London uni student buys 152-year-old football club for £15, after moving from Carolina

Imagine coming to the UK to study sports management and end up doing just that by the time you graduate.

That’s exactly what happened to 23-year-old Matthew Evans, who moved from South Carolina to south-west London in 2023 to attend the University of Roehampton.

Upon realising that his local area didn’t have a football club, Evans consulted a list of defunct clubs published by the FA and found East Sheen in Richmond-upon-Thames, close to where he was living at university and “across the road” from where the founder of the Football Association lived.

Matthew “read roughly 400 articles from the 1800s to figure out that, not only did East Sheen have a football club, but they had a good one.”

It cost Matthew just £15 to register the club with Surrey Council and Companies House and he has since spent “less than £500” on other set-up costs. He made agreements with the University of Roehampton to utilise some of its facilities and has also partnered with charities such as Beyond the White Line to bring the club back to life.

via SWNS

East Sheen FC was founded in 1873 but lost its home pitch in 1906, resulting in an end for its competitive activity. Two of its former players – Percy and Arthur Melmoth Walters – played for England in between 1885 and 1890, with Percy captaining the squad on five occasions. Arthur also later served as the president of the Law Society of England and Wales.

Matthew argued reviving a club that was “once a great and trusted establishment in the area over 100 years ago,” as opposed to starting his own, “has a lot more beauty to the story”.

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Evans sees the club as being a “long-term project, something [he] wants to stay stuck-in with for the next five to ten years.”

He said: “I hope to have my career outside of this as well with football, but this is definitely a passion project – I want to get this club to where it used to be, winning Surrey senior cups.”

“At worst, we’re a community club that shines a light on East Sheen and the beautifulness of that part of Richmond and South West London, that’s not a bad place to be.”

via SWNS

He understands similarities between himself and the hit Apple TV series Ted Lasso, which features an American college football coach heading to an English football team in Richmond. Matthew finds it to be “comical” that he reflects the show by being “an American guy from the south east of the US coming to the south west of London.”

“When I think of Ted Lasso, I think of a positive role model for how all football professionals should be trying to conduct themselves, focusing on making better people on and off the pitch, instead of purely results and purely money,” he said.

“I think that the game, unfortunately at the grass-roots level, at all levels of English football and worldwide, are starting to prioritise results and money over what the game is and always is about. It’s about people, making memories for people on and off the pitch.”

Featured images via SWNS.