Did an American student really buy an English football club for £15?

He registered the historic, defunct East Sheen FC name for a reported £15 — there was no existing club, assets, or ground to purchase.

Is this actually related to Ted Lasso?

Not officially — but East Sheen's revival is based in Richmond upon Thames, the real borough used as the setting for the show's fictional AFC Richmond, and Evans has drawn the comparison himself.

How successful was East Sheen FC historically?

The club won the Surrey Senior Cup in 1884-85 and produced two England captains, Percy Melmoth Walters and Arthur Melmoth Walters, before folding in 1906.

Is the revival actually funded?

Not yet, on the evidence of its own fundraiser: as of writing, a £1,600 GoFundMe target has raised £763 from three donors, with one £748 gift accounting for almost all of it.

A student bought a dead football club for £15

A 23-year-old spent an afternoon reading 400 old newspaper articles and revived a 152-year-old football club for £15. Actually launching it is proving rather more expensive — and he's doing it in the real borough Ted Lasso borrowed as its setting.

Registering a defunct club's name is the cheap part. Everything that turns a name back into a football club — pitches, kit, coaching, insurance — still has to be paid for, and on the evidence of its own fundraiser, that part hasn't arrived yet.

An American, alone, discovering a struggling English club nobody else wanted

If you were pitching this as a script, nobody would let you keep the coincidence. Evans is an American who moved to London to work in football, found a club with a losing history and nobody left to care about it, and decided — against all financial logic — to try to fix it anyway. Richmond upon Thames isn't just any London borough. It's the actual place that supplies the exterior shots and general setting for AFC Richmond, the fictional club Ted Lasso is hired to coach in the show of the same name. Evans has acknowledged the resemblance himself, calling the whole project's vibe distinctly "Ted Lasso." The difference is that nobody wrote him a season order or gave him Rebecca Welton's chequebook.

How you find a 152-year-old football club nobody's thought about since 1906

Evans moved to London in 2023 to study sports management, and quickly noticed his new neighbourhood didn't have a football club of its own. Rather than start something from scratch, he went looking through a directory of defunct English clubs — and found East Sheen, sitting right there in Richmond, waiting.

What he found once he started digging was more than he expected. "I read roughly 400 articles from the 1800s," he's said, "to figure out that not only did East Sheen have a football team" — but a genuinely accomplished one for its era. The club reached the first-ever Surrey Senior Cup final in 1882, losing 2-0 at Reigate Priory after two of its best players were refused permission to travel by their school headmaster, then won the trophy outright in 1884-85 at the Kennington Oval.

Two of its players, Percy Melmoth Walters and Arthur Melmoth Walters, went on to captain the England national team. The club toured France early enough to be among the first English clubs to do so at all, and had former players who scattered to Argentina, Australia, India, and New Zealand.

What £15 actually buys you

It's worth being precise about the headline figure, because it makes the whole thing sound easier than it is. Evans didn't purchase assets, a ground, or a going concern — there wasn't one to buy. £15 registers a name. Everything else — pitch access, kit, coaching, insurance, the basic infrastructure a functioning club needs before it can play a single competitive fixture — has to be built and paid for separately, and that's where the real story currently sits. There's no Ted Lasso arriving with a chequebook and a folksy pep talk to smooth this part over; it's just Evans, a university facilities agreement, a charity partnership, and a stack of flyers.

The club's own GoFundMe campaign, launched to help fund the return of men's and women's football, tells a more sobering story than the £15 headline suggests: as of writing, it has raised £763 towards a £1,600 target, from just three donors — and one of those three gave £748, meaning the campaign has attracted something close to a single meaningful supporter rather than genuine grassroots momentum. Registering a defunct club's name is the easy, cheap part. Convincing a community to actually fund its return is proving to be the real project, and unlike the show it keeps getting compared to, there's no writers' room guaranteeing things work out by the end of the season.

Why it matters

"For me, this is a long-term project," Evans has said, "something I want to stay stuck in with for the next five to ten years... I want to get this club to where it used to be, winning Surrey senior cups." That ambition is genuine, and the history he's rebuilding a case for is real. But the fundraiser's numbers are a useful corrective to a story that's mostly been reported as a quirky feel-good headline: reviving a 152-year-old football club takes more than a good history, a £15 registration fee, and a coincidental postcode. It takes a community willing to actually pay for it, and right now, that part hasn't arrived yet.

It's also a useful data point for anyone thinking about football finance from the bottom up, which is the whole point of this publication. The gap between how cheap it is to start something and how expensive it is to sustain it runs through this entire sport, from a defunct amateur club in Richmond all the way up to boardrooms with nine-figure related-party loans. East Sheen is just the smallest, clearest version of it currently visible — real life, it turns out, doesn't wrap up as neatly as the show that keeps getting name-checked in every article about it, this one included.