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Channel Islands football is a mystery to Chris Nee, and it will be to many of you too. The island of Guernsey has been in the non-league headlines lately, Guernsey FC having received approval in principle to join the English non-league pyramid. But this is no ordinary application; the club has been formed specifically for the purposes of bringing the Guernsey game to English shores, and it’s an enormous financial undertaking.

Football in the Channel Islands is, at grassroots level, much the same as anywhere else. But in terms of producing quality players who go on to become professionals, a lack of frequent competition at a high level is a significant hampering factor. Speaking in 2009, Jersey’s Brett Pitman (then of AFC Bournemouth) was the only Channel Islander in the Football League and blamed a lack of competition for the stunted production line of the Channel Islands game. “I was lucky to get sent away a few times,” said Pitman, now at Bristol City. “It’s hard because there is no real competitiveness. There’s a lot of good players over there but it is not easy to get noticed but when you come over to England to play for Jersey you’ve got to do well.”

With the annual Muratti matches between Guernsey, Jersey and Alderney providing the only competition that is meaningful in any sense, the Guernsey Football Association has set its sights far beyond success for the island’s representative football team. Guernsey FC, a name that finally means more than its previous use in denoting a long established mythical project, effectively became reality in March 2010, and the GFA is the driving force. Directors Steve Dewsnip and Mark Le Tissier are both officials of the FA, and the representative team’s coach, Tony Vance, will be the head coach when Guernsey FC finally take the field. The club president, incidentally, is Matt Le Tissier, brother of Mark and an honorary lifetime member of the GFA.

The rationale is a simple one, and has been welcomed by Pitman’s Guernsey counterparts. Earlier this month, Dewsnip told BBC Sport, “We’re trying to offer our better elite players on the island the chance to play at a better standard on a far more frequent basis than they’re used to. We think the way to do that is to be playing in a UK mainland league week-in week-out.” Ross Allen, one of the leading players in the Guernsey representative team, is fully behind the plan: “I have always been the biggest supporter of it. There are really talented footballers from Guernsey and it will be a chance for them to put themselves in the shop window.”

However one chooses to look at it, a successful Guernsey FC would be good for football on the island for two very basic reasons. First, a positive start to life for a high-profile new club brings with it supporters and, in turn, money that can be pumped back into the sport. That’s why the prominence of the GFA in this project is so crucial. Second, by generating prestige and a viable career path, Guernsey FC will (if all goes to plan) attract more youngsters to the game. As both Pitman and Allen suggested, there are undoubtedly good players in the Channel Islands, and Guernsey FC could be just what is needed to coax them, coach them, and then ship them into the English leagues.

If that explains the ‘why’, what on earth are the ‘where’ and the ‘how’? Having launched a rather beautiful new crest in March, Guernsey FC received clearance from the Football Association’s Leagues Committee to join the National League System, meaning that they are eligible to play in the English non-leagues. After a year of discussions internally on feasibility, with the business community about sponsorship, and with English leagues about a position, the pieces have begun to fall into place for Guernsey. The cornerstone is a likely place in the first division of the Combined Counties League (Step Six), which comprises teams from South West London, Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire. 30 out of the 40 teams in the Combined Counties League have indicated that they will vote in favour of accepting Guernsey when it comes to the crunch at the league’s annual general meeting on 24th June.

The recruitment of players will be even more unusual than Guernsey’s placing in an otherwise irrelevant division in the English system. Instead of simply hoovering up the island’s best talent and jetting off to the south of England every other week, Guernsey will commandeer players (Dewsnip expects the total number over a season to be in the region of 40 players) and allow them to continue to play for their local clubs in between. Some might interpret Guernsey as a Frankenstein club as a result, but it’s probably more accurate to think of it as a national team playing league football.

In fact, jetting off to the south of England posed perhaps the biggest question of Guernsey’s directors and it’s one that they’ve answered emphatically, at least for now. With the obvious requirement for the new club to fly to England every other week compounded by the huge increase in the travel costs that would be incurred by the rest of the league in travelling to Guernsey once a season, doubts were brushed aside with a solution as simple as simple can be: we’ll pay, said Guernsey.

A simple solution it may be, but it’s a solution that raises more questions than it answers. For one, for how long does the club intend to pay for opponents to fly to Guernsey in addition to the other way round, and how long can they even sustain that? Perhaps more importantly, what happens if the intention or the ability, for whatever reason, should expire? Guernsey’s opponents would presumably remain obliged to fulfil their fixtures at their own cost (one would hope this eventuality has been covered by the English FA, and that may indeed be the case). Although there is no apparent reason to be suspicious of the project in these early days, there also doesn’t appear to be much room for snag or error.

Like Notts County, Crawley Town and even the ‘New’ New York Cosmos after them, another question that will frequently be asked of Guernsey is the origin of the money. Again, there is no reason to be suspicious at this stage but by Guernsey FC’s own admission this is an extremely ballsy investment, which suggests that finances are not in short supply at Footes Lane. The reported investment on messageboards and elsewhere is a remarkable £750,000 a year, and the rumoured benefactor is Sportingbet (which has its corporate offices on the island), though I have found no confirmation of the veracity of this claim. Regardless of the sponsor’s identity, its motivation will require some explanation; it certainly isn’t immediately clear to me.

Reading between the lines, Guernsey’s ambitions simply must be to progress quickly through the divisions (Vance has already stated his desire to take Guernsey to a first promotion as soon as possible). Taking into consideration the enormous travel expense incurred in order both to fulfil their own away fixtures and to persuade the Combined Counties League clubs to vote in their favour, the people controlling the pursestrings at the club must be setting their sights high, possibly even as high as the Conference. After all, why take on this cost and make this level of investment just to stand still in an otherwise distant regional league?

There is likely to be a desire to make much of that early investment pay its way in terms of creating revenue, which should in turn help improvements on the playing side and in terms of infrastructure - again, it’s a mightily ambitious undertaking. Of course, the manner in which this club could take on some of the characteristics of a “national team” for the island means that there is the potential to pick up patriotic support -certainly the Muratti attendances have reached decent figures over the years. We can’t assume, though, that all of Guernsey’s football supporters will back the club regularly or at all, but the higher they go, the more support they’ll attract.

Ultimately, we just don’t know what will happen at Guernsey FC, where they’ll go, or even whether they’ll get off the ground. But if they do, it will be a fascinating case study that will remain unusual for a long time - for better or worse.

Tags: Guernsey FC