The collapse of Electric City Football Club

Shortly after the final whistle blew to end Electric City Football Club’s home opener in May 2022, fireworks exploded over Fleming Stadium. As the cracks and pops faded from the night sky, fans and players mingled on the pitch to celebrate the ECFC men’s team’s 3-1 win.

The game’s attendance broke league records, with a reported 1,565 intrigued community members, fresh football converts and seasoned soccer fans in the stands.

From my vantage point among the team’s official supporters’ group, it felt like something very special had started in Peterborough that night. Players and fans felt the same way.

“Nothing ever touched that first game,” remembered Jenn Jones, an active member of the supporters’ group.

“It was pure happiness,” said ECFC forward Connor Wilson, who played in the game.

But the hype, hope, and excitement wouldn’t last. Within months, the enterprise began to fray as well-loved team leaders abruptly departed, ownership expressed financial worries, and the team’s community owners — locals who had invested early — were sidelined, leaving majority owner Gregory Couch to take control of a diminished project for the next year and a half.

And then it was over. In a press release issued on January 9, 2024, League One Ontario announced that ECFC had sold its license to play in the league to Pickering Football Club.

“That’s it. ECFC is dead,” team fan Dave Barney wrote in a supporters’ group chat. “We built a community over three years,” he later elaborated. “And it vapourizes with no fanfare.”

“Something greater than ourselves”

The dream of bringing a professional football club to Peterborough was the brainchild of Keaton Robbins, whose vision and hard work are praised by almost everyone involved in ECFC’s early days. (Robbins ended his involvement with the club before the first season started, and he turned down Currents’ interview requests.)

Before the team was formally announced, Robbins and PTBOCanada.com founder Neil Morton assembled about a dozen community members who were to invest early and be called community owners of the club. Morton told Currents those early days figuring things out were “goosebumps moments.”

“The whole plan, the project was beautiful,” said Alvaro de la Guardia, who was named as one of the community owners. “Keaton did an excellent job. He really knew what he was doing.”

The community owners made relatively small investments, and Gregory Couch, a local businessman, was brought on as majority owner to make up the rest of the investment. 

Speaking to Currents after ECFC’s demise, Couch said the “biggest mistake would be to call me a footy guy.” He said his main interest in owning ECFC was to help build the local sports community. 

ECFC recruited Rob Jenkins to serve as the team’s first president. Jenkins had launched football clubs before, including one in the Canadian Premier League (CPL), the top level of professional soccer in Canada and the circuit that ECFC aspired to join.

Jenkins visited Peterborough and was struck by the community’s enthusiasm. “People wanted to support the town. They wanted something to rally around,” he said, speaking to Currents ahead of the first season. “So many closet football supporters that you’d never have imagined. So I got to thinking this had the potential to be CPL.”

ECFC would start in a semi-pro provincial league one rung below the CPL. But Jenkins’ goal was to achieve CPL status within three years, and he got to work bringing in talent to make it happen.

Jamie Sherwood, who Jenkins recruited from the UK, began the first season as head coach of the men’s team, while Randy Ribeiro headed up the women’s team. Sherwood shared Jenkins’ belief that ECFC was “bigger than football.”

“We were doing it for something greater than ourselves,” Sherwood said. “We were doing it for the city.”  

Players at the beginning of their professional careers like forward Holly O’Neill and seasoned pros like centre-forward Jordan Antonio Brown and goalkeeper Quillan Roberts each saw something different in ECFC that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. 

“The project was super cool as there wasn’t that much for women in Canada,” O’Neill said. For O’Neill, it was significant that ECFC would be a semi-professional team with a clear path to professionalization as soon as a pro women’s football league was established in Canada.

“I thought it was a bit ambitious but I was happy to gamble,” she said.

Roberts said ECFC “felt like a CPL club” from the very beginning. “We created a crazy bond I’d never experienced before in football.”

Both sides played good football in their opening games, with the men going toe-to-toe with the previous season’s league winners, Guelph United FC, to secure a 0-0 draw away from home. 

Like the men, ECFC’s women also broke the league’s attendance record in their home opener, a 4-1 victory over Blue Devils FC.

For ECFC fans who had already pledged their allegiance and volunteered hours for the club before a ball had been kicked, it was a dream come to life.

“It was incredible,” said Alen Andrijevic, a member of the official supporters’ group. “I’d only just moved to Peterborough and to find this so soon? I felt at home.”

To players and fans alike, ECFC was living up to the hype in the early weeks of the 2022 season.

But then the resignations started. (Or the sackings, depending on who you ask.)

“Everyone thought about quitting”

Jamie Sherwood said he knew something was up as soon as he got a text from Jenkins asking him to come into the club offices for a meeting at 8 a.m. on May 17, 2022, just weeks after the season started. 

After that meeting with Jenkins and Couch, Sherwood was no longer an ECFC coach. Sherwood said he agreed to leave by mutual consent. The Peterborough Examiner first reported the departure as a parting of ways, but in subsequent coverage, the paper referred to Sherwood being fired. 

“It broke my heart,” Sherwood said. “It definitely scarred me.”

ECFC players — men and women, both — were upset. 

“It was shitty,” said Roberts. “We didn’t know where it was coming from.”

“We were sad and very confused about why they had to let him go so quickly,” said O’Neill. “He really understood how women’s teams operate.”

Jenkins told Currents shortly after Sherwood’s departure that there had been a mismatch between the style of play the club expected and what Sherwood was implementing. No single issue was to blame, he said, but the club wanted to act quickly before Sherwood’s family moved out to join him. Many on the outside saw it differently.

“I think we all loved Jamie,” said Jeremy Corke, founder of the ECFC supporters’ trust. “But we’ve seen a history of the owner not getting out of the way and letting people do their job.”

The club announced Randy Ribeiro as interim men’s coach in addition to his duties coaching the women’s side. He would later be appointed head coach of both sides, a role he held until he was fired a few months before the club ceased operations. Ribeiro was well-liked among the ECFC community, but he had never coached at that level before.

“I give credit to Randy because he did a better job than he should have done [under the circumstances],” Brown said. “Knowing what I know, he will be a good coach. But it always seemed unfair to give one of the biggest franchises in the league’s history to a guy who has never coached before.”

Sherwood’s departure and his replacement by an unseasoned coach were upsetting to players. But the next departure felt like an existential threat.

In July 2022, the Examiner reported that Jenkins had resigned as club president. Later, sources from within the club reportedly said he was fired. Currents sought comment from Jenkins but he declined interview requests and did not comment on the circumstances of his departure.  

“I was devastated,” said Brown. “A coach can be fixed short term, but sacking the guy who made it all happen, the reason it came together? His departure was never going to be good for anyone.”

Brown said “everyone thought about” quitting after Jenkins’ exit. “But we wanted to finish what we started,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been fair to Randy, the supporters and others at the club.”

Sherwood and Jenkins were the kind of people you “hold onto and cherish,” said Roberts. “Jamie and Rob were the types of people you wanted to play for.”

The team kept playing without them. But there was little belief in the goal of achieving CPL status anymore. The excitement that characterized the first two months of the season — what forward Connor Wilson called the “promise” of ECFC — was gone. 

“After Rob left, there was always this lingering dark cloud where you were expecting the next bad thing to happen,” Wilson said.

“Used up several years of runway”

The departures of Sherwood and Jenkins came as a shock to many involved with the team and some struggled to understand why they left. For many, their departures showed how quickly the ECFC project had changed.

Couch told Currents that he discovered midway through the first season that the team’s budget had been overspent by a “factor of two,” and that this had increased to a “factor of three” by the end of the season. “That pretty much used up several years of runway,” he said.

“The original commitment that I was putting in was about $200,000 cash and then other contributions,” Couch said. He didn’t disclose specific details about the budget, but said he had put in more than $1 million by the end of the first season. 

But one source with knowledge of the club’s finances disputed that the team was overspending. Having signed a non-disclosure agreement with the club, the source spoke on the condition of anonymity, but Currents has verified their identity. The source said that the club’s cash flows were “lower than anticipated” due to some delayed revenues, but that overall the club was “on target with the budget.”

Regardless of how healthy the club’s finances actually were, players and community owners said they started hearing about Couch’s budget worries.

According to Roberts, Couch started trying to find savings. “After Rob left, things changed,” he said. “Greg and Randy had conversations with both teams about, ‘How can we cut back? How can we scale back? Can we stop taking buses to games? Can we cut the catering service?’”

“It was almost amateur again,” said Wilson.

Couch complained to players that his family was unhappy they might not be able to vacation as normal because the club was losing so much money, Roberts recalled.

After Jenkins’ departure, Couch met with the community owners to explain the club’s financial situation. 

“You know, I just thought, ‘Why did you spend so much money?’” said Kyle McDonald, a community owner who was at that meeting.

“I had to ask if I was still a community owner. I was told no.”

When ECFC was unveiled in Peterborough, Jenkins referred to it as “a club for the community, by the community, and with the community.”

Among those introduced as community owners of the club in August 2021 were Neil Morton, Paul Bennett, Beth McClelland, Jon Gillan, Burton Lee, Kyle McDonald, and Alvaro de la Guardia.

According to Gillan, the community owners committed to investing some combination of money and services into the club. For McDonald, that meant contributing sweat equity by creating the club’s iconic logo and branding, which could be seen on merchandise worn by fans downtown all through the summer of 2022.

Couch said the initial vision was for community owners to collectively contribute $50,000.

Gillan said there was never a clear articulation of how the club’s ownership would be structured. “We had a memorandum of understanding that we signed before the first season,” Gillan said. “We knew that Greg would be the primary owner, and as part of the memorandum, our money was going to be held in trust.”

According to Gillan, community owners were told the memorandum had been sent to Toronto sports lawyers to formalize. Every time they checked in about its status, they were told it was coming, but it never materialized, he said.

A Selwyn-based business called Electric City Football Club Ltd. was incorporated in June 2021, according to the Ontario Business Registry. And according to Couch, he is that entity’s only shareholder, and always has been.

When asked by Currents why Couch set himself up as the sole shareholder of the corporation, Couch said he didn’t know the community owners had given investment cheques to Jenkins to be held in trust until he “discovered” the financial issues midway through the first season in 2022.

In the fallout from Jenkins’ departure, community owners soon began to realize they didn’t own any stake in the club.

After leaving as club president in July 2022, Jenkins gave community owners their investments back, according to de la Guardia. It was then, de la Guardia said, that he realized he wasn’t an owner of the club.

“All of us ownership group were essentially let go,” McDonald said.

“There was just no clear path to continue contributing,” Gillan said. “I had to ask in March 2023 if I was still a community owner, and I was told no.”

“There will be a future”

Both ECFC teams played on in 2023 and ended their second seasons reasonably well. They both missed out on the playoffs, but finished high enough in the rankings to ensure qualification for the top division of League One Ontario’s revamped, tiered structure for 2024. 

But a club that began life with a bang ended with a whimper. Couch complained about low matchday attendance figures while fans, for their part, expressed frustration at what they saw as a lack of outreach and marketing. Those attending games every week weren’t sure what the club was doing to attract new supporters. 

“So much work was done to get it started and so little was done to keep it going,” said Andrijevic, a fan of the team. ”How badly we wanted to get butts in seats, it is like we wanted it more than the club.”

Many of the people Currents spoke with said the demise of ECFC had seemed likely ever since the departure of Jenkins. But when news of the end finally came in January 2024, it still produced a sense of shock.

“I was shocked. I was pissed off,” said McDonald, a community owner. “I feel let down…It feels like we didn’t even give it a proper try.” 

Couch said he informed the league the club wasn’t viable in the fall of 2023. He declined to say how much he sold the league license for.

Without its license, ECFC can no longer play in the league. According to Couch, the ECFC corporation will be dissolved. 

But Couch appears to remain committed to Electric City Sports as a brand. Hybrid Sports, the fitness and sports complex Couch owns in Selwyn, has rebranded as Electric City Sports, and Ontario’s business registry reveals that Hybrid Sports Inc. has been renamed Electric City Sports Inc.

The website for Electric City Sports appears to bear the same golden yellow as was used in ECFC branding. And, for a time, the football club’s logo was also used on the site. A screenshot captured by Global News in a January report on the complex’s temporary shuttering shows the company using the ECFC logo.

That didn’t sit right with McDonald, who designed the logo. McDonald said he told Couch to pull down the ECFC branding from the site. The logo has been removed from the home page.

But whatever the future holds for the ECFC brand and Couch’s corporations, there is a strong belief that football at this level will return to Peterborough.

“There will be a future,” said ECFC supporters’ group organizer Dave Barney, echoing a sentiment almost everyone who spoke with Currents shared.

Jeremy Corke said they’ll show up to cheer for any local team that takes ECFC’s place, regardless of whether they win or lose. “If there was a ‘Peterborough Losers,’ we’d be there,” they said.