Over decades, London's oldest senior football ground fell into terrible disrepair.
Now with both the Old Spotted Dog Ground and the warehouse building next door finally under the ownership of Clapton Community FC, and the women's first team playing home games there, we have a new challenge...
Making sure the Dog is finally in a fit state to enable our men’s first team to play home games there - and to secure promotion.
Getting to this stage has already involved hundreds of hours of work by our volunteers and enormous financial investment.
Nevertheless, the men's first team has had to hire pitches all over East London this season while we have been working on getting the OSD up to scratch, including having to buy the warehouse building next door that contained changing rooms in a terrible state.
This is more than just making sure we have changing rooms – although this is our largest project.
Some floodlights need replacing (the cost of which has just jumped up), fencing that needs repairing, and numerous other safety improvements. We have very limited time – the FA needs to see our ground is up to standard by March 31.
The cost of living crisis means the funds that Clapton CFC and the Old Spotted Dog Ground Trust have set aside for further essential work are stretched extremely thinly.
That is why the Old Spotted Dog Ground Trust is launching an emergency appeal to raise £15,000 over the next month to help cover the costs.
It’s a big ask at a time when everyone is struggling financially. However, we want both our women’s and men’s first teams playing at the OSD and at the highest level they can next season.
Once all our teams are playing at our home in Forest Gate, it means we can start to properly build our presence in the surrounding community. It means we can offer the opportunities to local people that both the club's members and the Old Spotted Dog Ground Trust have talked about so often since the purchase of the ground in 2020.
That’s why we are asking for your urgent help to raise funds for the work needed to make this possible.

The financials
The changing rooms refurb will cost £51,000.
On top of that, we need to pay for a player's walkway from changing rooms to the pitch; repair the parts of the pitchside perimeter fencing; repair the back rows of the main stand; and improve the floodlights, among other tasks.
£26,066 of the funding for the project is coming from OSDGT reserves. We ran a previous fundraising appeal which contributed £25,077 to those reserves.
However, we had to commit £293,130 to buy the building where the changing rooms are housed, and construction and other related costs have grown dramatically.
A previous grant of up to £50,000 from the Premier League Stadium Fund for new changing rooms had to be withdrawn as we are now refurbishing existing changing rooms.
We have submitted a request for a different, smaller grant to help towards the remaining amount, which may or may not be successful. Even if successful, there is still a shortfall.