George Dowell interview: ‘I felt if I can’t walk, then I don’t want to be alive. What was the point?’

“People say I saved Worthing FC, but I say Worthing FC saved me,” says George Dowell.

He is speaking to The Athletic at Woodside Road, the home of the non-League football club he owns on England’s south coast.

Fifteen years ago, aged 17, Dowell was a promising full-back in the Worthing under-18s and pushing for a first-team call-up.

But in April 2010, he and some friends drove to McDonald’s after training. They skidded on a wet road and the car overturned. Dowell, the front-seat passenger in the car, was paralysed from the chest down.

Over the following days, months and years, Dowell would come to terms with his life-altering injuries. He would eventually take over the club he once hoped to represent, using part of the money from his insurance payout from the accident. He has since transformed Worthing’s fortunes.

They are top of the National League South, the sixth tier of English football, and promotion to the National League would put them at the highest level the club has ever competed at in its 139-year history.

And yet 10 years ago, Worthing FC, riddled with debt, appeared to have a bleak future. Until Dowell, who was awarded an MBE for services to football and disability awareness in the 2024 New Years Honours List, got involved.

It has been an inspiring and touching symbiotic relationship between owner and club that has led to an astonishing transformation for both.

Deep down, Dowell knew. “I was in a spinal unit, so that wasn’t good,” he says.

He was not informed of the severity of his injuries until a few weeks later, but his parents were told that night that he would never walk again.

Recalling how he laid in a hospital bed, contemplating his future after the accident that changed his life, Dowell says: “I was like, ‘Well, if I can’t walk, then I don’t want to be alive. What’s the point?’.“

He spent 10 months in hospital trying to recover, adapt and come to terms with his new reality.

“I had no touch points with anyone that’s got a disability so I had no idea of what to expect or what my life could look like now, or if there’s still things that you can do, and what you can and what you can’t do.

“I am sure I would have said if I had sat around with friends and we had discussed what we would do if we were paralysed that I would rather have been dead. 

“That was very much my mindset for a long time.”

The worst moments were the first few months lying on a hospital bed day after day, although he always had a visitor to try to lift his mood. His mum, Linda, quit her job and moved into a bed and breakfast in Salisbury to be near him, while his dad, Dave, visited every weekend and his close network of friends took it in turns to visit.

“Slowly, I started to move about, and that helped,” he says. “I did a good job of coming to terms with things, but I was incredibly lucky with my friends and family who visited me for 10 months.

“They still treated me as George and I began to realise I could still be the same person — just sitting down.”

But Dowell was not the same outgoing person he was before. His wheelchair gave him some mobility but his ability to face the world in it needed more time.

“I got home from the hospital and for the first two years, I didn’t really do much,” he says. “I struggled with going out and about. I didn’t like going to restaurants and then it being a big fuss because it wasn’t accessible.

“I felt people were looking at me. I wasn’t particularly comfortable in my own skin.

“I didn’t like seeing people I hadn’t seen since before my injury because I used to overcompensate to make them feel comfortable. I could see in their faces they didn’t know what to say. I used to try and avoid going places where I thought I’d bump into people.”

But Dowell realised he could not spend his life playing Xbox. He needed a purpose and so he set up a football team, Worthing Borough, competing in the West Sussex League, for his friends. He became the manager but found it difficult to find anywhere they could train. 

His search would end in a discovery that would transform his life.

“I was looking around for some land to buy to build our own community hub for training as there weren’t many facilities for teams,” he says.

“It came out in the local paper that Worthing FC were struggling financially and not far from going out of business. I thought that would be a huge shame for the town. I used to go and watch there from the age of five and played for them when I was 15.”

He knew the ground could make a perfect community hub so he went to the committee running the club with what he described as “a half-arsed” business plan, which they eventually accepted.

The club had reported debts of £200,000 ($260,000). “That was the debt you could see,” Dowell adds, admitting more creditors started coming out of the woodwork.

“I had some money set aside for a career so I used that.”

Worthing FC were then in the Ryman League Division One South (now known as the Isthmian League South), the eighth tier of English football, but since Dowell’s takeover in 2015, they have enjoyed two promotions.

Owning and running a football club was a steep learning curve for Dowell but he has slowly built a team of volunteers and a few full-time staff.

There is now an academy for young players from aged eight upwards, with links to a local college for the older players. When Dowell was playing in the under-18s, there was only one junior age group.

A women’s section has also been set up and teams for the older generation to still keep playing through walking football. The artificial 3G pitch, another significant financial outlay, is in constant use.

“It’s really important for a community club that everybody can use the club,” Dowell says. “We try to touch base with as many different sections of the community as possible and then hopefully they feel a part of what is happening.

“It was tough at first, to get people to engage with us, but we are now averaging 1,600 for home games.”

The transformation and Dowell’s story led TNT Sports to document the story in a film titled The Club That George Built but Dowell is quick to emphasise he has received a lot of help.

One of those aiding him is chief operating officer Keith Mitchell, who has swapped working on the Neom city development in Saudi Arabia to help run Worthing FC.

“George’s vision has become a shared vision,” he says. “It has been about careful recruitment and getting people in who can add some value and can share George’s vision and, hopefully, make it reality.”

That vision is to reach the highest level possible, starting with the fifth-tier National League, where they would be mixing it with many full-time clubs who have dropped out of the English Football League (EFL; the second to fourth tier of English football). 

Manager Chris Agutter, who took over in May, 2024, met The Athletic before the home clash with Farnborough on February 25 and he says Dowell is an inspiration for his players.

“It’s a hell of a reference point,” he says. “His story puts things in perspective, not just for the players but for the staff.

Worthing manager Chris Agutter says George is someone he and his players want to fight for (The Athletic)

“Part of the reason I want to do well is to fight for George. He’s an incredible human being.

“If you took away his story and, in an alternative world the accident hadn’t happened, he’d still be an incredible human being.

“He’s a really good man and someone that you want to fight for, and you want to work hard for.”

Nine of Worthing’s 27-man squad have come through the ranks at the club, with three homegrown players in the regular starting line-up.

“It is important to have a program from top to bottom, all ages, which is aligned,” says Agutter. “George had his own footballing aspirations. It’s incredibly important to him and he’s incredibly passionate about it.

“The big thing is to put a team out on the pitch that he could be proud of and that does him justice, and part of that is making sure we have pathways from our academy program into the first team.”

Ultimately, Worthing are planning to go full time and first-team coach Dean Hammond has plenty of experience, with nearly 500 professional appearances for Brighton and Hove Albion, Southampton and Leicester City.

With the players only able to train twice a week, Hammond knows how much turning professional would help the club’s ambitions.

“We’d love to have more time with the players, not just coaching, but spending more time with them to build relationships,” he says.

‘There’s a long way to go, but the club is growing really fast and it’s come a long way in a short space of time. Turning professional a few years back would have just been a dream that just never seemed possible.”

Anything seems possible now at Worthing. Before the game with Farnborough, The Athletic met up with James Easton, who hosts a fan podcast called Rebel Yell, after the nickname of the club, The Rebels. He says Dowell’s dream has become infectious within the growing fanbase.

“George’s story is inspirational,” he says. “For him to come back to the club he played for as a kid and then to lead them to this level, coming back from the accident, is remarkable.

“He could have thought his life was over, but he decided to invest in his local team, save the club and you look at it now.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if within five years we could be in the Football League, let alone the National League.”

Worthing suffered a rare 2-1 home defeat against Farnborough that night but have won five consecutively since to take a four-point lead at the top of the table with a game in hand.

The National League is in sight.

Dowell, who is now married to Jessikah and has a daughter, Bonnie, may have initially thought his life would be over after his accident. But fifteen years later, the dream of promotion is alive for Dowell and Worthing FC, with more chapters to be written.

(Top photos: The Athletic and Getty Images)