Land of the Braves
BUILD it, and they will come. Maybe not to the ground in huge numbers. Not yet, anyway. But give people something to believe in, and crucially, to invest in – on more than one level – and you might just have yourself a proper football club.
The accusation that the Caledonian Braves, the professional evolution of the Edusport Academy, aren’t a ‘proper’ football club is one that owner Chris Ewing has heard thousands of times before. What he has also heard thousands of times before though is that familiar ping notifying him of yet another investor joining him on his journey with Scotland’s youngest football club. As he spoke over video call from his home in Paris, for instance, a gentleman from Texas chucked in $500.
“A traditional football club is about having a set of values on and off the park,” Ewing said.
“We can talk about the apps and the owners in America and all the rest of it, but the reality is that at its core, it’s crucial to have that traditional element of having a good culture about the club, working hard, considering each other, giving fans a voice and being transparent.”
From that core idea, Ewing is building something at the Lowland League club, alright. The Braves play out of Alliance Park (the owners voted for the name of the ground, as they did the name of the club), a modest set-up within the Strathclyde Country Park in Motherwell.
The Braves had no roots in an area already saturated with much larger professional football clubs, but Ewing realised that if the local community won’t come to them, then they could build their own global community. Which is now 2,500-plus strong.
“The challenge we had is how do we as a brand-new football club compete in the West of Scotland when you’ve got Hamilton Accies, Clyde, Motherwell, Rangers, Celtic, Albion Rovers, you name it?” he said.
“My idea was that we don’t look to engage a local community, but we look to engage an international community through social media.
“Those folk who own our football club voted for the new name, the new logo, and in 2019 we became the Caledonian Braves, and we had that clear distinction between the club and the academy.”
To understand the journey that took the Edusport Academy from an academic programme, where students from France paid to come over to Scotland to learn English and be coached in football for a year (there is a certain irony there on both counts, Ewing notes), to becoming a professional, fan-owned club with a global footprint, you must first understand the journey Ewing has been on personally.
Behind him on his wall of his Parisian home there is a pink poster bearing the famous ‘People Make Glasgow’ slogan that looms over George Square, and there is no doubt that the influence of Glasgow continues to loom over Ewing. But it was a trip to watch former Celtic striker Tommy Coyne – who had married into his family – play at the World Cup in New York in 1994 that changed everything.
“We’re all Rangers fans in our family, and at that time he was playing for Dundee, so that was fine. Then he signed for Celtic…” he laughed.
“He’s a great guy and a great player, and in a roundabout way he changed my life.
“I went to that Ireland game and it was probably one of the best experiences of my life, watching Ireland against Italy in the Giants Stadium.
“It was just brilliant. As much as a Rangers man as I am, I went out that stadium singing ‘You’ll never beat the Irish!’
“It was a brilliant experience, and it changed my life. As a 15-year-old boy from Pollok to go and see New York, come off the train at the Long Island railroad and just see Manhattan and all these sights and sounds, it was just like ‘wow’. There is something else out there, it’s not just my mum’s house, there’s a big wide world out there.
“It gave me that sort of wanderlust to believe in ‘better than’. I absolutely love Glasgow, and I consider myself very fortunate to be Glaswegian, but that trip to New York just allowed me to dream and showed me that there is more to life than the schemes.”
Ewing was a handy footballer himself, but not quite good enough to make it to the top level. When he was released by Motherwell back in 1997 – “probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says – the contacts he made on that trip to the States led to a scholarship. And laid the foundations for what became Edusport.
“My experience there allowed me to understand that any project that combines sport, education and travel is something that is very worthwhile and very positive,” he said.
“That’s what led me to create my first company, Edusport USA, sending young kids to America, and that led into Edusport Academy.”
As fulfilling as running the Edusport Academy was – and is – Ewing had a competitive itch that he wanted to scratch.
“After a few years I thought it would be brilliant to get the boys into a league where we could train all week and it would actually mean something at the end of the week,” he said.
“Now, at that point you’ve got a choice. Do you go amateur, do you go under-21s, do you go into the juniors?
“I thought, why not try do it right, get into the pyramid in the South of Scotland League and see what can happen from that?”
That led Ewing and the club’s longtime coach, and now Caledonian Braves manager, Ricky Waddell, to be summoned south to a meeting to state their case. The culture clash between the committee and the pair, having their Dragon’s Den moment, had Ewing fearing the worst.
“The average age of the guys in that room must have been about 65,” he said.
“I’m standing there with Ricky with my Ted Baker shirt on and talking about how I live in Paris, I want to bring these French boys over to play, and I’m thinking there is just no chance that this is going to happen.
“Afte the pitch, they send you out of the room, and you sit twiddling your thumbs in the hallway like you’re waiting outside the headmaster’s office. There was a team called Dumfries YM who were there too trying to get into the league.
“We got invited back in and they said they were delighted to welcome us into the league, and I couldn’t believe it. People criticise football in Scotland for being too traditional and a little bit of a closed shop, but those people in that room gave us a chance to move from being a private football academy to being an actual football club.
“I’ll be forever grateful to those guys.”
After a few years of Edusport plying their trade in the South of Scotland league, Ewing was getting itchy feet once more, and wanted to continue the club’s progression into the Lowland League.
“We were refused twice,” he said. “Unceremoniously.
“We were actually told by David Baxter, who is the current league secretary, that if we wanted to get into the Lowland League then we would have to win the South of Scotland League.
“We duly obliged, and became the first club in the history of Scottish football to go from the sixth tier of Scottish football into the fifth tier.”
Which was all well and good, but Ewing knew that the Edusport model and a step up in level were likely not compatible.
“It gave us a bit of a headache,” he said. “The reality was that the level in the Lowland League even at that stage was far superior to what we had been used to in the South of Scotland.
“So, we had to start bringing in some Scottish players, and try to consolidate our position as a Lowland League team. That came at a cost.”
A further problem then was, as football club owners go, Ewing was of relatively modest means. But not of modest ambition.
“The reality is that I am very limited in where I can take the football club alone,” he said.
“But that doesn’t excite me to run a club on my own anyway. The exciting part for me was sharing that with people.
“So, I feel very privileged to bring people along on this journey that we are on. That’s where I get a real buzz, having people from all over the world buying into the club, creating a community and being able to impact people’s lives positively through this wee club.”
From that seed, Caledonian Braves has grown. And their ownership group continues to do so at the rate of around 100 members a day.
Sharing major decisions between 2500 people doesn’t mean the work
I’m standing there with Ricky with my Ted Baker shirt on and talking about how I live in Paris, I want to bring these French boys over to play, and I’m thinking there is just no chance that this is going to happen
load is shared though, and Ewing’s role as figurehead is an all-consuming labour of love.
“When I’m not working on it, I’m thinking about it,” he said.
“But I’ll tell you something, it’s brilliant. What a job I’ve got, owning a football club along with 2500 owners around the world.
“People are emailing you, and when they invest in the club they can leave a message, and without being cheesy, some of the messages you get really warm your heart, uplift you, and makes you realise you are doing the right thing for the right reasons. It isn’t every club that can say that. I just love it.
“I think people love the idea of trying to grow a wee club, and it goes back to all of those good things like hope and incentive that we should be involved in with sport. All of these things, along with the sense of community, really appeals.
“I think it seems to particularly chime with Americans because they generally have a ‘can do’ attitude towards life, so they think that we can do something with this wee club.
“Edusport Academy has had a lot of criticism over the years. We don’t have our own ground, we don’t have a proper name, all that stuff.
“We’ve had to fight for everything, for our SFA membership, to get into the Lowland League, but we have now established ourselves as a good member of the SFA, a positive club, a good team that try to give players opportunities who may have been released by clubs.”
THE global ownership of the Braves allows not only for a pooling of financial resource, but perhaps just as valuably, a pooling of talent. Among the notable investors are Mujtaba Elgoodah, former manager of team development for the Golden State Warriors when they won the 2022 NBA title, Isaiah Covington, the Strength and Conditioning Coach for the Boston Celtics, as well as a group of three professional footballers from the Kansas City women’s team. Oh, and an investor from Nasa just for good measure, with Ewing just resisting the temptation to say how that shows not even the sky is the limit.
That gives Ewing the sort of sounding boards that, with the greatest of respect, should be way out of the reach of a club in the fifth tier of Scottish football, and they are just as passionate about driving the Braves forward as he is.
“For me, it’s just unbelievable that I can phone these people up, get advice, and they are involved in helping me drive the strategy of the club,” he said.
“We also have a lot of just normal folk who love football and they will put their ideas forward, and those can be as good as anything else because they are just really passionate. Those folk probably wouldn’t have any sort of opportunity to be involved in owning a football club, so we are giving them that opportunity too.
“So, pooling resources a big, big part of it.”
Where does this all lead, then? What is the dream that this global community are buying into?
There is the ethos of the club as a fan-owned entity, and all the warm, fuzzy sentiments that come with trying to be the antithesis of the stateowned behemoths dominating the game at the highest levels, of course.
But Ewing knows there has to be more, and an ambition on the field to match their reach off of it.
“If we’re not looking to take the club towards top-flight football, then we shouldn’t be in it,” he said.
“Every club should be looking to play at the highest level that they can, that should be in their manifesto. If that isn’t your ambition, then why are you doing it?
“Ultimately, there is an opportunity. So, the idea is that we continue to grow the community, continue to improve on and off the park, and ensure that the club is in a good place for promotion within the next few years. I think that is a reasonable and achievable goal.”
Ewing is still building. And they are still coming to back the Braves, from all over the world.
Meet the former footballer who masterminded move to attract American sports stars to invest in his fifth-tier Scottish club