At the seventy-minute mark in their third round FA cup clash with Exeter, Premier League high-flyers Nottingham Forest brought multi-million-pound signings Elliot Anderson and Morgan Gibbs-White on from the bench. It was a sign that Nuno Espritio Santo’s side had underestimated the Grecians, as the game sat on a knife-edge with the score level at 2-2.
The match, which Forest unfortunately eventually won on penalties, sold out, and was broadcasted on ITV1.
Yet despite the loss, Jon Beer, Exeter City fan and co-host of the You Don’t Know What You’re Doing Podcast, is chipper in his assessment of the game and the show Exeter were able to put on, telling me that “more importantly than anything, it showed everyone what the club is like and how special Exeter is as a football club, that’s all you can really ask for from a game like that, people were talking about Exeter and that’s never really a bad thing.”
Speaking to me a week after the game took place, Beer, now living in Manchester, watched the game in a pub with his family, but believes “even watching it on the telly you got the sense something special was happening, even when we were down to ten men in extra time there were points that we were still the team attacking.”
“It showed everyone what the club is like and how special Exeter is as a football club”
Back in 2021, comedian and actor David Earl moved down to Devon. Wanting to get into supporting a local football team, he put it to twitter to decide between Exeter City, Torquay United and Plymouth Argyle as to who he should go and watch. Exeter came out on top, and the My New Football Club podcast was born, detailing his forays into following the Grecians.
It became clear however that David didn’t have any source of knowledge on the club. Enter, Jon. Having just been on the trust board at Exeter, Beer had recently moved to Manchester to start studying sports broadcasting when David tweeted out asking for other Exeter supporters. “It was just potluck of David tweeting out does anyone know anyone who’d be good for this and a number of people replying with me,” he told me.
Jon was an instant hit, and David kept asking him to come back. “We got on really well for two people that are quite different in age,” Jon says of the relationship between him and Earl. “I think that the dynamic gives people an avenue to listen to, as you get this quite funny dynamic where David is seen as the goofy one and I’m seen as the boring sensible one, even if often in real life it’s the opposite.”
The podcast bloomed and from its success emerged its current form: the You Don’t Know What You’re Doing podcast, hosted by Jon and David, alongside former Jaackmate’s Happy Hour host Alfie Indra. The trio brand the podcast as one that ‘always forgets to talk about football,’ and Beer recognises the pod’s value outside of just Exeter Fans: “It started off as an Exeter Pod, but even when it was My New Football Club it never really felt like the football was that important.”
Jon’s role on the podcast doesn’t just represent the young Exeter fan, but the young football fan in general. “There’s always that pullback in the form of how Exeter are doing, but it’s also partly about my life and growing up, because I think content in my eyes should always be relatable, and I think people can resonate with being a 20–21-year-old maybe moving away from home, going out all the time and doing all these different things with your mates.”
Like myself and many football fans, being away from home hasn’t dampened Jon’s love for his club, and he remains optimistic for the Grecians’ final third of the season. When the conversation pivoted back to the topic of football, he wished that “hopefully this is the turn; we’ve been quite lucky the past few years in League One to have a turn, obviously last season we went a hundred days without a win which really split the fanbase, and Gary [Caldwell] did quite well to get everyone back on side.”
Unfortunately, this season has seen a similar turn in fortunes with Exeter going nine games without a win in the run-up to the Forest clash.
They were also dealt quite a bad hand in the January transfer window, as key players Triston Crama, Kamari Doyle and Amani Richards all had their loan spells at St James Park cut short. To make matters worse, in the final days of the month, striker Millenic Alli, scorer of ten goals this season, was sold to Luton, who sit bottom of the Championship.
Yet with replacements already in, Jon thinks it will go down as a satisfactory window, admitting “it’s so tough to keep hold of your players in January, so I think it was a pretty solid January overall, we’ve just done what we needed.’
“We probably weren’t expecting Alli to go, but we were prepared in that if any striker went we’d be able to replace him with [Andrew] Oluwabori.”
Manager Gary Caldwell was on record as saying he doesn’t ‘love the January window,’ and Beer is keen to dismiss the notion that the month’s outgoings were a result of bad preparation. “I wouldn’t say it’s bad planning, and not necessarily the nature of lower league football either but more the nature of Exeter, we don’t have the push or the pull of some of the other clubs.”
“I think a lot of football fans are quite naïve, in the sense that they see teams around us and think that we have similar budgets.” He raises a good point. Exeter have only the 17th largest payroll in the league, and the nature of the club remaining fan-owned means they can’t splash the cash in the way some teams around them in the bottom half of the table can, never mind the top half.
Jon remains ever the optimist in how he views the relationship between manager and on field-performance too. With only one win since boxing day, the Exeter fanbase is divided again, but Beer is somewhat level-headed, believing “sometimes it’s not necessarily about being pro-Gary but being pro-team, regardless of who’s in charge.’
“Make all the noise in January when you can bring players in, but digging players out outside the windows is just not beneficial”
He was also keen to take a stand against the modern footballing phenomenon of calling for a change at a club on social media: “make all the noise in January when you can bring players in, but digging players out outside the windows is just not beneficial.”
Sitting in 18th in League One, Exeter have 15 more games to ensure their survival for the third consecutive year since their promotion from League Two in 2022, a stark contrast from the playoff position Beer told me they would be occupying had they had a fully fit squad from the get-go this season.
Since the FA Cup loss, they’ve won one game and lost one.
In the coming months, the televised game may not benefit the club in the way that previous hosting’s of Premier League opposition did off the field, like the 2005 televised FA Cup replay with Manchester United, which helped wipe out the clubs debts. But, fans will be hoping pushing one of the most in-form teams in the top division to penalties could have a huge impact on the pitch and help them avoid a relegation battle.
“More importantly than anything it restored a sense of pride,” Beer believes, “and restored a sense of faith in the players, and showed that they are good enough.”
Jon Beer can be found on X at @jonbeera, and the You Don’t Know What You’re Doing Podcast can be found on Spotify.
