Documentary on £10 million National Lottery funding for National League clubs during Covid pandemic airs on YouTube

The 57-minute film, called Gate Money, presented by Fred Atkins and directed by Jasper Spanjaart, explores what went wrong after the National League ignored the government and used a formula which saw the biggest winners receive nearly ten times more money per fan than the biggest losers.

"It was a massive achievement to get the £10m in the first place”, says Fred Atkins, writer and presenter of Gate Money.

“Somebody, whoever it was, had done a very good job of bringing this grant in. They had all that goodwill and it just evaporated in the space of five days because the formula was inexplicable and they never made any attempt to explain it.”

The film includes interviews with clubs who lost out on huge sums of money like Chester, Dulwich Hamlet and Maidstone United. Atkins also speaks to clubs who actually benefitted from the distribution, like Dorking Wanderers and Tonbridge Angels, but whose chairmen could see the problems that lay ahead.

"It also includes interviews with independents: Kieran Maguire (The Price of Football), Tracey Crouch (MP & Former Minister of Sport) and Ollie Bayliss (BBC Three Counties & Non-League Show), plus David Bernstein, former chairman of the FA and Manchester City, whose independent inquiry into the matter, commissioned by the National League, was never published.

“We weren’t interested in doing a one-sided version of everything that happened, but we ran into a wall of silence whenever we tried to approach the National League for an interview”, said Jasper Spanjaart, director of Gate Money.

"Important community-driven clubs were backed into impossible financial situations. For seemingly no good reason at all. We really just wanted to get to the truth of the story.”

The documentary can be watched here.