The most valuable piece of real estate for a soccer team isn’t on the pitch, it’s on the front of the players’ jerseys, a foot-wide swath of fabric some companies will pay tens of millions of dollars to rent for a season.
But Bohemian FC, a small but mighty fan-owned club in Dublin, has made its money targeting an area that lies beneath the front of the jersey. Convinced a fan’s beating heart and soul can be worth more than any corporate advertising budget, Bohemian — or Bohs for short — promotes causes, not companies, on its away jerseys. The strategy has turned a club once headed for relegation and financial ruin into the most profitable one in the Irish first division.
“I can’t conceive of any way where Bohs could be in a position that a fan of Bayern Munich in Munich or a fan of Manchester United in Manchester would want to buy a Bohs shirt for football reasons,” Daniel Lambert, the team’s youthful chief operating officer, said last week in a video conference call from Dublin. “But if you bring it to an emotional space, there are people who care. They care about Palestine. They care about the migrant crisis, the climate, could be anything.
“If we can connect with people in different countries and cities around the world on that basis, our potential market is huge.”
How huge? Although Lambert declined to share detailed numbers, he believes most clubs in Ireland’s 10-team Premiership will sell between 100 to 500 away shirts while Bohemian might sell 20,000 or so a season. While other Premiership clubs are lucky to fund 5% of their annual budget through jersey sales, Bohemian is anticipating it will earn about 40% of its revenue from socially conscious shirts that have featured the colors of the Palestinian flag, a tribute to Bob Marley and the slogan “Refugees Welcome” beneath the silhouette of a fleeing family.
“There’s an awful lot of financial logic to this,” said Lambert, 37, whose club funnels much of that profit to migrant-aid groups, charities for the homeless or others providing medical assistant to Palestine.
Read more: Why one pro soccer team in Orange County has 1,463 shareholders
At a time when many public-facing companies are beating a hasty retreat from anything that smacks of woke culture, Bohemian decided to proudly and defiantly double down on causes from gay marriage and climate change to Palestine and Ireland’s harsh asylum policies. While that has met with some pushback — and has earned the team the nickname “We put any cause on a jersey FC” from some detractors — it might also have saved the 135-year-old club, one of the oldest in Ireland.
A dozen years ago Bohemian entered its worst stretch this century, one that saw it lose more games than it won while finishing in the bottom half of the league table three straight seasons and narrowly escaping relegation. The club’s finances were in worse shape.
“We were bankrupt,” Lambert said. “We had a part-time team; people earning 50 euros a week, 80 euros a week.”
For many games then, Dalymount Park, the team’s 100-plus-year-old stadium in Phibsborough, a diverse neighborhood less than two miles north of Dublin’s center, was two-thirds empty. By 2015, the club’s membership had dropped to 420.
The purpose of the club, an 11-time Irish champion, was to win but, Lambert said, it also had a responsibility to be a force for good. Bohemian was doing neither.
“That led to a bit of introspection, I suppose, in terms of what do we stand for as a football club? What are we about?” said Lambert, who joined the team’s board in 2011, at the start of its slump. “If you’re a club with an awful lot of money, you grow your fan base by winning a lot of trophies. If you don’t have that, what’s another way to appeal to people? The human, emotional level.
“If you engage somebody on a human, emotional level, you’re more likely to get a loyalty from them over a period of time.”
Lambert knows a little bit about marketing since he’s co-owner of Bang Bang Cafe, in the shadow of Dalymount Park — as well as host of an eclectic podcast that emanates from the cafe — and is the manager of the Irish Republican hip-hop band Kneecap. (The Irish Film and Television Academy chose a biopic about the group as its country’s Oscar submission.)
The plan he helped develop for saving Bohemian didn’t depend on the generosity of a deep-pocketed owner but was, like the team itself, a grassroots effort that began about a decade ago when the club began working with street artists and sold its own beer, christened an in-house poet and began doing community work.
“The strength of most football clubs is how wealthy the owner is. Our strength is how many people are a member, how many people are willing to come to a game,” Lambert said. “That’s our real strength.”
Next came the jersey campaign, although that got off to a rocky start in 2019 when the club placed an image of Jamaican singer Bob Marley on a shirt — and promptly received cease-and-desist letters from the late singer’s representatives. They later came to an agreement allowing Bohemian to re-issue the shirt.
“We kind of outlined to them what we’re about, that we’re a not-for-profit entity and I think they really liked that,” Lambert said. “They respected the history, respected who we were.”
A second shirt, released during the coronavirus pandemic, was white with thin red-and-black diagonal lines and the profile and a man, woman and child sandwiched between the words Refugees Welcome. The club’s crest is above the left breast and the understated logo of O’Neills, an Irish sportswear manufacturer and club sponsor, is on the right side.
With that shirt, meant to call attention to Ireland’s controversial “direct provision” system of housing migrants, gaining international news coverage, Bohemian has seen its merchandise sales increase more than 2,000% while average attendance last season was just 260 fans shy of the capacity of Dalymount Park, where the corner flags are rainbow-hued and a large red-and-black antiracism banner hovers above the supporters’ stand.
The club’s membership, which has grown 600% over the last decade, has been capped at 3,000 to ensure there is a seat at the stadium for all the owners. There is a long list of people waiting to join them.
Bohemian, which kicks off their nine-month-long league season on Feb. 16, has revealed the first of its three 2025 road jerseys. It will carry the logo of the Dublin-based punk band Fontaines D.C., which will open a 26-country tour next month. The home shirt, unveiled last fall, is a red-and-black-striped jersey with the emblem of a local furniture store across the chest.
“We exist in a small football market, but when it comes to values and our ownership model and our structure and our potential to derive new fan bases, to raise money and profile for causes and issues, we can be bigger than Man United,” Lambert said. “Clubs very often don’t take a position on anything. They like to be agnostic because they’re making money.”
Bohemian, on the other hand, makes money precisely because that’s not its main goal. Its aim is to make a difference.
“That enables us,” Lambert said, “to have sales that far outstrip our attendance. To become a part of the global football landscape, in a small way, on issues that aren’t directly related to the players on the pitch.”
⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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