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How American believers rebuilt an English soccer underdog

Published: Aug 14, 2025, 9:00 p.m. MDT

The voice of law and order echoes across 21,000-seat Turf Moor stadium. Unaided by any sort of loudspeaker or microphone, a constable barks instructions to a battalion of cops — at least 100 strong, dressed in reflective yellow — about crowd control.

Around him, sprinklers spritz the immaculate grass. It’s all rather calm, even serene, but make no mistake: The police battalion is here for a reason. Fans recently stormed the field after a big win. Rumors suggest they will again.

Now the players begin to arrive for the day’s contest, the final game of the campaign in the second-tier English Championship League. Professional British soccer is broken down into four tiers, with every team trying to claw toward the top level: The English Premier League — the most valuable, most competitive association in the world’s most popular sport.

The players, every one of them eager to prove they belong at the top, hustle toward the locker room at Turf Moor, home of Burnley Football Club, the heart and soul of this town of under 80,000, a halfhour north of Manchester.

Once inside, they’ll no doubt hear the voice of British R&B star Natasha Bedingfield whose classic anthem of possibility, “Unwritten,” has become an unlikely soundtrack to their season. Meanwhile, as they meet with trainers and study game plans, their boss waits for them outside.

Alan Pace is Burnley F.C.’s compact, gray-bearded chairman and the lead investor at ALK Capital, a group that became majority owner of Burnley Football Club in 2020. He shakes hands with the players, this American who once helped build Real Salt Lake into something respectable.

Now he’s here, millions invested, twice a casualty of the ruthless, multimillion-dollar culling known in European soccer as “relegation,” which demotes the worst-performing teams to lower, much less lucrative divisions. That’s how Burnley ended up in the Championship league rather than its rightful place (its fans argue) in the Premier League. But today is not a day to dwell on the past.

Already the Clarets, as Burnley is known, have secured promotion back to the Premier League. Yet today, May 3, 2025, they still have a title to play for. A league to win. Today could spell the beginnings of validation for Pace and his co-owners’ belief that provincial Burnley can be competitive in the world’s most respected soccer league, jousting against behemoths backed by billionaires and sovereign wealth funds, all without sacrificing its soul.

The idea, in other words, of sports as ideal, rather than as business alone. Although, as Pace will tell you, it is still a business. And to live up to its ideals, it needs to run like one.

That attitude hasn’t always made him friends in Burnley. When some earlier decisions backfired, supporters threatened his life, right to his face. But today, when his name is announced alongside the players’ as they trot onto the pitch to face Millwall in the crammed finale of the 2024-25 season, the crowd roars. Pace smiles, savoring this suspended moment of possibility.

Tomorrow, he knows these same fans could sound very different. He knows they could turn when the realities of competing in the Premier League demand a different level of faith. But today — today they believe.

The beating heart of an old mill town

Russell Ball has believed during the worst of times. In August 2024, after the team had been relegated and forced to sell off many of its best players, Ball, the team’s director of fan experience, posted on X urging Burnley fans to “have some faith.” He tagged Pace and defended his leadership, imploring viewers to “calm down” and “let the process take its course.” His post was viewed over 163,000 times, with 180 replies, most of them negative, many of them nasty. He’s hardly posted since.

But lately, he’s noticed some folks looking back at his remark with new, vindicating eyes. “It’s about the longevity of your promises and making sure they come true,” he tells me, leaning on a Formica desk in colorful running shoes, a polo shirt tucked into blue jeans. He often contemplates that sacred covenant between town and team that transcends the cold arithmetic of business ledgers.

The club sprouted from a mill town where textile barons cast long shadows over rows of “two up, two downs” — modest 800-square-foot homes that somehow accommodated mill workers and their sprawling families. These laborers found salvation in the beautiful game, first competing against fellow workers before challenging neighboring mills. Their fiercest foe emerged from nearby Blackburn, birthing a rivalry that Ball notes is “bred into generations” to this day.

When these players gathered momentum, they lobbied to professionalize their passion. The club, founded in 1882, stands among the dozen original members of the world’s first organized professional soccer league. Burnley F.C. has called Turf Moor home since 1883, an unbroken lineage that explains why Ball insists the football club remains “absolutely intrinsic in a community like this.”

Ball himself isn’t Burnley born-and-bred. His journey to the club came through Pace, a church connection — they’re both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — that represents one thread in a tapestry of faith throughout the organization. The region’s Latter-day Saint lineage stretches to the late 1830s when American missionaries baptized several thousand converts, some eventually trekking to Utah. Many modern Utahns, as a result, can trace their roots to this corner of England.

That history echoes through today’s club leadership. Fellow ALK investor and co-owner Stuart Hunt, a BYU grad and former resident of Park City who moved to Burnley full time in 2023, got to know Pace when they were both bishops at neighboring wards in Connecticut. Board member Dave Checketts, who previously helmed Madison Square Garden and Real Salt Lake, is also a Latter-day Saint, as is Lola Ogunbote, a Nigerian who directs Burnley’s women’s program.

These connections never manifest in matchday rituals, but they do create an invisible connective tissue that stakeholders believe makes Burnley unique. And they want to share that with the world.

The club’s global aspirations produced “Mission to Burnley,” a documentary series on Peacock that acknowledges the owners’ church affiliations from the get-go. It may lack the celebrity wattage of “Welcome to Wrexham,” an FX docuseries starring Ryan Reynolds and Rob “Mac” McElhenney that similarly follows their journey to revitalize a small-town English soccer team, or the mainstream appeal of the Apple TV smash-hit “Ted Lasso,” starring Jason Sudeikis as an American football coach who invigorates a fictional English soccer club, with mantras about belief. But the doc showcases Burnley’s unique character — in terms of history, faith and football.

That formula tends to be a winner in the U.S., but at Turf Moor, calibrating Burnley’s local appeal with the interests of the wider world remains a work in progress.

Team leaders once debated relocating TV cameras that faced the stadium’s less impressive stand, Ball explains, only to discover broadcasters treasured those shots featuring bygone mill smokestacks in the background. Meanwhile, partnerships with “Visit Detroit,” whose leaders see a certain kinship in formerly industrial Burnley, as well as NFL star-turned-minority owner J.J. Watt and his wife, Utah native and former professional soccer player Kealia Watt, have injected American influence that some traditionalists grumble about — until the results quiet their protests. For now.

A most American chairman

Alan Pace lives just minutes away from Turf Moor. That was always important to him when pursuing a Premier League club. He wanted to build something, and to build properly, he believes you have to be present. Especially when he knew almost nothing about Burnley when he became chairman, even though in some ways, his connection to the area predates his birth.

Pace’s father served a Latter-day Saint mission in northwest England in the early 1960s. Pace himself served a mission in Venezuela, which led him to graduate school in Barcelona in the early 1990s. There, he played semi-professional American football, becoming a return specialist despite his modest stature. “I’m one of those people,” he explains, “who loves to dream.”

When they weren’t playing, he and his teammates supported the biggest team in town: F.C. Barcelona, the behemoth of global soccer that has been home to all-time greats like Lionel Messi, Ronaldinho and Neymar. Pace’s very first professional soccer match was watching Barça take on archrival and fellow behemoth Real Madrid in El Clásico. After something like that, he says, it’s pretty hard to say you’re not a fan.

When he finished his studies, Pace moved to London on his father’s advice. He spent a decade there becoming a Chelsea F.C. fan before relocating to New York to work with the financial services firm Lehman Brothers.

His trajectory changed when Checketts — a sports business veteran who had also led the Utah Jazz and New York Knicks — hired him in 2006 as interim CEO of Major League Soccer’s struggling Real Salt Lake. “You cannot underestimate this guy. He has an iron will,” Checketts says of Pace. “He doesn’t always come across that way because he speaks soft and almost like he doesn’t care, but he cares deeply.”

Alan Pace believes in many things. Some of which have led to unparalleled success — and some that have unleashed death threats and failure.

Within two years, Pace led Real Salt Lake to an MLS Cup before returning to banking in New York. But the dream of team ownership had taken root. After a failed attempt to purchase Sheffield United, Pace and his partners kept searching until Christmas Eve 2019, when he secured a verbal agreement to buy Burnley. The deal was finalized in 2020, and Pace began implementing what he calls the “Burnley Way.”

This philosophy, though difficult to precisely define, centers on community and family. “That doesn’t mean that you can’t go somewhere else and get better skills, better pay or feel more loved,” Pace clarifies. “But doing that all together is the Burnley Way, where you feel something special about being here.”

That might sound like tired sports rhetoric, but those around the club cite concrete examples: Pace volunteering to babysit players’ kids or feed their dogs, or showing up unannounced at general manager Matt Williams’ home after his wife gave birth. Williams has also seen Pace and his co-owners applying American business principles to the club, with improved efficiency and data-driven goals.

“Sometimes they have weird and wonderful ideas that we have to tell them, ‘We can’t do that. It’s not the Super Bowl,” Williams notes. But their attention to detail and ambition to prove that a small-market team can compete with Premier League giants is contagious.

“What I believe is that we can have an impact in the world’s largest sport, in the world’s best league,” Pace says, “and show that it can be communal, investable and successful.” Indeed, he believes in many things. Some of which have led to unparalleled success — and some that have unleashed death threats and failure.

Death threats and doubt

Back at Turf Moor, the visitors from Millwall quiet the hometown fans with a goal 11 minutes in.

To win the Championship league, Burnley needs to beat Millwall and have Leeds United lose or tie with lowly Plymouth Argyle. With so much needing to go right, an early deficit unleashes a sustained silence — except for the section packed with Millwall faithful, who scream and wave their arms like a pot of boiling spaghetti. Those fans are surrounded by security guards, as is custom. Fans here take these games seriously.

Sometimes too much so, Pace has learned.

When he arrived, Burnley was in the middle of an unprecedented run: Five straight seasons in the Premier League. Fifteen months in, Pace decided change was needed regardless. He fired longtime head coach Sean Dyche — a man so beloved in Burnley that a local pub, bearing his likeness in regal dress, is called “The Royal Dyche.”

It was a controversial move, especially with just eight games remaining in the season. The outcome came down to the final match of the year. Burnley lost, at home, and was relegated just 17 months into Pace’s leadership.

Pace had heard stories about passions spilling over into harassment and worse. He’d read about the Manchester United executive whose home had been targeted by the flares of enraged fans just down the road. Similarly, a deranged fan recently put the CEO of Everton in a headlock. But Pace didn’t expect to experience it so directly, so viscerally, as he did one afternoon in May 2022.

Pace’s seats at Turf Moor are not secluded. He sits among the fans. After the loss that condemned the Clarets to relegation, at least four of those fans approached. Alongside curse words, they told him to “go back where you came from.” To “go die.” Security had to intervene to escort Pace out.

In the weeks that followed, fans would walk by and spew similar bile. “It’s very easy, even now looking back, to minimize that,” he says. “It wasn’t hollow threats.” They were credible enough, at least, for team security and local police to recommend he disappear for a while. For his family to need personal bodyguards. For him to wonder whether he could safely visit the grocery store. He doubted the need for these precautions. “But all these people around me,” he adds, “said, ‘We don’t have a choice to find out whether you’re wrong.’”

To get the team back on track, Pace made a splashy hire in June 2022 to replace Dyche: Vincent Kompany, a young Belgian who’d starred at global superpower Manchester City. Kompany had limited managerial experience, but later on, Pace would liken him to a “Nobel laureate professor” who “may not give a ton of office hours. But when you sit in a lecture, you go, ‘Oh my goodness, where could I have ever heard from someone that amazing?’”

It didn’t go well for Kompany at first. Five games into his first campaign, Burnley had only won once, and sat in 16th place. But the team wouldn’t lose again for 13 games, powering into first and never giving it up.

At one point, the Clarets captured 10 wins in a row and lost only once in their final 26 matches. Burnley won the Championship League and earned promotion, while Pace unleashed a notorious quip about Kompany. “It’s like dating the most beautiful girl in town,” he said, “and knowing there’s zero chance she’ll marry you.”

He meant that Kompany was too good to last at small-time Burnley, which turned out to be true in part. Kompany’s second-year squad labored in the Premier League, with his fast-paced, attacking style of play rendered ineffective against the world’s best players. At season’s end, Burnley was relegated once again, and Kompany was gone; Bayern Munich, the biggest team in Germany and one of the biggest in the world, hired him away for a massive £10.2 million (the equivalent of nearly $13 million at the time).

Despite his struggles, Kompany left behind an impressive void. “It was a bit of a culture shock,” says Matt Scrafton, who covers the Clarets for the Burnley Express newspaper. “They were left to pick up the pieces.”

In addition to dreaming, Alan Pace prides himself on learning from mistakes. What went wrong in the past, he likes to ask, and how can I prevent it from happening again? Kompany had been terrific in many ways, but his style wasn’t, ultimately, a good fit to make up for the club’s small-market limitations.

Now, following Millwall’s game-opening goal, Kompany’s replacement looks on from the sideline. Arms crossed, oxfords planted in the turf, he hardly moves. He’s ready to strike back.

From the ashes

Scott Parker brought his own impressive credentials to Burnley when Pace brought him on board in July 2024. He had played for some of the Premier League’s top clubs, including Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. And though only 43, he’d already guided two other clubs to Premier League promotion.

Yet stylistically, he was no Vincent Kompany. Kompany, bald and imposing at 6-foot-3, prized aggression and player recruitment. Parker, 5-foot-9 with a clean-cut, Roger Federer look, is all about defense and development. If Kompany was a Nobel laureate professor, Parker is the lecturer hosting office hours, Pace says. Getting to know players and making them want to play for him. Against Millwall, the approach pays off quickly: Just two minutes after the visitors’ game-opening goal, Burnley responds to tie it up.

It hasn’t always been so easy.

Parker’s approach did get the defense right, quickly — but that made for some not-so-fun games. Most importantly, Burnley tied 1-1 at home against its old milltown rivals, Blackburn Rovers. A result some fans found unacceptable. “He’s come under a lot of criticism at times,” says Paul Kidd, a longtime Burnley fan who heads the fan advisory board.

Kidd’s been a season ticket holder since 1985-86. “Burnley fans, in general, are quite a passionate bunch,” he says. “It’s kind of a special, unique club, really.” When Alan Pace and his fellow Americans came in, Burnley diehards worried that the club as they knew it could be killed — or worse: “Americanized,” Kidd says. He was skeptical, too.

But while the new owners have made some changes, drastic predictions haven’t come to pass. Not only has the team remained competitive, but Kidd says Pace hasn’t missed a single fan advisory board meeting. “I think (Alan Pace) recognizes what the town’s about,” Kidd says. “I do believe he does.”

The belief paid off as the season progressed. Burnley’s defense remained spectacularly good. The Clarets allowed just 16 goals in 46 matches, which was the best mark in English league history; compiled 30 shutouts, or “clean sheets”; and, entering the match against Millwall, hadn’t lost in 32 straight Championship league contests. Not, in fact, since their last game against Millwall.

The club clinched Premier League promotion with two games remaining, following a 2-1 triumph over Sheffield United — the very club Pace tried and failed to buy years ago. “You can’t argue with the fact that we’ve got over the line,” Kidd says, “and I think it was evidence of what (Parker’s) plan was: to get the defense right first and then build.”

Whatever questions fans had about Parker — and about Pace — had been quelled. “(Pace) got that one spot on,” Scrafton, the newspaper scribe, says of Parker’s hiring. “There’s no doubt that he’s been excellent.”

“I think the ceiling is extremely high here. There’s no reason in the world why Burnley Football Club could not or should not be a Champions League team. Not saying that’s gonna happen in our lifetime, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be that.”

— Stuart Hunt, Burnley co-owner

But what happens next is still suspect with national debates roiling the British soccer world about the growing gap between the country’s top divisions. Even between the haves and have-nots of the Premier League. “You could potentially get everything right off the pitch,” Scrafton says, “and it still might not be enough.”

A tapestry of belief

Back at Burnley’s game against Millwall, it’s 1-1 at the half. On the other side of the country, meanwhile, Plymouth Argyle FC — one of the worst teams in the Championship League — shockingly leads visiting Leeds United 1-0 at the break. If that score holds, or even if Leeds manages to tie it up, Burnley just needs to secure victory at Turf Moor to win the league title.

Leeds scores quickly to start the second half down in Plymouth, but Burnley scores, too. Leading 2-1, the Clarets just need for nothing to change. A tall order in the turbulent, entropy-riddled world of English soccer. But maybe, for just half an hour, it’s possible.

Creeping into the 73rd minute, with both results intact, an unrelenting entourage of security guards in highlighter-yellow coats emerges on every side of the turf. Graphics flash on the ribbon scoreboard surrounding the pitch: “Please do not enter the playing surface,” all caps. Fans can feel it now.

A season of struggle culminating in just a few minutes of action, here and down south. The whole thing comes down to execution and luck, measurable in seconds.

It’s stressful for everyone, but especially for Pace and Hunt, the fellow ALK investor/owner. Hunt has seen — has felt — high-pressure moments during his days on Wall Street, but nothing quite like this.

“There’s no bigger stage than English football in the world,” he says. Which made his decision to leave investing behind an easy one. “It’s incredible. The lives you can touch. The lives you can change. The value you can add.”

For Hunt and Pace, this moment represents more than just sporting glory. It’s also validation of their investment strategy. Proof that a small-market club can increase in value through strategic decisions and improvements.

Unlike billionaire-backed rivals, they’ve had to be cunning, even shrewd, operating with limited resources in a sport increasingly dominated by the bottomless capital of oligarchs and foreign royalty. This is still an investment, after all, and like any investment, it demands return. This is about proving an ideal, yes — but part of proving the ideal is proving financial viability.

“I get to work with great people and motivate them to operate better and reach goals and be better people,” Hunt says, “and that really motivates me every day.”

That’s what belief in the mission looks like to him. But others within the organization define it differently. Ogunbote, the Nigerian Latter-day Saint who manages Burnley’s women’s program, sees it more philosophically. “That’s probably one of the key fabrics in any industry,” she says: Belief in your team’s success. You buy jerseys and tickets and go to games based on your own belief in your team. And even as an insider, she adds, you have to believe in the people around you, and in yourself.

“I think belief is essential, critical when you’re in the sporting industry,” she says, citing “Ted Lasso.” “If you believe you can, you will.”

Hence Pace’s belief that underdogs can compete at this level. It may sound strange to call him and fellow ALK investors underdogs, given that they’re all wealthy by any reasonable standard. But they still don’t have billions to throw at the world’s best players. They have to fight the good fight. And if they do, belief tells them they have a chance.

On this day, as fans boo more reminders to stay off the field at 82 minutes — and at 86 minutes and 88 minutes — Millwall supporters suddenly erupt. Not for their own team’s success, but because word has spread: Leeds United has scored in stoppage time down in Plymouth, clinching the Championship League title regardless of what happens here.

The Clarets add another goal in the 93rd minute to punctuate their win, though it matters little. On this day, amid a certain level of success, it’s a reminder that some things are outside any individual’s control. But in this industrial town dotted with dormant smokestacks, transformation has always required seeing what could be rather than what is.

The rest will soon be written

Once more, a disembodied voice urges fans to remain seated. To stay off the pitch. Once more, fans boo. But nobody moves. Whether toward the grass, or toward the exits. Despite the heated online promises, there is to be no pitch invasion today. Instead, as the players disappear into the locker room, the voice promises a different kind of surprise.

When the players return a few minutes later, it’s time to revel. They bring their families and wear banners reading, “We’re going up!” Parker, the first-year manager, takes a victory lap, toasting Burnley diehards with a green glass bottle. The celebration will continue with a parade three days from now, with temporary signs already advertising it all over town. But today is the real party.

And what better way to cap it off, this improbable season that played out to Bedingfield’s “Unwritten,” than with a surprise appearance by the Grammy-nominated singer herself, emerging from the locker room near a graffiti-style mural encouraging Burnley fans to “Visit Detroit.”

She’d been waiting for the players when the game had finished, and now she serenaded the fans. Circling the edge of the pitch as she sings while the players jump and sing alongside her. Later, Ball told me only three people knew she was coming. They wanted it to be a true surprise. I asked Hunt whether it was hard to get her. “You can do anything,” he chuckled, “with money.”

The irony, of course, is that looking ahead to the team’s Premier League slate, that’s exactly what it will not have. Not relative to Manchester United and Arsenal and Liverpool. But that doesn’t stop Hunt from believing. “I think the ceiling is extremely high here. There’s no reason in the world why Burnley Football Club could not or should not be a Champions League team,” he says. “Not saying that’s gonna happen in our lifetime, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be that.”

Pace is a bit more modest. His ultimate vision for Burnley is still in flux. “I love the progress that we’re making, and I love the journey that we’re on and the people that are with us,” he says. “And I think that the more people we can bring along on this journey, the more I will start to see glimpses of what that vision might come to.”

It’s already snapped more sharply into focus since then. In July, he led ALK Capital in purchasing Barcelona-based club Espanyol, which competes in Spain’s top division. Though based in a major city, Espanyol is a lot like Burnley in that it exists on the fringes of one of the world’s top leagues, and very much in the shadow of F.C. Barcelona. “I have a tremendous connection to the local area,” Pace says, referring to his youth in Spain, “but I cannot say the same for the club, and I will be very honest with the club and the supporters of the club.”

That kind of honesty, he believes, will be the first step in exporting the “Burnley Way” to somewhere new. Although it won’t be called the Burnley Way in Barcelona. “In two or three years after we’ve been there, people should be saying, ‘Oh, so this is the Espanyol Way,’” he says.

Back at Turf Moor, it isn’t lost on Pace that, when his name is announced alongside players and coaches, fans cheer once again. Today, they believe in what he’s doing. Today, they believe their team can reach new heights with less money. Tomorrow, that could change quickly, because like the song says, “the rest is still unwritten” — and there’s no guarantee it will be written well.

But for this one afternoon in May, a long way from the potential letdown lurking in the months ahead, Burnley’s fans believe in the possibilities. And for Alan Pace, for now, that is enough.

This story will appear in the September 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

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