Summer 2026 and Maidenhead United Women and manager Dave Kitson have been doing things a little differently on the club’s social media channels.
Once an ad-hoc space to advertise matches and running text commentary of games, platforms like Instagram and TikTok have allowed grassroots clubs space to breathe and foster an identity.
The team behind the Magpies socials have leaned into that, and made the most of the man leading the team – who just also happens to be the scorer of Reading Football Club’s first goal in the Premier League, the previously under wraps author of The Secret Footballer series of books and newspaper columns, and arguably Caversham United’s biggest ever signing.
We’ll leave you to decide on the order of importance there.
BUT, Dave Kitson is a big name in the game, through spells with the Royals, Stoke City and Portsmouth as well as articulate appearances on podcasts and public speaking. He leads his team though, with a vision and strategy, and backed it up with the club’s highest-ever finish in the FA Women’s National League South East Division One last season, despite seeing several long-serving players depart, with former manager Ed Jackson-Norris to Reading FC Women last summer.
You might think of Kitson as a serious person, and there is no doubt from meeting him he knows what he is talking about, but Maidenhead’s summer social rethink has shown a whole new side to the former Premier League striker.
I’ve just loved watching the Maidenhead United Women’s social media this summer. I know there’s some serious stuff about why the women’s section of the club are doing it, but we’ve seen a less serious side to yourself. How have you found it? How have you enjoyed it?
Yeah, it’s good, we can’t expect people to do things we wouldn’t do ourselves, so in the spirit of that – and with the social media team, you can’t say no to them, they’re so persuasive in getting people to do things.
We’ve had a couple of celebrities turn up, you might have seen. The social team don’t stand on ceremony, they just pulled them out of the crowd and said, come and do a TikTok for us, and before you know where you are, you’ve done it and it’s gone out there, which is great.
And it’s all done in the best possible taste, and it’s all good fun. I’ve done a few, I mean, they got me to – my worst nightmare is dancing – and they managed to get me to dance, so it’s, yeah, dance in the loosest sense of the word, but it’s good.
Related: Meet the Maidenhead United fan more famous than Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney put together
Being able to headline something, how Maidenhead United got Dave Kitson to breakdance is.. I’ve had dreams about writing that headline.
I think calling it break-dancing is a stretch (video below) – sort of falling over and rolling around on the floor. But it’s all fun, it’s all designed just to be fun, and highlight what we are as a club. We’re serious, we want to be competitive, but there’s another side to it as well.
Club’s now need someone doing marketing and social media if they want to be noticed, and it keen do so much if you can hit it in an organic way, so how and why has this developed within MUWFC?
It was ahead of the new stadium, fingers crossed, Maidenhead gets its new stadium. We had to sit down and design a of three-year strategy, so once that key turns in the door, what does our little part of the club look like when we move in? How do we want people to see us? How do we perceive ourselves? And what is it that we’re bringing to the table for Maidenhead United Football Club, so that’s what we did, we created a three-year strategy, it nearly killed us, but it encompassed an overarching document, and social media was a big part of that.
We really we stripped it way back to, who are we, what is it that we’re trying to achieve here, and it broke two ways, one was yes, we want to be competitive, we want to try and win games of football, but ultimately we don’t pay our players, so we have to bridge that gap another way.
The way of bridging that gap is just to have the best possible coaching that we can have, improve our players as much as we possibly can, in the hope that they can progress and go on and have careers at a higher level, so that was that, so we can be competitive.
I’ve lost count of when I was chairman of Arlesey Town, a Step 5 men’s team, as it was at the time, that you’d meet people coming in saying, you know, we’re going to be the next Man United, and that was when I was a player 20 years ago, and when I became Chairman, you kind of see them back there.
I admire that ambition, but there’s a stark reality to how far you can go. For us at Maidenhead, it’s not beyond reality that we could get promoted to Tier 3, and we might play at Tier 3, and we might come back down to Tier 4, but that’s who we are. Going to the WSL, you need a lot of money to do that, and we’re not in that position.
From that, we identified off the pitch that there are no profitable clubs. We don’t want to be a drain on the Football Club, so wouldn’t it be good, wouldn’t it be cool if we could be the first consistently profitable women’s football team? Every year we turn a profit. Can we do that? Can that be done? Because taking a profit at the end of the season of, let’s say, £50,000, £60,000, and saying, right, we’re going to pay our players, all we’ve done is use the money to pay players that already play for us for free, and now we’ve created a problem.
Because all we’re going to end up doing is going to the club, asking for more money to compete for other players, it didn’t make any sense.
We thought, well, wouldn’t it be better to use that, those profits for other things, to give back to the community, to identify some charities that we can help and really engage within our community. That’s pretty much what we ended up deciding, and then it was a case of ‘how are we going to do that?’
Social media was the obvious tool, so we brought in a company that work with some of the big hitters, big influencers in the tens of millions, way beyond anything that we do, but these are the people that get invited to TikTok and YouTube and get told this is what we need to be doing. And we were unbelievably lucky to have the ear of this company to help us. We recruited an army of social media volunteers who produce huge amounts of content, and that’s pretty much what we decided to do.
At a certain point that we can monetise that, you can reach more people, so that’s really where we are, on the pitch competitive, yes, we want to try and win every game that we play, but off the pitch we’re realistic. We want to turn a profit and this is the way that we’ve decided to do it.
Have you seen an uptick in reach? In follows?
Yeah, so from a standing start last season, we didn’t have a TikTok account, we didn’t have an Instagram account, and we went from a standing start to a combined six million views in the season. Target this year is 15 million, which sounds like a big number, but in social media land it’s possible.
Sometimes you only need one thing to really work, don’t you?
Yeah, and it’s trying to work out the rhyme and reason that there’s one post that you do, which you think, that’s really funny, that’s really clever, and it gains no traction, and then you’ll do another one where you think, yeah, okay, and it’s half a million views inside an hour! How does this happen?
I have nothing to do with this, this is all the social media department, but I’m fascinated by it, and I’m so impressed with what they’ve managed to achieve, and it’s like anything else, we have a set of metrics that underpin the way the team plays, and the social media department is no different, so they have a set of metrics, and as long as they see everything doing this [motions upward], they get validation from that, and it makes them work even harder.
It’s a brave new world! I don’t profess to understand everything about it, but I can see that it’s working.
In maybe five, ten years time, there are going to be thousands upon thousands of young people working in Premier League football clubs, and top football clubs around the world that all got their chance working for their local grassroots football club.
Oh yeah, absolutely, it’s really interesting, to me at least, when I see what areas of football the young people want to get involved in. Half a dozen years ago, I would put an advert out for an analyst to come and analyse the games, the metrics, the home team, away team, and you would be inundated with University graduates who wanted to get into football through that room.
Fast forward, last year, you put the same advert out, no one wants to do that, but half a dozen years ago, you couldn’t get any social media people, it’s all switched around again, and it keeps changing, that’s what keeps it exciting, but it’s really interesting to see what the young people are studying, and how they get into football, their entry point into the game, and at the moment, social media is winning that battle.
Do you have a favourite clip so far? Is there one that you watch over and over again?
But what I think is funny is what a six-year-old boy thinks is funny. There’s a, there’s a few that have really made me laugh. It’s like anything else, once you start, and you’re trying to find your way into it, it’s a bit clunky and then you get into, into a little bit of a rhythm.
I like these ones where they find a clip of two people yelling at each other, which has clearly come from some Netflix show, or something like that, and then they’ll voice over it, which is quite cool. We did one, when we had our media day, and all the girls were having their pictures taken, they’d come in, they’d sit down, they’d have their headshots taken, one of the social media girls put the Netflix trailer over, over the top, which was when you come in and you tell your documentary story. That made me laugh, and it went nuts, and then we started seeing all the other clubs doing it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re not necessarily at the forefront, we take a lot of our content from other stuff that people are doing, and, and people take stuff from us, and that’s great, and that’s as it should be, because it’s all promoting the women’s game.
What are steps you want to hit along the way, and what have you learned?
A couple of the KPIs I can share are, yes, can we be profitable, can we contribute to this football club overall, and help to sustain it with what we bring to the table? And can we boost the fan base? That’s social media and physical footfall in the stadium. Can we take it from 100 fans to 300 fans? We’ve got to aim for that, and we might fall short here and there.
One of the things that we’re doing at the moment is focused on our training shirt, because of the social media, we worked out pretty quickly that the value is in the training shirt. All of our social media is shot with the girls in the training shirt, really, so we thought, well, wouldn’t it be great to go into the community and beyond, and divvy up that shirt.
You might have seen this on social media, there was a South African team that divvied it up into about 500 squares [Hout Bay United in Cape Town, South Africa – find out more here], and sold each square. We’re going to do the same thing.
That’s the beauty of being at this level. I was having this conversation with somebody at Reading the other day, we were talking about the ceiling over your head, if you get to the Premier League, the ceiling over your head of interesting things that you can try is like this [motions a small space], the ceiling here at Maidenhead, you can’t even see it [motions above the camera level]. So there’s always something you can try, there’s always something that you can do. You can try really fun things that perhaps don’t work in the men’s game, which absolutely make sense in the women’s game, and it’s fun. That’s the bit that I love, if it’s not going quite well on the pitch, or if it’s not going quite so well off the pitch, you can always dip into the other one.
Anything else you wanted to add?
If you’re looking for a little dopamine hit of football, and you’re scratching around for something to do on a Sunday, come down and watch us at Maidenhead. We play our games at York Road, bring your daughter with you, bring your son with you, if you want to see how football should be played.
And when can we see you in a social media video next?
That’s my one for the year, now I’m sure they’ll grab me! What I will say is, I think I alluded to it earlier, I think I got away lightly. If you haven’t seen the Petr Cech TikTok video yet, just go on our TikTok and have a look at that video, and that’ll put a smile on your face.
Find Maidenhead United Women on TikTok here, and Instagram here.
