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Results so far:
| No | 39% | 27 votes | Total: 70 votes | |
| Yes | 61% | 43 votes |
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Add to FavoritesThroughout the history of football, there have been many innovative ideas. Deciding to disallow the use of the conventional backpass to the goalkeeper, putting numbers on shirts, even the intense physical conditioning that a lot of the top level managers use have all contributed to make the sport the spectacle it is today. In the past few years, one of the things in football that has caused the most amount of debate is take-overs by "foreigners". Whether it's Thaksin Shinawatra at Manchester City, Malcolm Glazer at Manchester United or Roman Abromovich at Chelsea, most businessmen that have taken over clubs in the recent past have courted controversy at one point or another. In the past, most football clubs were owned by fans of the club itself- no it seems that more and more businessman looking to make a quick buck or for a real time version of popular computer game Football Manager. Now, it seems like ordinary fans will be able to actually have a say in the running of a club. MyFootballClub, a website set up by former football journalist Will Brooks claims that common football fans will finally be able to effect decisions of a club- be it who to sign in the transfer market, selecting which players will feature in the first team or the amount of money put into the youth fund for the coming season.
The site charges a fee of 35 for all those wanting to take part (7.5 for administration of the MyFootballClub Trust while 27.5 goes into club expenditure) and members get to vote on which club they would like to see taken over. Currently leading the list is League One club Leeds United, with Nottingham Forest and Cambridge United in second and third place respectively. Although the website is keeping the number of people that have signed up a secret so that clubs they were negotiating with would not know the extent of their wealth, 53,051 members had signed up as of July 31st- making the total value of the company worth 1.46 million at the very least. Now that all the facts have been sorted out, this writer will give his view on whether he feels that the idea is a good one or not.
While the idea of "the people" running a football club may be a sound one in principle, a look at nearly any football forum on the Internet will tell you that most of "the people" are lacking a few brain cells. The very fact that a club like Leeds United, a team that was given a fifteen point penalty for financial issues leads the list of clubs to purchase speaks for itself- as do the listings of Arsenal and Manchester United (two clubs that would cost over 1 billion to purchase) at 9th and 11th place respectively shows that voting even in large numbers can sometimes produce futile results. Also, while the MyFootballClub scenario allows your vote to be counted, it is unlikely that a solitary vote in 50,000 people will make a large dent in the decisions you want to affect. There are official fan forums of teams that ask you to contribute ideas as to how the team can be improved and they are often free to join- what difference does MyFootballClub offer you, apart from charging you 35 to voice your opinion?
Although a fee of 35 seems a fairly cheap price to join the service, which as MyFootballClub says is "less than most Premiership tickets" as well as the price of a "football manager computer game", what benefit does joining the service give you? Whereas football manager computer games can be played for hours on end, and going to a football match allows you to see your favourite team in the flesh, how does joining what is effectively a glorified fan forum create any more fun' that a free online message board would do? As MyFootballClub have not even selected the team they are going to purchase yet, those fans that have already paid up could be hugely disappointed if their dream to control the decisions of Leeds United turned into a reality of controlling the decisions of non-league side Cambridge United. Since football is a very passionate sport, it is nearly impossible for those that have a true interest in it to generate support for another team. Why then, should fans of the club that MyFootballClub will purchase waste money on a team they were never interested by in the first place?
Even though it must have seemed a good idea when Will Brooks concocted the MyFootballClub scenario, in reality there are just too many problems and too many drawbacks for it to work smoothly. While fans would get to own' a football club for probably the first time in their lives, there are many ways they could satisfy their passion for the sport, and spending 35 on MyFootballClub is certainly something that will bring them a great deal of satisfaction.
Learn more about this author, Jason Pereira.
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Yes
From what I can gather, the situation works like this. Lots and lots of people sign up to this website, MyFootballClub.com and pay a fee of 35. When they have enough money they put in a bid for a club, buy it, then run it. Personally, I can only see positives from this.
You don't have just one person responsible for making a decision on who to buy, the manager etc., you have hundreds. Imagine you are a manager and you fall out with your chairman. You will get no funds, no support and probably will be hounded out of your club. It would take quite a personality to fall out with hundreds of people. This system gives security to managers and players alike. The average fan, despite the chanting one hears on the terrraces, is a lot more tolerant than a chairman, who pours vast sums of money into the club and will suffer the consequences of failure alone. Schemes like MyFootballClub will mean fewer managerial casualties and seeing as there were over 50 in the Football League last year, this can only be a good thing.
Linked into this is the issue of personality. Chairmen like Doug Ellis became increasingly unpopular during his time in charge of Aston Villa, not only for the fact that Villa were not achieving the high targets they set themselves, but the fact that many people were getting frustrated with an old man who did not seem to have much passion for the game in charge. This would not happen with schemes such as MyFootballClub as there would be no figurehead to scorn. Votes could be taken on issues such as players, managerial confidence, the upkeep of the ground etc., and, despite some people obviously losing out, most will be happy with the decision, unlike with a single chairman who could taken a decision seen by the majority as unpopular.
There is also the issue of money. In these days of sky high prices in football, many chairman are having to be incredibly rich, otherwise they will be reluctant to pay such sums, or end up doing a Leeds United (and we all know how that ended up!). Despite the man in the street not having the deep pockets of an Abramovich or a Glazer, with enough of them contributing a small amount each, money can be easily raised to fund new players.
Having mentioned Abramovich and Glazer, I feel that I must touch on the subject of foreign investors. In the past few years, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Aston Villa and West Ham have all been sold to foreign investors. This has angered many fans, as it seems that their beloved clubs have sold their soul to the money making machine, but that doesn't seem to be translated into dropping ticket prices. On the contrary, prices are rising stteply all the time, but mostly by clubs who have been sold to foreign investors. This, rightly, enfuriates the average fan who feels that the game is being snatched away from them, in order to be a plaything for multi-millionaires, when clubs owned by local businessmen like Bolton and Birmingham are able to freeze prices. MyFootballClub is a excellent way of bringing the game back into the realms of humanity and if a club is run by the fans, then it will be run for the fans who want to be able to pay a small amount of money to see a decent game of football on a Saturday afternoon. That's not too much to ask is it?
One reads all the time in newspapers and on message boards what people would do if they could run a football club. The majority of them make a lot of sense. As people are getting more and more frustrated with the game moving away from its roots and into a great corporate monolith, the time is right for schemes such as MyFootballClub, which will bring the game back to where it belongs. With the people.
Learn more about this author, Jamie Frier.
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