The smell of sizzling burgers drifts across the Memorial Ground as the sun dips behind the rooftops of Farnham. A thousand fans pack the touchline, pint glasses in hand, children waving flags in red and white. The new Pepperami Stand hums with energy, its corrugated roof amplifying every chant and every thud of the ball. Behind the bar, laughter spills over the music as queues snake toward a new bank of food outlets, smoke rising in the cool evening air.
This isn’t a Football League stadium, though it feels like one. It’s a non-league Saturday done differently, part football, part festival, all community. And at the centre of it stands Harry Hugo, the 29-year-old owner who has turned Farnham Town into one of English football’s most fascinating stories.
Building Step Three Before You Arrive
When Harry took over, Farnham Town were a Step 5 side struggling to balance ambition with reality. Fast forward 18 months, and they’re in Step 3 of the non-league pyramid, a seismic leap by any measure. But what sets them apart isn’t just the results. It’s how they’ve planned every promotion before it happened.
“The hardest part,” Harry says, “is planning for success you can’t yet guarantee.”
That mindset, anticipating growth rather than reacting to it, has seen Farnham transform their humble ground into a blueprint for semi-professional football. Capacity has jumped to nearly 2,000. Turnstiles have multiplied to ease bottlenecks. Dressing rooms were knocked through and rebuilt to meet grading rules. Even the referee’s room was resized to satisfy the fine print of Step 3 regulations.
“Fans don’t think about whether the changing rooms are five square metres bigger,” Harry laughs. “They just see the football. But every small thing takes money, planning, and time.”
Now, as a new 700-capacity covered terrace rises on the hill behind the goal, Farnham’s ground feels alive with purpose, the sort of attention to detail you’d expect from a League Two outfit, not a club that once drew 200 people on a good day.
The Matchday Machine
For most clubs, matchdays are about survival: make enough to pay the bills, keep the volunteers happy, and hope the result helps the mood. Farnham Town flipped that logic. They engineered their Saturdays like an experience economy.
“When we had 250 fans, we nailed it,” says Harry. “Good food, cold pints, short queues, a safe place to bring your family. We figured out what a great matchday looked like, then scaled it.”
Scaled it is an understatement. Today, four bars and four food outlets circle the ground. Turnstiles are doubled, staff tripled. It’s still the same formula, just amplified. “The trick,” he adds, “is not to reinvent the experience, but to protect it as the numbers grow.”
Even halftime, once a lull of dead air, has become entertainment. Farnham now run a Crossbar Challenge with real stakes. A fan is picked from the crowd, gets three chances to hit the bar from different distances, and could win anything from club-shop merch to £100 cash or, if they hit it from halfway, a free drink for everyone in the ground.
“It’s like the basketball half-court shot,” says Harry. “Imagine the roar if someone hits it. That’s a viral moment right there.”
It’s football, but it’s also show business, a nod to how fans now consume sport both live and on their phones.
Why Free Tickets Make Money
Most non-league clubs raise ticket prices to chase revenue. Farnham gave theirs away and made more money.
“We wanted to fill the bucket, not just squeeze the same people harder,” Harry explains.
By focusing on families and 8–15-year-olds, the club built for the future. They handed out thousands of free family tickets to local schools and youth teams, tracking where each one came from. Even as gate receipts from those tickets dropped, average spend per head went up by a pound.
“The worst-case scenario,” he shrugs, “is they don’t come. The best case is they come, buy food, have a drink, and come back three or four times a season. That’s growth.”
It’s simple maths, executed brilliantly. A kid who gets in free still needs chips and a Coke. Mum and Dad still want a pint. Multiply that by hundreds of families and suddenly the free strategy becomes a business model.
Beyond the 90 Minutes
Ask any regular what’s different about Farnham, and they’ll probably mention the food. The club’s Mystery Kitchen started as a social-media stunt, a way to get featured on Footy Scran. It became a sensation, so much so that Harry had to upgrade to a full shipping-container kitchen capable of serving 200 covers a game.
“Food and drink is the business,” he says. “People think it’s about tickets. It’s not. Getting people in is step one. Getting them to spend is step two.”
And spend they do. Last season, the club averaged about £11.50 per fan. This year, Harry’s chasing £14, a target he calls “punchy, but possible.” Every pound per head adds thousands to the club’s revenue, helping to fund better facilities and stronger squads.
The new Pepperami Stand, a sponsorship masterstroke, now anchors the far end of the ground, bringing colour, acoustics, and national visibility. When away fans roll into town, Harry calls it “the circus arriving.” Farnham regularly deliver other clubs their biggest home gates of the season.
“People love stories,” he smiles. “And we are one.”
Money and Meaning
Two years ago, Farnham brought in about £50,000 in sponsorship, a healthy figure for Step 5. Last season, that doubled. This year, they’ve already smashed £200,000.
“People laughed when I set that target,” says Harry. “We obliterated it.”
Big names like Pepperami and Howden Insurance now back the club, drawn by both its community presence and its sleek digital storytelling. Farnham’s affluent Surrey base helps, but Harry’s background in marketing and tech has been just as crucial.
He sees sponsorship not as logos on shirts but as partnerships in purpose, and the next chapter of that purpose is the women’s team.
In just a year, Farnham’s women won promotion and reached the FA Cup First Round Proper. “It’s realistic,” Harry says, “that one day they could host Manchester United Women here.”
It sounds wild, but he means it. Reaching the fourth round would make it possible. “It’s never going to happen with the men,” he says. “But with the women? It could. And that’s the dream.”
Screens, Streams and Superfans
Scroll through TikTok and you’ll find Farnham everywhere, a slick mix of match clips, behind-the-scenes stories, and community moments. With 125,000 followers and millions of views, they’ve become one of the UK’s most-watched non-league clubs online, ranking 41st overall for football engagement.
“We’re not a TikTok club,” Harry insists. “We’re a 120-year-old club that’s finally found its community.”
The connection goes far beyond hashtags. In one of the club’s most touching stories, a 10-year-old boy from Ireland, obsessed with Farnham through YouTube, wrote asking for a signed shirt. Instead, Harry and the team flew him and his dad over for a match. By chance, it was the day they lifted the league trophy.
“He knew every player, every result,” Harry says. “Seeing his face when he met them all, that’s what it’s about.”
That moment, like so many of Farnham’s, was shared online, but it wasn’t for clicks. It was proof of what non-league football can still mean: real connection between people who might never have met otherwise.
The People Behind the Project
For all the talk of numbers, budgets, and brands, Harry is quick to deflect credit. “I get all the praise,” he admits, “but this pitch doesn’t look like this without a team of people who graft every day.”
From bar staff to turnstile operators, volunteers to groundworkers, Farnham Town thrives on local passion. “Ra behind the bar has changed our business,” he says. “She’s friendly, she’s smart, she’s basically our pub landlord.”
He believes non-league clubs everywhere underestimate the talent sitting right in their stands. “You’ve probably got a retired accountant watching every week who’d love to help,” he says. “You just haven’t asked.”
The Moneyball Mindset
Farnham now operate like a modern football enterprise. They categorise budgets into four tiers: relegation, lower-middle, upper-middle, and playoff level. After back-to-back promotions, they upgraded to a Tier 1, a playoff budget.
That ambition is backed by smart recruitment. The club has begun paying transfer fees, a milestone Harry once thought was a decade away. Players like Brandon Mason, Bobby-Joe Taylor, and young talents such as Owen Dean reflect a moneyball approach: calculated investment, high potential, resale value.
“We spend money well, not loads of money,” he says. “There’s a big difference.”
Even so, he’s realistic. “If we get promoted again this year, great. If not, we consolidate. But we’ll always be a club that plays to win, on and off the pitch.”
The Blueprint for Non-League’s Future
As the final whistle blows and fans stream toward the bars, the Memorial Ground feels more like a festival than a football ground. Kids chase players for selfies. The smell of food lingers in the air. A local band sets up for the post-match set.
Harry surveys it all, the stands, the noise, the laughter, and grins. “Paths,” he says, pointing at the newly paved walkway outside the clubhouse. “It’s boring, right? But it’s what makes the whole place work. That’s what people don’t see.”
That might be the perfect metaphor for Farnham Town: success built one quiet, sensible decision at a time, until suddenly everything looks extraordinary.
In a landscape where non-league football often survives by habit, Farnham are thriving by design, building something that feels modern, human, and inevitable.
For Harry Hugo, the mission isn’t just to win games. It’s to prove that a community club, run with heart and intelligence, can become a national story.
And on nights like this, with the lights glowing over the Pepperami Stand and the crowd still singing long after full-time, it’s hard to argue he hasn’t already succeeded.
