefers, he says, to look forward rather than back. It is an outlook that has shaped most of his life. From leaving home at 15 to spend a decade as a New Age Traveller, living in an old fire engine — later exchanged for an ambulance — powered by a home-made wind turbine, to launching his own green energy company Ecotricity, building the UK’s first electric supercar, creating diamonds out of thin air and turning Forest Green into the world’s first carbon-neutral football club.
‘I’ve always been a contrarian, I guess, and a bit of a rebel,’ Vince tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘I’ve never pursued money, I’m not interested. I pursue change.’
So it is a shame as there is plenty to be proud of. Not least because he has steered Rovers, a club from a town of 6,000 on a hill in Gloucestershire, into the Football League and promotion to League One. They might even win League Two on the final day next weekend, although a 3-1 defeat by Harrogate yesterday was unhelpful. But if they do, what will he feel?
‘There will be a big smile on my face and in my heart and I will feel pleased we’ve made that big step,’ he says. ‘I’ll be looking to survive in League One, then progress up the leagues and hopefully compete for the Championship soon.’ You see, always looking forward. And Vince and Rovers have done off the pitch, too.
Since he took over in 2010, he has turned them into, as FIFA say, ‘the greenest club in the world’. There is a vegan-only menu, shirts made from coffee grounds and pitches irrigated from rain water and cut by a robot mower.
Vince is seeing more players and fans adopting those values into their own lives. They have come a long way from opposition fans turning up in butcher’s aprons and singing ‘you dirty vegan b ***** d, you’re eating our grass!’
Rovers made headlines again — ‘we’re used to it now’ — when they travelled to Bristol Rovers in a £420,000 electric coach. Vince, looking ahead, plans to buy one and thinks the team could use it to get to half of their League One away games next season. He wants to swap the club mowers’ motors for electric ones. And there is also the proposed new Eco Park stadium, still a few years away, which will be made of wood. Vince, meanwhile, plans to sell Ecotricity for a move into politics. He has previously donated to the Labour Party.
It was Vince, too, who funded the Just Stop Oil protests last month when activists tied themselves to goalposts during Premier League matches. He did not know that was their plan when he gave them £10,000 but would have done so anyway. ‘There’s some things that transcend everything, including football.’
Sustainability runs through everything. And when you are a football club owner, in an industry where so many edge close to financial ruin, it is not just about sustaining the environment.
‘Sustainability is a broad issue,’ says Vince. ‘It’s also about financial and social sustainability. You’ve got to have social justice in anything you do. Without it, you can’t have true sustainability.’
It is fitting, then, that we are speaking around the anniversary of the proposed Super League.
‘It crystallized the issue of what we expect from football. It turns out we expect more than rampant money-making. Then you’ve got a Government saying the free market can’t fix this. So we’re going to have some good old state intervention.’
The Government will create an independent regulator to stop owners buying clubs and running them into the ground. The Premier League accept the need for reform but say a regulator ‘is not necessary’. ‘My main day job is in the energy business which has a regulator and that has been a disaster,’ says Vince. ‘So I’m hesitant to say, “we should regulate football”.
‘But football needs something done because there are so many clubs that run close to the edge. That’s harmful for communities. Self-regulation isn’t working. The fit and proper owner’s test breaches the Trade Descriptions Act.
‘Money rules the roost in football, which is all kinds of wrong. It’s like a Wild West version of capitalism. It needs control. The Government said the free market can’t solve football’s problems. This is a Conservative government that thinks the free market can solve all issues.’
If it has been a disaster in the energy industry, could it have the same effect on football? ‘Well, it could, because you tend in a regulator to get a lot of theoretical people and they’re not in touch.
‘It might be simpler in football. It should be straight-forward. They need to make sure there’s more money coming out of the Premier League into the lower leagues. And I would look at wage caps.’
Meanwhile, Forest Green keep working their way up them. And, regardless of temptation, Vince will not sacrifice what he believes in to get there. Not even if he had to trade a rasher of meat on the menu for a place in the Premier League.
‘No way. Absolutely not. I would never swap principles for money. I think the worst thing anybody could do,’ he says.