The Canadian musician supersizing Dumbarton FC Women: ‘The players are a megaphone for the team’

Mario Lapointe became the unlikely owner of the Scottish club a year ago and his radical plans are taking shape at the Rock

“A lot of people ask me the same thing,” says a laughing Mario Lapointe, on how a Canadian songwriter and entrepreneur became owner of the Scottish lower league club Dumbarton 12 months ago. “When I was looking for a football club, this club kept calling me back – not literally.

“For example, I wrote a song in 1992 which had a lyric about sitting on the rock, and Dumbarton’s stadium is called the Rock. It’s also on the river and I wrote a lot of lyrics about rivers and ships, so it felt meant to be.”

Lapointe is at home in Quebec in a Dumbarton home shirt, but there was a deeper meaning behind a man, better known by his stage name Vintage, and who moved from music to engineering and back to music again, wanting to own a club he had no apparent physical connection with.

“Where it seemed to click for me was the club was about to go into liquidation,” he says. “Five years from now you’d have trees in the grounds and someone building houses on the land. The club had been going for 153 years and has tasted bad times because of bad people.

“I came in last summer, but discussions had started a few months earlier. The link between generations and the core values are important and in Scotland there’s a real passion for what the core values of Scotland are.”

He also has a plan to take the club forward, including its women’s team, which sits in the third-tier Scottish Women’s Football League Central-West, one of four regional divisions where the players are unpaid.

Lapointe, though, wants to ensure the women’s team get access to an equal split of what they bring into the club, with all games next season to be played at the Rock – which neighbours Dumbarton Castle and the River Clyde – for the first time “I looked at different sports and clubs … but we know what happens, as soon as something goes wrong it’s the women’s budget that gets cut.”

Dumbarton’s men’s side finished ninth of 10 in Scottish League Two this season after being deducted five points for entering administration prior to Lapointe’s takeover. “I had to find a different model. In my case, we are a League Two club, the players are not being paid right now, they rarely even have anything to cover their own expenses. My model is very simple. It’s not profit sharing, in football there is no such real thing as that, the wording is wrong; it’s revenue sharing, attributing 50% directly from gate sales and season ticket sales to the women’s team, not anywhere else.

“We’re going to the stadium for the first time so we can push the sponsors a little bit more to help cover travel etc, but we use it almost like all the players became a megaphone for the team. They have a hand in it now, if they can bring people in it helps them, it makes them money.”

During his year-long ownership, there are things he would like to have done differently, but is aware “nobody is going to change anything just for me”. But he believesthe game is missing out when it comes to attracting a core audience to games every weekend.

“The thing that doesn’t play well for me is games being played on a Sunday – it should be a Friday night. I’ve been doing one year of meetings and when I open my schedule nobody ever books Sunday because Sunday is family day, spending time with your wife and kids, going for a picnic. Now we’ll ask them to come to watch our women’s team on a Sunday. That is a change which will be hard, but I’d like to get more games on a Friday night. It’s like having a new product to push and putting it out the back of the store and not in the front window.”

While his background is in music, Lapointe is aware of the pros and cons of elite sport living in Canada, where the women’s team became Olympic champions in 2021. Other sports, particularly winter sports, have seen the country compete at the elite level and he believes there are elements from the North American culture he can apply to Dumbarton’s women’s team.

“Canada, at one point, was top five in women’s football. They didn’t go backwards, the other countries got better,” he says. ”Over here in North America, women’s football developed so much because of the NCAA. When I see that angle, I see the universities we have in Glasgow, how do we bring those students, both local and international, into our programme?”

On long-term aims, it is not just about reaching the top division, but creating a more professional environment. “If I finish one day in a position where our athletes are being paid, that’s a win for me, because there is no sport without athletes.

“I don’t think I should say in three years we want to be in the SWPL [Scottish Women’s Premier League]. We give them the environment and then it’s how we measure winning for us. For me, it’s giving them salaries, increasing the talent pool and only then starting to think about the teams and leagues above us.”

Get in touch

If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email moving.goalposts@theguardian.com.

• This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.