The Pyramid Partners With Hanwell Town

What the partnership is

Hanwell Town were founded in 1920 by Newcastle natives living and working in West London, and retain both the black-and-white identity and the London Geordies nickname more than a century later. They play at Reynolds Field in Ealing, now the Oliver Connell & Son Community Stadium, and have competed in the Southern League Premier Division South since winning promotion in 2022.

The club combines more than a century of history with the realities of running a modern non-league operation: volunteers, commercial partnerships, matchday income, ground improvements and the constant challenge of competing against clubs with very different resources. Those are precisely the parts of football The Pyramid was created to cover.

Why Hanwell

We started buying pitchside advertising in August, at Boreham Wood in the National League and Corinthian-Casuals in the Combined Counties Premier Division South. Peterborough United followed in September, taking us into the EFL for the first time. Hanwell adds a fourth level.

We now advertise at tiers three, five, seven and nine. The ambition is to have a partner club at every level from tier two to tier ten, which leaves tiers two, four, six, eight and ten still to fill.

That spread is deliberate, and it reflects the publication. The economics of English football do not stop at the Premier League or the EFL. Ownership structures, sponsorship values, stadium costs, playing budgets, supporter funding and the basic business of keeping a club operating all change as you move down the pyramid — and the readership we are trying to reach is spread across all of it.

Tier seven is a particularly useful place to be. It is where the gap between traditional non-league operations and increasingly ambitious semi-professional clubs produces some of the clearest examples of how football economics change below the EFL. We have written about that division repeatedly this year, and the two clubs whose front-of-shirt prices we compared — £50,000 and £15,000 for the same inventory — both play at this level.

On independence

The Pyramid covers Hanwell Town in the same way it covers every other club in the pyramid: from the filed accounts, the corporate record and the public statements, without favour.

A commercial relationship with a club we write about creates an obvious question, and the answer is the one we have applied at Boreham Wood since August and at Peterborough since September. The partnership has no bearing on what we publish, and nothing about it gives Hanwell any say over our coverage of them or of anything else. Whenever we write about a club we sponsor, the piece will say so.

That is the same standard we would expect of any publication writing about a business it takes money from, and we would rather state it here than have someone else point it out later.

What happens next

Our thanks to everyone at Hanwell Town for making it happen.

If you are reading this because you found us through the boards at Reynolds Field, welcome — the accounts are more interesting than you might think.