It is difficult to imagine there are too many other clubs where the manager can freely walk home from matches, regardless of the result, or has been gifted a tailor-made oak coffee table by a fan. Better still, the table in Gary Caldwell’s office at Exeter’s revamped Cliff Hill training base, given to him by a supporter who is a carpenter, has an integrated tactics board and the pitch dimensions are to the scale of the surface at their St James Park home. “The supporters go over and above in terms of what they give to this club,” Caldwell says.
Then again Exeter are somewhat unique given their status as a fan-owned club, the 20-year anniversary of which is this month, a cause for celebration and a move that has since prompted intrigue and praise in their model from rivals and government.
The Exeter City Supporters’ Trust has about 3,600 members, each of whom pay a minimum of £24 a year. “You always hear players at clubs say: ‘It’s a family club,’ but we’re owned by the family,” says the club president, Julian Tagg, a lifelong fan who was once Exeter’s Under-11s coach and a player‑manager in the reserves, as well as a ball boy. “It takes us a long time to do anything, an inordinate amount of time, but when we do it, we do it right.”
It is an incredible tale of community, steel and sheer hard work, and an endearing one, too. Andy Gillard, among the army of volunteers who shovelled Exeter out of the brown stuff when they were relegated from the Football League in 2003, is the longstanding club secretary. “It was hand to mouth and you would split the tasks up, and if you needed to stick your hand down a drain, you stuck your hand down a drain,” he says. “You had to survive a day, a week, a month or two and, back then, to get to the first game of the season was a huge achievement.”
The new training facility, regarded as a quantum leap, also means a new office. “The great thing about it is in the cold weather I won’t get chilblains,” Gillard says. “It was a temporary one we had before from the 70s, so we got 50 years out of it.” Gillard’s mother, Margaret, volunteered as a matchday host in hospitality suites for 17 years.
There is the story of Uri Geller, once co-chairman under the fateful regime of Mike Lewis and John Russell, both of whom were later found guilty of fraud, parading Michael Jackson around the stadium. “That was a zoo,” Tagg says. “David Blaine was doing card tricks that they never paid for … we picked up the bill from two or three hotels, which were never paid, the bill for the train which they got Jackson on from London.”
Tagg recalls driving home from Plymouth when a fan of their arch-rivals phoned up BBC Radio Devon basking in Exeter’s misery, taking aim at the off-field circus. “They said: ‘All they need now is Coco the Clown to complete the set’ … very funny but, you know what, it was embarrassing. You know when a switch goes? I was like: ‘I’m not having that.’ I didn’t even think about the numbers. It was: ‘I’m going to get involved.’”
Another yarn exposes how Exeter’s old incumbents made a mess of making friends, leaving the club alienated by local businesses. When the Trust gave companies the chance to pay £500 to enter a raffle to sponsor the old grandstand to help fund the first set of wages, they encountered some pushback.
“I phoned [cash-and-carry wholesaler] Makro but didn’t hear back after a few days,” Tagg says. “It transpired they asked the club to open their store – no problem – but Russell and Lewis sent Geller down there to open it and sent them an invoice for £10,000.”
The padlocks on the latch of a door along from the boardroom, put in place to lock out Russell and Lewis, are symbols of Exeter’s supporter-led uprising and remain unmoved. Elaine Davis was another who volunteered a helping hand: cleaning, painting, fulfilling odd jobs. “We were top of League One on the weekend of the anniversary,” Davis says. “It has been great to have this time to look back and understand what we’ve done. I’m tingling now, thinking about it.”
When the Trust rummaged under the bonnet they unearthed £4.8m of debt. A windfall from an FA Cup replay against Manchester United in 2005 eased finances but there was plenty of firefighting along the way. In more recent years, the fees from the sales of academy products Ollie Watkins, Ethan Ampadu, Matt Grimes and Jay Stansfield have, in effect, paid for upgrades to the infrastructure. “Exeter is a very special place to me, it’s my home,” says Ampadu, who left to join Chelsea at 16. “I try to look at how they have got on most weeks after my game. It is a close-knit club; maybe at a bigger team you wouldn’t see someone ‘higher up’ on a daily basis but at Exeter you pretty much see them every day.”
Everywhere you look there are reminders of how supporters are embedded in the fabric of the club. On the exterior of the main training pavilion, which opened in February, the words “We Own Our Football Club” proudly sit underneath the club name and crest. Inside there is a plaque in recognition of the £63,000 donated by fans to kit out the building with analysis screens, kitchen equipment and furniture. Upstairs, in the canteen, the manager and his staff eat lunch in front of a “virtual brick wall” decorated with messages from 200 supporters.
On the Big Bank terrace, at one end of the stadium, is a giant red love heart, painted by Tagg, who remembers getting stick in some quarters for the idea at the time. “People thought it was cheesy: sing your hearts out for the lads.”
There is no “us and them” at play here. On match days players are told to walk through the fan zone en route to the home changing room to engage with young supporters, and after every game a “gallant gang of volunteers”, as the Trust chair, Nick Hawker, puts it, stay behind to pick up coffee cups and crisp packets. In the past many also helped with providing ticketing support. “We’re trying to professionalise ourselves more and now we can afford to pay people to do some of the things volunteers did in the past,” says Davis. Still, the external perception remains the same. “We’re a bit of an oddity, quite cute,” Hawker says.
Patience has been vital along the journey, on and off the field. Caldwell is the fifth permanent manager the club has had in the past 20 years, and even after a six-match losing run last season, including a 6-0 trouncing at Ipswich, he remembers fans clapping his team off. Last week a youthful Exeter side lost 9-0 at home against Reading in the EFL Trophy. Reading, also of the third tier, may have won the match but what would their fans give for Exeter’s stability? “We don’t cane our managers,” Hawker says. “I went to see Gary and he said: ‘I’ve never known a club like this, we’ve just lost six on the bounce and nobody has said anything [negative] to me.’”
Listening to Hawker is refreshing. “I’m sad at how other clubs judge success. It doesn’t have to be on the pitch. It can be good financial performance, what you do in the community, how you treat your supporters … if the fans feel that ownership, why would you boo? You wouldn’t go into the office and boo all of your employees: ‘Crap accounts this week.’ If all you’re worried about is how you feel at five o’clock on a Saturday, then you’re wasting a huge opportunity.”
Several League Two clubs are thought to have bigger budgets than Exeter. They are thrifty, not stingy. One of the former director of football Steve Perryman’s adages, Tagg says, often springs to mind. “He always said: ‘We need to get £1.50 out of every £1.”
Tuesday’s Carabao Cup third‑round tie at home against Luton, another example of a well‑run club with fans at its core, is the latest opportunity to showcase just how far Exeter have come. “I’ll maybe get a pint on the way home if we win,” Caldwell says. “Under the lights, a full house, it will be a special night.”
