WEMBLEY FC

Football at a non-league level can bring a sense of community to the sport that is seemingly lost at the Premier League end. A club in a particular area, where the midfielder who takes the corner in the evening might live a matter of minutes from the fans sat on the terracing. Few clubs embody this local model better than Wembley FC, a side who play step 4 football in the Combined Counties League. But there is a unique twist here – Wembley FC are a group of fans turned players turned team, representing some of the most local football you could possibly find.Nicknamed ‘The Lions’, Wembley FC are a Sunday League team based at Vale Farm in Wembley. Their motto, A Posse Ad Esse – or ‘From Possibility to Reality’ – has never been more relevant in the digital age. For a team who play their matches on a Sunday, social media has provided them with a platform and presence that they never thought possible.The rise of social media has been extraordinary and its rapid growth in recent years continues. In 2024, there were 5.04 billion global users and this number is set to increase as average users now spend 143 minutes per day, on average, on social media. Non-league clubs with modest funds have been given a tool to reach fans without having to fork out. No longer do posters put up in newsagents count as promotional wizardry. Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook are all at clubs’ fingertips and free of charge. In a study by Machado et al. ( 2020) the three most popular platforms for fans to interact with clubs at all levels of football are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And there is no doubt social media has enabled clubs up and down the football league system to utilise community and fans identity to keep supporters entertained between matches.It’s increasingly important for clubs to portray their image through various channels online. Community-owned club Wembley FC is no exception to this. Their Instagram (@wembleeafc) has a massive following of over 3000, with his fans regularly engaging with club-based graphics, score updates, and behind-the-scenes photographs of activities at their training facility, Vale Farm. The club also has an active LinkedIn page. Club volunteer Olivia recently wrote this post on the club’s LinkedIn page after she helped manage the club’s social media accounts during an FA Cup and FA Vase away day. This kind of testimony demonstrates how important it is to engage with your audience, to be aware of who your fan base is, and to produce relevant content that appeals to them. Understanding these aspects of your club and fan base are key concepts in applying the STP (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) framework, frequently used by sports marketers to generate successful marketing strategies (Kotler and Keller, 2016).However, club followers are not passive recipients of content; rather fans are co-creators of the club’s brand image (Felix, Rauschnabel & Hinsch, 2019, p.4). This paper analyses the images fans published in the wake of Everton 3 Arsenal 2 (5 February 2017) on the official Everton Facebook page. It considers the extent to which Everton supporters actively engaged in constructing the club brand via sharing matchday images and club-centric posts in the supposedly ad-free, fan-centric space of social media. In a club with no TV football broadcast contract and just a relatively modest, almost exclusively UK based support, such a ‘bottom up’ community creation potentially could be the club’s most powerful marketing asset.And it’s not just big names and high-profile games that can create drama and pull the crowd. If a great story is told well, it has the potential to go viral – as shown by the Sidemen, a group of European footballers that packed out the Wembley Arena in March 2025 for a charity match that sold out in three hours, amassing over 14 million live viewers across their social media channels (Front Office Sports, 2025). While, at the time, the event featured some of the biggest names in European football, it was the community, the personality, and the content created by the Sidemen that harnessed the kind of media frenzy that lower-level clubs can only dream of. What could Wembley FC learn from this, with the only senior team playing in the shadow of the National Stadium? And so, all Wembley FC need is a great story told well. This is easier said than done, especially in a period of football when media coverage is given to the same select group time and time again, with regional media outlets often marginalised in the process. Wembley FC train at the very place where the England national team would have set up camp ahead of the 1966 World Cup, lift the trophy on home soil and return as champions. In their match-day vlogs, player features and fan testimonials, the Wembley FC team are taking us through the story of the club from its humble beginnings to its current development and growth serving the community it was created for. For a non-league club with virtually no budget, silence on social media is not an option, with research from data providers Opta (2024) suggesting that football fans have become insatiably hungry for content.
References:
Front Office Sports (2025) ‘Influencer Soccer Match Sells Out Wembley Stadium, Draws Over 14M Views’. Available at: https://frontofficesports.com [Accessed 26 March 2026].Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L. (2016) Marketing Management. 15th edn, Harlow: Pearson.Machado, F, Góis, M, Gama, M, Pereira, N, Carvalho, L and Castro, N (2020) Fan engagement in football clubs: the role of social media. Soccer & Society, 21 (6), pp. 657–669.McCarthy, J., Rowley, J. and Ashworth, C. (2022) ‘Social media marketing strategy in English football clubs’, Soccer & Society, vol. 23, no. 2. <https://www.tandfonline.com&gt; [online]. Always available.Muniz, A.M. and O’Guinn, T.C.Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2001, pp. 412–432.Opta / Stats Perform. Opta’s Ultimate Guide to Football Fan Engagement in 2025. Available at: https://www.footballbusinessinside.com [Accessed 26 March 2026].Statista (2024) Number of social media users worldwide from 2017 to 2027. Available at: https://www.statista.com [Accessed 26 March 2026].