Don’t write off Llantwit Major FC: The lower league club making a virtue of shithousing
Photo by Lewis Mitchell [lewismitchellphoto.photoshelter.com]
Megan Feringa
The smiley face emoji, the closed-mouth blushing one. If you hadn’t been looking for it – it being the usual raillery that has come to be synonymous with the small town JD Cymru South football club taking names and winning games far outside its historic remit –, then on Saturday afternoon as Llantwit Major FC officially secured top spot in the league table, you’d have likely missed it.
But there it was, that little prick of craic as Llantwit, for now, usurp Pontypridd after their promotion rivals shared the points with Swansea University.
It was hard not to share in the cheeky computerized smile.
Granted, this response was tame, particularly when up against the bon mot that ensued five days earlier when a pizza – six inches of personal pepperoni sliced four ways to be exact – sent a small corner of Twitter rollicking. There was the £3 price tag, the fact this pie sat plump on a ceramic plate (a plate that the owner, allegedly, was allowed to carry in given his season ticket holder status, obviously), and the larger fact that the Llantwit Major AFC admin was keeping no prisoners as he pinned Llantwit Major AFC: Better Pizza than West Brom 2022 atop a middling list of lukewarm footballing accolades on the club’s Wikipedia page without an iota of shame.
For those keeping tabs on the Vale of Glamorgan football club (if you haven’t, this is your hint to do so), this type of mirthful savagery is not unusual. In fact, this is very much the expected, if not highly anticipated, standard of practice from the on-the-up club’s twitter account and the person whose role it is to run it: part-time amateur football club, full-time neighborhood-friendly shit-housing hero.
“Llantwit is a small club. I’m a Llantwit fan, but you know that because it’s hard to be passionate about Llantwit Major AFC unless you’re a fan,” explains the mastermind behind the rejoinders and quips since mid 2019. He is speaking under the guarantee of anonymity from his home in Stockholm, Sweden.
For the sake of ease, we’ll refer to him as Llant.
Llant is an intelligent, immediately amenable human being. His voice is kind, his laugh mellow and his self-deprecation on point. This he owes to being bred in Llantwit, a place where the biggest day in its history arrived in the form of a Greggs five years ago. He works as a copywriter in Stockholm and has a designated ‘spotter’ to feed him match updates through Whatsapp when he cannot be at matches in person, which he then feeds onto Twitter (for those of you who have gone searching for the Llantwit tweeter and discovered only dead ends, this is why).
Absolutely nothing about Llant screams keyboard warrior. That is entirely the point.
No, Llantwit Major AFC have no business ripping Borussia Dortmund or Lee Trundle on Twitter (more on this later), and yet they are. And if you ask anyone who has peeked down towards Llantwit in the last 10 years, they might say the club have no business being situated at the top of the JD Cymru South table at the time of writing when just seven years ago they limped a few games away from total extinction.
“We were the worst team in Wales,” Llant says. “No one was coming to watch the games, no one was wanting to play for us, no one was turning up for training. We were getting battered in every match and it really looked like if this goes on, there won’t be a club much longer. The guys who were in charge were working really hard but if you have no committed supporters and no players, there is only so much you can do.”
And yet, here they are.
“The club has a lot of ambition to get into the Cymru Premier,” explains Llant, keeping his emotions appropriately tempered when motioned towards their current position in the table. “I don’t think we’ll do it this season but the aim is to do it within three years.
“But there were a lot of things that needed to be made more professional and our Twitter account before was just… it was just terrible.”
When considering the various steps a small club must take to become more professional, crafting a social media presence feels as new-age as ever. There are nostalgic footie fans frowning at the screen now, bemoaning the corrupted state of the beautiful game.
But social media has gained unprecedented clout, particularly as smaller clubs look to secure financial security and compete with richer rivals. Media banter operates as a particularly lethal weapon. Successful banter lends a hand in successful branding, which in turn lends a hand in everything.
The quickest way to capture this is to boil it down into a list of easily digestible numbers.
Before Llant’s arrival, home fixtures raked in 20-25 fans, though remove player’s family and the tally stood at a tepid five or six. The club’s Twitter enticed a mere 2.6k followers and was run by a player, meaning full-time score updates were regularly forgotten and heated affairs were finalised with 280-character tirades at the opposition.
After winning promotion from the fourth division to the third in 2018, Llantwit posted a celebration photo from the dressing room. The euphoria was visible. What was also visible were the spare parts of three players who had just left the showers.
“We got fined for that,” Llant said. “£200 I think.”
Professionalism was a distant ambition.
Two years later, Llantwit Major’s Twitter following has grown to 4.5k with heavy regular interaction. Home matches regularly see attendances of around 250 fans while the away scene boasts crowds breaking 100.
The on-pitch success obviously helps. In seven years, Llantwit have eclipsed a history of footballing slumming it with the help of manager Karl Lewis, whose devout focus to his tactics and trade has earned him the nickname the Bridgend Guardiola and his side an inspired new life.
But the on-pitch and off-pitch work in inextricable tandem.
This year, YesCymru’s Bridgend branch offered to sponsor the club after seeing a signing video that announced Owain Glyndwyr’s signing (the player’s grandfather and the Welsh hero share an uncanny resemblance). The extra cash flow has allowed for facility improvements (requisites for a promotion-pushing club) along with better signings and a first-ever custom kit featuring a psychedelic windmill (soon to come). The video camera that captured the small dog “pitch-invading” two weeks ago was offered on discount from a company who noticed a significant lack of video content.
“And that video did better than any goal update or signing video that we could have imagined,” says Llant. “It’s about noticing those small moments, knowing what people find funny and endearing to come and watch the club.”
Tom Walters of Llantwit Major in action.
Credit: Lewis Mitchell
The views garnered by Llant’s humorous signing videos have notably lured signings away from rival clubs. The club’s current top-scorer and star striker Tom Walters is tearing up the division with 20 league goals, causing envious eyes from larger clubs to turn. But Walters, like any true goalscorer, enjoys praise. Meaning “player hype-man” always falls into Llant’s extensive remit in a bid to keep top players for the season’s remainder whilst convincing other potential signees.
”If you look back at our tweets, you’ll notice that we tag Tom in a lot of stuff, a goat with a Llantwit shirt on it with the caption ‘Tom spotted around town’,” Llant says.
It risks sounding asinine: a tweet of a goat in a shirt can reap so many outcomes, as can auctioning off the stadium naming rights for just £20 in a bid for charity – and subsequently naming the ground Prince Moomin’s Palace after a player’s girlfriend’s dog.
But such is the weight of visibility.
“I wanted to do things differently,” says Llant, who agreed to rebuild the presence knowing full well no form of pay would be provided and hours would not operate within a 38-hour week (though they do give him a card for free admission for away games, such is the luxury of a lower league admin).
“We aren’t Swansea or Cardiff or Barry. We’re a small club, but a fun club. I wanted to not take things too seriously, make fun of the opposition a little bit, do something to put us on the map because people like you would never have known about our club if we didn’t do things like that.”
But in the jibs lies a calculated masterplan.
“It’s a strategy just to make people know we exist,” says Llant. “It’s that feeling of you can’t understand why no one else thinks they’re the best team in the world, because Llantwit are the best team in the world but obviously not many people see it that way. But to see other people captivated by it, and really get into the spirit of it is such a rewarding thing.”
For some, the stunts are a far cry from professionalism, and while the club has made a virtue of rival clubs not liking them, lines have been tested. Ammanford AFC fans, for example, did not take kindly to the video posted after Llantwit’s 3-1 victory over August, with the words “No money. No ex-pros. No hashtags. No problem” fading to black as ex-professional Lee Trundle laughs into the camera.
Llant conceded the video crossed a line.
But the line is murky, and that is the wilderness that clubs are having to navigate.
“We do have ambitions as a club,” Llant says. “We want to grow and be more professional, but we also don’t want to lose sight of what made us do well, which is those years when nobody cared. You have to make fun of yourself.”
That, says Llant, is the trick. Remembering that football, life-affirming football, sometimes needs a mirror check. As clubs struggle with outlandish lump sums and inane contract disputes, here is Llantwit Major, readily acknowledging that for a whopping £10, a spectator can get sloshed at the bar and watch a former basket case club sing a Cinderella story of sorts.
The stripped down, devil-may-care fodder is the social media equivalent to cracking open a beer and shedding the trousers for the night. There is no snazzy pretence. Rather, there is self-deprecation and, perhaps most importantly, a concerted return to fun. Remember, that? Llantwit sure do. This is a team that will be hosting their promotion rivals Pontypridd Town this Saturday in what Llant has dubbed the biggest game in the club’s history in a stadium called Prince Moomin’s Palace.
Some might call it shithousing, but there is something so purely football about that.
Credit: Lewis Mitchell