Fan ownership at the next level
With football finance being the buzz word among the sporting media, with stories surrounding MUST’s campaign to get the Glazers out, and the pressure on Liverpools owners to leave, the flip side of this is people proactively trying to own their own football club.
MyFootballclub.co.uk featured fairly heavily in the press in the lead up to, and the completion of a deal to take over Ebbsfleet United. 20,000 fans worldwide paid a contribution to take over the club. It hasn’t been without its problems, with membership numbers dropping off, and remaining fans having to brain storm new ways to fund the fledgling project.
The Bundesliga model is held up to be a fantastic model for this notion of fan ownership, and there is a fantastic article at Pitchinvasion explaining how the system works.
As an avid Twitter user, I stumbled upon a new project, known as the Five Pound Football Club project. Quite simply, the notion is you register your interest in paying £5 a season to own a part of a football club. Initially, the site are gauging interest on Facebook, Twitter and its own website, and are conducting their research into football clubs which could be purchased. Initially they are looking at choosing from four countries: Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
At the moment, it is only a gauge of interest and maybe nothing will come of it. The prospect of seeing how this story could unravel is just too tempting for my curious mind, and I’ve registered my interest. Nicole Carroll; Football club owner? Watch this space.
This Five Pound Football Club looks rather too similar to My Football Club, an experiment that went wrong and left the fans of Ebbsfleet United to clear up afterwards. In the end, it wasn’t just about the members being denied the right promised by inventor Will Brooks to ‘pick the team’, but also evidence of what happens when you subvert a perfectly good idea like ‘ownership by the fans of xxxxx fc’ (the trust movement etc), instead calling it ‘ownership by fans of football’.
This experiment wouldn’t be ownership by the fans like supporters’ trusts, or that in Germany, Spain or Sweden, but instead another subversion of the idea that can actually work.
Kevin Rye
March 29, 2010 at 5:36 pm
The fact that it failed with Ebbsfleet United peaks my curiosity even more, surely being involved means I get the scoop on the story whatever the outcome? Whole thing could fall flat before it ever happens if they never get enough people interested.
Nicole Carroll
March 29, 2010 at 5:40 pm