The Board of Lincoln City Football Club is delighted to welcome three new members.
Richard Clarke and Jay Wright join as directors and Russell Clarke joins as a non-executive director.They bring extensive business experience and skills to the Boardroom and are looking forward to the challenge of pushing the Club to even greater heights on our return to the English Football League.
All three are keen to have an active involvement and have already started working on projects such as the new ticketing system.
Richard Clarke
Born in Lincoln, Richard qualified as an accountant in 1994 and, following a move to London, quickly went onto become a director in BPP Plc with responsibility for worldwide training and the opening of all new global subsidiaries.
In 2005 he then started his own accountancy tuition business (The Richard Clarke Academy), with branches in Britain, Western Europe and the Caribbean.
Following its success, Richard developed aCOWtancy.com - an online accountancy portal and grew it to over 30,000 subscribers in under two years. Today it’s the world’s leader in its field
Richard returned to Lincoln and as a strong believer in community and local projects he founded "Monks Road Records" which currently has acts ranging from The Blow Monkeys to members of
Squeeze, Oasis and Paul Weller bands.
Currently working on a new project which celebrates the work of artisans and craftsmen, due to be launched in 2017, he lives in Lincoln and Malta and has two daughters Amaya and Poppy.
Jay Wright
Jay has been a massive Lincoln City fan all his life and is currently the CEO and co-owner of Virgin Wines, the largest independent specialist online wine retailer in the UK.
Jay has spent all his working life in the drinks industry, initially with The Greenalls Group plc before leaving to set up his own mail order wine business in 2000. In 2008 Jay merged his business with Virgin Wines before leading a £16.9m management buy out of the company in 2013.
Jay brings a huge amount of energy, enthusiasm and passion to anything he does and he is honoured to have joined the Board of Directors and will do all he can to help the football club he loves build on the success it has enjoyed over the last season.
Interesting fact: Jay’s dad, Tony Wright, was captain of Lincoln City Boys in the 1950’s and went on to play a couple of reserve team games for the Club as a teenager.
Russell Clarke
Russell has a degree in economics and a business background in sports analytics (specialising in the football betting markets) and investment.
He ran a profitable advisory service for over 15 years and was a partner in Soccerbrain, which was a highly successful analytical software tool in the betting industry. He is currently a partner in www.acowtancy.com with his brother, Richard.
Russell attended school in Lincoln at Monks Road and Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School and saw his first Imps' match at Sincil Bank in 1971 (0-1 defeat by Notts County). A conservative estimate would be around 1,000 matches attended since.
He has lived in Spain and Dubai and is married to Gael, with two daughters, Georgina and Isobel.
