“It’s real privilege being a chairman but it’s bloody hard work” - Brighouse Town chairman James Howard on living his dream

James Howard runs a very successful Brighouse business, Yorkshire Payments, which works with some of Yorkshire’s best-known companies and handles half a billion pounds a year in card transactions.

So what on earth possessed him to become chairman of a football club?

Howard, 35, moved to Yorkshire in 2011 and lives in Shelf.

He is chairman of Brighouse Town, who play in the Northern Premier League North West Division, at step eight of the English football pyramid.

“I’m the youngest chairman in the country, from the Premier League down to our level,” he says proudly.

“It’s every boy’s dream really isn’t it, to run a football club or play football.

“I wasn’t as privileged as some of our players, I played Sunday League at best.

“I was in goal because I was usually the last person to be picked!

“But at school and as a teenager, I was always involved in football, whether it was organising teams or understanding the game from an operational or commercial point of view.

“And within my day job, I’ve been exposed to professional football. We’re quite close with Bradford City, Halifax Town, Huddersfield Town and I’ve been privileged to see what it’s like behind the scenes, what goes on, why they wash their kit on site, things like that.

“I suppose I’ve been a bit like a sponge in understanding how the game works.

“An opportunity came up to sponsor Brighouse a number of years ago and, I suppose like any entrepreneur, I was on the touchline thinking ‘we could do this better, we could do that better’.

“And then Charlie, who was the chairman at the time, who runs a very successful business in Calderdale, Andy Thornton’s, turned round to me one day and said ‘do you want to put your money where your mouth is?’ and come and join the board.

“I did and was involved as a board member for about 18 months and then he asked me to take over the club. So I did a deal January/February time in 2019 and it was officially ratified by the FA on July 1 last year.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey but equally frustrating, like any business.

“I think the key to it really is having the ability to not think with your heart, not get too attached to players or let people influence your decisions.

“You might have a favourite player but they might not be the best individual for that position, and it’s having the nous not to interfere with that.

“I made a rule from day one that I wouldn’t interfere with the team, with player recruitment or picking the side.

“I know lots of chairman who are quite heavily involved with picking the side at half past two on a Saturday afternoon, even at a professional level.

“I’ve seen it first hand at Football League level where chairmen have gone in and told the manager who to start, who to pick and who to sign.

“And I thought ‘if I’m going to do that I might as well manage the team myself, what’s the point in having a manager?’

“The priority for me is about winning games and getting results, but that’s only 50 per cent of the full picture.

“The other 50 per cent for us is growing the brand, growing the reputation, growing the fanbase, creating a really good online presence and retail offering, but more importantly, attracting fans, Halifax Town, Huddersfield Town or Bradford City fans who can’t watch the professional game because of the current situation.

“The feedback we get every single game from fans is ‘it’s alright down here, I can have a pint for three quid, a burger for two fifty, I can get in for under a tenner and I’ve still got change’.

“They’re getting more for their money and a real matchday experience, and that’s rubbing off on sponsors now.

“Did I, ten years ago, think I’m going to get involved with Brighouse Town? Absolutely not. Did I have any ambitions to do that? Probably not, that were realistic, but opportunities come round once in a while that you really have to think about.

“I’ve got clients who are professional sports clubs up and down the north of England, and it does help with Brighouse Town because it forms relationships.

“Clubs like Doncaster Rovers, Lincoln City and Harrogate Town, because they’re clients of mine, we’ve already got friendships in place.

“We just got a lad called Will Shepherd on loan from Salford City, that’s down to the profile of the club raising with the media work we’re doing and obviously Gary Neville’s a fan of ours anyway, he looks out for our result on a Saturday.”

Howard says he has tried to change how things are done at the club from top to bottom.

“When I first took over I thought ‘I’m going to commit a few evenings a week and my Saturday to the football’ but it’s a bit of a 50-50 split.

“I’m quite fortunate to have a very good senior management team at Yorkshire Payments who can run the business.

“But I’m not a conventional nine to five man anyway, I’m up at six am every morning on emails and phone calls until I get into the office at about half past eight, there until about six, go home, back on emails and spreadsheets, or I’ll put myself in the club for an afternoon.

“I am hands on in both businesses and I think you have to be. If you’re not then businesses suffer.

“I was the Trustee of a homeless charity in Leeds before I took over the football club, I’d been there for about three years, and I knew something would have to give if I was going to take on the club so with a heavy heart, I had to resign as a Trustee, in order to do things and follow them through.

“Just simple things like we didn’t have a landline number for the club, it was the secretary’s mobile number, we didn’t have an email domain, little things that start to create an element of professionalism.

“We didn’t really have a retail offering or do season tickets, we’d never received a transfer fee for a player. All these things were on my list.

“If we’re going to attract Salford City or Harrogate Town, we had to change our offering to the outside world.

“We want kids coming through the door and be fans for the rest of their lives.

“There tends to be a bit of a stigma in non-league with regards to the fan bases being the older generation, and that’s fantastic that we have fans full stop, but we need to look to the future.

“We’ve now built a youth section from under 6 to under 18’s, we’ve got over 200 kids in our youth programme.

“We’re developing relationships with schools. Calderdale schools have their finals at the ground now.

“For a long time we’ve been dubbed as Calderdale’s second team, or the second team in the Huddersfield postcode.

“We are smaller than Huddersfield Town or Halifax Town on paper but the ambition is to compete with the likes of Halifax Town. I really don’t see why we can’t.

“That’s the aspiration for the club, to grow us. We’ve got a lot of chimney pots around us in Brighouse, we’re in the middle of Leeds, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Halifax and Bradford, five really big areas we can try to capitalise on, to attract fans and sponsors.

“I’m not saying within three season we’re going to get consecutive promotions and we’ll be playing Halifax Town in the same league, but I certainly think within the next decade, realistically, we can be playing National League football.

“And, you never know, maybe one day do a Harrogate Town.

“If you don’t have those dreams and ambitions, then what’s the point in running a club?

“Lots of people will voice their opinion ‘well, we need to be realistic, this is Brighouse’ and I get that, but what’s the point in me being chairman of a non-league club if we don’t have ambitions to be promoted?

Howards is keen for Brighouse to try and step out of the shadows of their neighbours.

“I’m an ambitious individual anyway and I’ve always been a bit of an underdog in everything I’ve done. It’s about proving people wrong,” he said.

“We want to compete side-by-side with Halifax Town and be the go-to team in Calderdale.

“Halifax have a lot stronger following and the history’s there, and they’ve got some beautiful facilities that we don’t have, but we feel we genuinely can compete with them.

“But equally, we don’t want to be in the pockets of one club. We’ve relied on a fixture from Halifax Town for many years in a pre-season friendly, and we’ve been beholden to them in terms of dates and management changes.

“And I felt that we need to not rely on this moving forward, we need to not put ourselves in the pocket of Halifax Town. Yes we’ve got a great relationship with them but the football world is bigger than Calderdale, and with my connections through my day job, we’ve started to form relationships with other clubs, even Manchester United, who we’ve got a goalkeeper on loan from.

“It’s been a really incredible journey but the priority for me and the club was to find and build those relationships with professional clubs, and we are doing, every single day.

“I think you’ve got to be a little bit cheeky as a football chairman and if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

“Players who have played for us over the last 12 months are now playing professional football, like Luke Rawson at Chesterfield, we had him on loan last season, Finn Cousin-Dawson at Bradford City was centre-half for us last season, Rarmani Edmonds-Green was with us when we won the play-offs in 2019, he’s now the poster boy for Huddersfield Town, Tim Akinola, an incredible story, we had him on loan from Huddersfield and he’s been snapped up by Arsenal.

“The biggest one we’re very proud of is Aaron Martin who now plays for Harrogate Town. Jake Lawlor, a centre-back at Harrogate, used to play for us.

“Reece Kendall went to Matlock Town and was the first player we received a transfer fee for in the history of the club. Bearing in mind the club’s been going since 1963.

“That’s incredible and it really shows what we’re trying to achieve.”

Howard is originally from Wolverhampton the West Midlands and grew up supporting his hometown club.

“People say ‘you’ve only bought Brighouse because they wear similar colours to Wolves!’

“I suppose it was the next best thing.

“I used to sneak into Molineux as a kid and get kicked out by stewards because we couldn’t afford season tickets. I come from quite a poor background.

“Football has followed me since I was knee high in terms of being a huge fan. I’ll watch any game, German football, Women’s Super League, Czech Republic v Hungary, it doesn’t bother me.

“When I moved up here I never really had the time to go back to Molineux to watch my team.

“I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Bradford City and I’ve been really fortunate to get to know the chairmen there, and at Huddersfield and Halifax.

“It is a real privilege and honour being a chairman, but it’s bloody hard work.”

Howard says he has learned to be diplomatic as a chairman.

“I knew it would be hard, I’ve always been an underdog and had to scratch and claw to get things done,” he said.

“The thing I was slightly naive about was the amount of opinions you get.

“Probably similar to myself before I took over the club, everybody’s a football expert, everybody knows the game inside out and will tell you quite happily how to run the club, probably like I did with Charlie and the board.

“That’s where you have to learn to bite your tongue, whether it’s good or bad.

“It’s nice to receive compliments but you do get a lot of grief, not just on matchday but out and about in the town as well.

“People will come up to you and force their opinion on you, ‘why did so and so get dropped on Saturday?’ or ‘why didn’t you sign that player?’.

“Parents can be just as bad if they think their kids will be the next Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo but we’re not starting them.

“You need to be very professional and not really engage in those types of conversations.

“If I’d taken over ten years ago, maybe I’d have had a scarecrow made of me chucked on the bonfire because I’d have been a bit more loose-lipped.

“But learning to manage your emotions is quite important.”

Howard values and respects what has gone before at Brighouse, but has his sights on some big ambitions for the club.

“We’re desperate to get out of the league we’re in, I think we’re better than this league,” he said.

“I will say that, of course I’m going to be biased in my opinions. It’s going to be tough but we’re determined to get to where we need to get.

“I got told when I took over as chairman from Charlie that ‘since you took over we’ve lost our promotion, we’ve had a four-point deduction, we were kicked out of the FA Trophy and now you’ve got the season null and voided’ and I said ‘yeah, it’s not a bad start is it?’ and I walked off.

“So it’s interesting. Yes, we’ll lose revenue in November but we’ve got the club into a position of being in the black for the first time in a very long time.

“We’ve done that by working with suppliers, looking at what we spend and how we can improve our income levels, putting proper till systems in the clubhouse rather than things being written down on the back of a fag packet.

“That’s not doing anyone down who was involved with the club previously, the club has been run by some fantastic people.

“Charlie Tolley, Chris Lister, Ray McLoughlin, Dave Parker, Dave Rowland, Andy Eccles - some great people who are all volunteers.

“We do rely on volunteers because we can’t afford to pay everybody. It’s not a full-time business.

“The majority of our income comes on matchdays.

“Some of those people have played for the club and they all think with their heart, but my job is to think with my head and try to treat it as a business so the club has a future.

“It’s a balance because there are times when you can’t help your emotions, when we miss an open goal or we concede a poor goal, but that’s the football fan that comes out in you.

“But at the end of the 90 minutes, it’s business again, and it’s ‘how was the gate?’, ‘what have we got to do tomorrow?’, ‘the pitch needs reseeding’.

“There’s no football this month but we don’t want to be standing still, we can’t because not only do we get itchy feet but there is stuff that needs to be done.

“The toilet might need painting, there’s some tiling needs to be finished in the kitchen, or a potential sponsor who expressed an interest needs calling back.

“There’s a lot of work that goes in away from matchdays. Originally I was only going to put two hours a week aside but it’s more like 40 or 50.

“But I do it because I love it. Do I make any money out of it? No I don’t. Does it cost me money? Yeah, of course.

“I put a significant investment in last year and with the way things are going I’ll most likely have to do an amount this year as well for the club to be sustainable.

“But I do it because I love it, not because I’m going to get a return out of it.

“Anybody who thinks they’re going to buy a football club to make any money out of it are absolutely off their rocker.

“I’m sure David Bosomworth at Halifax Town, Phil Hodgkinsopn at Huddersfield Town or Julian Rhodes at Bradford City would say the same.

“Chairmen do not do this to make any money out of the club, you do it for the passion, you do it for the love of an interest.

“But keeping a conservative business head on you as well. It’s a balance and a skill, and I don’t think many people can do that.

“If you bring in the wrong person as a chairman who’s very corporate, that’s probably not the right individual, but if you bring in somebody who is always thinking with their heart and is very emotional, again, that’s not the right person.

“It’s finding that balance where you have passion and enthusiasm, but before and after the game, it’s back to business, ‘right, what have we taken behind the bar?’, ‘right, that and that needs sorting’.

“I don’t want to be putting in hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to keep a football club afloat. I’ll do it if I have to but with Brighouse, it’s about getting it to the point where it’s sustainable and the money that comes in outweighs the money that goes out.

“I genuinely believe we can get to that position, but a lot of that is about cost-control and making the right decisions from a business point of view rather than ‘oh look, there’s a player available and he’ll cost £500 a week’.

“That’s just not sustainable for us. There are clubs at our level that will pay that sort of money, but it’s about that balance and not putting the club in a position where we’re stretching ourselves and all of a sudden you think ‘I’m up the creek without a paddle here’.

“It’s about having the right individuals at the club who have the future in mind and are looking at the club long-term, not short-term.

“We want people in the club who value what we do and see us as like a Harrogate Town, who don’t pay the best money in the world but have gone on an incredible journey.

“I really don’t see why we can’t replicate that model.”