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In this episode, Liam Scully, CEO of Lincoln City FC, and Jason Futers, Chief Growth & Innovation Officer, explain how a League One club with a 140-year history stays competitive against rivals with far greater resources. From governance and fan engagement to innovation and commercial growth, they outline how Lincoln City builds for long-term success while staying rooted in its community.
By Joachim Stelmach
A 140-year-old club with a modern mission
Scully describes Lincoln City as “140 years old, with a real proud history within the English football pyramid”, adding with a laugh, “I think we even hold the title of being the most relegated club… unluckily given to us.” He joined in 2017 with a clear goal: “To professionalise the football club and create the on and off field structures in order to help the club thrive in the short, medium and long term.”
Futers sees innovation as part of that professionalisation. “We’re very much community-based… but things need to change. We’re ambitious on the pitch and we’re ambitious off the pitch.” That ambition is not limited to one department: “Innovation for me is about on-pitch performance and off-pitch operations — it’s both.”
Competing with bigger rivals by knowing who you are
In League One, Lincoln faces former Premier League clubs with far greater resources. “At times we’ll be coming up against teams with 30, 40,000 seats, huge history, huge fan bases,” Scully explains. “If we plan and create a strategy that is reliant on those clubs not being our competitors, then the likelihood is we’re going to struggle.”
The answer is to define their own identity and stick to it. “We’ve worked really hard to understand and codify who we are and be us,” Scully says. “First of all, it’s understanding it and defining it. And then second of all, it’s about how we execute that.”
He recalls that early in his tenure, the club had to make tough decisions about where to allocate resources. “If you spread limited resources thinly across all areas, you’ll get beaten more often than not… We decide the areas we’re going to really commit to.”
Fan governance and building trust
Lincoln has become “the first football club in the UK that was regulator ready”, introducing a golden share for the Supporters Trust to protect heritage assets like the crest, stadium, and club colours. “It’s about having that transparent, open dialogue with our fans,” says Scully.
The Fan Advisory Board is not symbolic. “It’s not a customer services board,” he stresses. “This is a formal, structured, two-way conversation about the big topics.”
An example came with ticketing: “Tiered pricing was something the fans raised… we’ve listened, we’ve acted, and we’ve implemented.”
That focus on connection extends beyond governance. “We have our fan village with games and activities for the very youngest fans… our Legends Lounge where fans can come in and play Xbox,” Futers says. The foundation’s 3G pitch next to the stadium is “full pretty much every day with holiday clubs, schools, community groups… It’s about engaging with the community not just on matchday but year-round.”
Innovation, sustainability, and commercial growth
Lincoln’s appointment of an Entrepreneur in Residence is, in Futers’ words, “fairly confident a world first in football.” The role’s purpose is to identify projects that “grow revenue, create wealth, and improve what we’re doing on or off the pitch.”
One example is Quambio Sports, addressing fan travel emissions. “Seventy percent of our carbon footprint is from fan travel to and from games,” says Futers. “We reward fans for sustainable travel — and we’ve had supporters on the pitch receiving prizes.”
Commercial reach is also growing. “Our digital footprint means we’re appealing to a geographically much broader potential market,” Futers explains. “We’ve had fans travelling from as far as Edinburgh for matches.”
Unity, priorities, and looking ahead
For Scully, leadership starts with alignment. “Get everybody to pull on the same piece of rope at the same time and get us all working towards that north star… Everything we’ve linked absolutely everything to winning on the pitch.”
But he knows that results fluctuate. “We’re not always going to win more games than we lose, so we have to constantly top up that bank of goodwill in all our actions and behaviours.”
This season’s third kit is a perfect example of that goodwill in action. “The swing tag is infused with seeds so fans can plant the county flower of Lincolnshire,” Futers explains. Beyond the symbolic value, it’s part of a calendar of “a wide range of events coming up over the next 12 months.”
Scully closes with perspective: “Every single football club is a living, breathing beast and no two football clubs are the same… You have to come in and operate in time with that.”
Jason Futers
Chief Growth & Innovation Officer at Lincoln City FC
