Folkestone Invicta Promotion: Chairman Josh Healey on Club Growth and Next Season

Promotion has brought excitement back to Cheriton Road, but the bigger test starts now. In this interview, Folkestone Invicta’s chairman Josh Healey (pictured left) reflects on rebuilding the club, growing the crowd, improving the ground and trying to make sure ambition doesn’t tip into recklessness.

Promotion is the headline, but it isn’t really the whole story. The more interesting part is what sits underneath it: a club that believes it has rebuilt its structure, widened its support, improved its facilities and started to feel more rooted in the town again. The challenge now is whether it can carry that momentum into the next level without making the kind of mistakes that leave clubs chasing dreams one season and counting the damage the next.

Promotion is the headline, but what do you think it says about Folkestone Invicta as a club, on the pitch, off it and behind the scenes?

I think it shows that we’re ambitious. When I came into the club three years ago, there weren’t many people left here and, if I’m honest, the club had stagnated a bit. I think people can now see that we’re serious and that we want to take the club as high as possible.

This season you’ve seen bigger crowds, more younger supporters coming through, stronger links with the academy and youth set-up, and a better social media presence. And when you’re winning, naturally more people want to come through the gates.

A lot of supporters only see the matches. How important have the people behind the scenes been in making this promotion happen?

Massive. On the football side, a lot of credit has to go to Jay Saunders and his management team. They’ve done a brilliant job on the pitch.

But it’s much wider than that. You’ve got the ground staff, Mary-Ellen and her team dealing with security and the gates, Charlie Wilson running most of the site and helping oversee the 3G bookings and other operations, Anthony and Holly doing media and communications, and then the sponsors as well. Whether they take one board or several, they’re all part of the same project. Promotion doesn’t happen without all of that.

When did you start to think promotion was a genuine possibility rather than just a hope?

I’d say when we beat Maidstone in the FA Cup at the end of September 2025. They were playing a level above us and we were still not fully back at home because the pitch works were ongoing. Beating them away made me think we could definitely be in the play-offs.

I still didn’t think we’d go on that winning run and win the league with games to spare, though. That was some achievement.

Supporters see the goals, the points and the league table. What don’t they see about the work it takes to get a club promoted?

They don’t always see the structure behind it. When I first got involved, the club didn’t really have one. There was only one remaining director, Bob Dix, and one person of that age can’t realistically run a Step 3 football club on their own.

So first you have to put a proper structure in place. Then you have to invest in things that supporters might not immediately want to see money spent on. A good example is this Dugout Bar. Some fans saw money going in there and wondered why it wasn’t going straight into the first team. But the reason was simple: we wanted the club operating seven days a week, not just on matchdays. If you want long-term stability, you need revenue streams and you need the club to be part of the community every day, not just on Saturdays.

At our first fans’ forum in August 2023, I asked supporters where they wanted the club to go. They said National League South. I said, right, let’s try and do it. In three years, we’ve done exactly that.

Every promotion brings excitement, but it also brings pressure. What are the biggest challenges now as the club steps up?

Sustainability is the big one. We’ve got a very good group of players and I’d hope the nucleus stays together, but naturally you always add to it. At the same time, you can’t run before you can walk.

For me, a good next season would mean consolidating well, having a decent FA Cup or FA Trophy run, and finishing comfortably mid-table. That would be a strong season.

Then there’s the ground. There are improvements that need to be made around covered seating, toilets, accessibility and disabled areas. We’re discussing that with the council now, because if we’re going to invest more, we need either a longer lease or the ability to buy so that investment makes sense.

How do you balance ambition with realism? How do you keep climbing without gambling the club’s long-term stability?

You have to be realistic about where you are. We’ve effectively got a catchment area cut in half by the sea, and the local population is smaller than some other areas. So you have to be honest about what crowds you can draw regularly.

For the very big games, like Dover, you might get 3,000. But week in, week out, if we can get 1,500 to 1,800, that would be strong. If we improve the ground and the infrastructure, that helps us move closer to that.

I often look at Bromley as a model. They were in National League South about 11 years ago and now they’ve reached League One. That didn’t happen by just throwing money at players. It came from hard work, the right people, and improving the club’s infrastructure.

We’d like this stadium to be used outside matchdays as well. That could mean facilities for children, gym or recovery spaces, maybe even rehabilitation partnerships. Those things make a club stronger. But I’m not under any illusion — going even higher gets much harder because the budgets go up quickly.

What has this promotion meant for the town itself? And how important is it that the club feels rooted in Folkestone rather than just based here?

It means a lot. A couple of supporters said to me over Easter that this is what they’ve wanted for years. Some of them have supported the club for 40 or 50 years and had never seen a season like this.

There was a promotion about 10 years ago, and that was a great achievement, but I think many supporters knew that without fresh investment and new ideas there was a ceiling. What we’ve tried to bring is a vision to take it further.

It also matters because football at the top level has become very expensive. Here, families can come along locally, pay a reasonable price, sometimes get the younger ones in free, use the facilities, and feel part of something. That brings a community together.

Clubs often say the fans are everything. In practical terms, how have supporters helped make this happen?

Through the gates, for one thing. When I came in, crowds were around 500 or 600. Our last home game was 2,600. That’s a huge help, because any surplus revenue goes back into trying to make the football side stronger.

But it also doesn’t mean we should be silly with it. You look at other clubs that have gone too hard, too fast and ended up falling away badly. We’re custodians of this club. What I’d like to leave behind is something stable and lasting for whoever takes it on next.

What kind of club do you want Folkestone Invicta to be known as over the next few years, not just in terms of results, but in character and reputation?

One of the nicest things we hear when we go away is how respectful our fans are. We’ve had no real trouble on the road in the three years I’ve been here. Our supporters are loyal, polite, friendly and supportive.

When we won the league at St Albans, their stewards and directors came up and thanked me for how well our fans had behaved all day. That meant a lot. So yes, results matter, but character matters as well.

For people only really paying attention now because of the success, what would you want them to understand about where the club has come from and what it stands for?

I’d want them to understand that Folkestone hasn’t really been on the football map for a long time. Loyal supporters know that. Dover have had the edge for years, and Margate to a degree too.

But things are changing. The improved facilities have helped. Before, if I’m being blunt, I wouldn’t have wanted to come here for food or drink. Now it’s a far more welcoming place for families, for children, for people who maybe wouldn’t have come before.

We also want feedback. Around the ground there are QR codes people can use to tell us where we need to improve, whether it’s catering, stadium issues or behaviour problems. We won’t get everything right, so we have to listen. That’s why we hold several fan forums every year as well.

The women’s game is growing rapidly. How is the club developing that side?

Last season, 2024-25, we set up our first senior women’s team. There had been girls’ teams at youth level, but no senior side. Someone who’d done a lot of good work in youth football locally came to Charlie and me and asked if we could make it happen, and we said yes.

They won their league in their first season, which was a brilliant achievement. This season they’ve consolidated at the next level up. With the new youth programme and trials, we hope that side of the club will keep growing, because more girls and women are coming into football all the time.

Once the celebrations settle down and attention turns to next season, what would success look like for you and for the club?

Success would be a solid mid-table finish and a decent cup run. We’re going to learn a lot next season. The travelling changes completely. Depending on how the league shapes up, you could be looking at overnight trips to places like Truro, Weston-super-Mare and maybe Torquay. That brings extra costs and extra planning.

So for me, success is about consolidating properly and showing we belong at that level.

What’s the question nobody has asked you yet about this promotion, but should have?

Probably: why did I get involved in the first place? People thank me for what we’ve done over the last few years, but not many people ask why I chose to do it.

So why did you?

I played for the youth set-up here years ago. Football was always my game, even though at school in Canterbury we played rugby rather than football. Then I broke my femur, which ended any serious football ambitions, and I got into golf instead.

But football always stayed with me. My mum was born and bred in Folkestone, and I wanted to do something local, to give something back both to football and to the town. I’ve got a young family too, and I’d love to see them involved around the club as they grow up.

It’s a passion. I like winning. Football gives you that. And if I’m honest, I’ve probably taken on more than I expected, but I care about it.

Football is increasingly shaped by data and analysis as well as instinct and experience. How is Folkestone Invicta thinking about using data to improve the team next season?

That’s more one for the manager than for me, but I do think there has to be a balance. At Premier League and Championship level, you’ve got analysts for everything. At our level, most players still have second jobs, and you only get limited training time.

So I think the basics matter most. You don’t want to overload players with data when the game itself can still be simple at heart. But we do use analysis already. We’ve got Wyscout for opposition analysis, every game is recorded, we have tracking equipment that measures player output, and scouts who combine video work with watching matches in person. There’s also a detailed opposition report produced for the management team.

One area I’d like to push further is nutrition. If better understanding of what suits a player’s body can give you one or two per cent extra, that matters. If you outrun and outwork a team, you’ve got a much better chance of winning.

Finally, one thing visible in the numbers is that a few players have carried a lot of the goalscoring burden. How do you spread that more widely next season?

Again, that’s mainly for Jay Saunders and the management team, but I understand the point. Strikers are there to score goals, that’s their job, but ideally you also want more goals from other areas — number 10s, number 8s, set pieces, corners and free-kicks.

When Jay came in, apart from a few players already under contract, it was basically a brand new team. You won’t get every decision right, but he clearly got enough right to win the league. Now the challenge is to improve again.

At National League South level, it becomes more technical and more tactical. Recruitment will be key. We’ll need more technical players and probably more variety in how we create and score goals. Personally, I’d also like to see us get more from corners and certain set-piece situations.

Promotion has given Folkestone Invicta a lift, but the most revealing part of this conversation is that nobody at the club seems to think the hard bit is over. The tone is ambitious, but cautious. In football, that usually isn’t a bad mix. Supporters have heard big talk before. What they’ll want now is proof that this latest rise can be turned into something sturdier than a good season and a few sunny afternoons. If Folkestone Invicta can manage that, then promotion may end up looking less like a high point and more like the start of something bigger.

The Shepway Vox Team

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