Informative Articles on Ebbsfleet & MYFC

[Bitch]

Though a few days late, this article is very informative.

 

Feb

17 2009 D-Day approaches for MyFC and Ebbsfleet

Written by Gary Andrews

 

Where will MyFC find money from to run Ebbsfleet?

 

A year to the day this Thursday internet site MyFootballClub.co.uk completed their takeover of Ebbsfleet United but any anniversary celebrations are likely to be muted as the club desperately needs members to renew their subscriptions ahead of this week

[Bitch]

Total MyFC membership...

 

Feb 20 9136

Feb 20 9292 A few hours after midnight.

Feb 20 9473

Feb 21 9438

 

The membership will continue to fluctuate as memberships run out in the following weeks. The new sign ups seem to be outnumbered by the expired membership not renewing.

[Bitch]

 

Ebbsfleet United:

[Bitch]

Originally Posted By: Bitch

Total MyFC membership...

Feb 20 9136
Feb 20 9292 A few hours after midnight.
Feb 20 9473
Feb 21 9438

The membership will continue to fluctuate as memberships run out in the following weeks. The new sign ups seem to be outnumbered by the expired membership not renewing.

[Lightweight]

Now we know

[Bitch]

Originally Posted By: Lightweight

Now we know

Knowledge is the bomb Lightweight Handle it carefully

[Lightweight]

You have been one busy girl

[Bitch]

I find the Ebbsfleet (MYFC) experiment interesting Lightweight. I've had to trawl around for information, it's not just in one place. Anyone googling Ebbsfleet will come onto this forum, but not be able to find the crucial news. So, i posted it. There's far more that can be said and no doubt it will come out in the following days/weeks.

 

From Gravesend & Northfleet struggling club, to new experiment and back again.

 

It amazes/disgusts me that any link you follow to MYFC official still carries the banner - Sign up - Pick the team! Shocking!!

[Lightweight]

As you said it's a bit perverse it's like football manager meets real life! The thing is real life isn't a computer game and eventually at the end of the line people get hurt. I feel it's all very sad.

 

 

[Bitch]

It is sad. But, fantasy football (football manager) was sold as a reality. They are still trying to sell it as such! http://www.ebbsfleetunited.co.uk/ See the flashing banner on the right hand side of the Official Ebbsfleet Utd site! All those gullible foreigners that haven't caught onto the scam will still be sucked in...

 

"My Football Club .co.uk - Own The Club - Pick The Team"

[Lightweight]

[Darter]

This is great Jane and the second article there is particularly spot-on. Let people see the true figures. As you know, we've been tracking the daily renewals for ages on freemyfc and adjusting for those people who have multiple year memberships (like me, I extended my membership to 2 years and have already been banned for 7 months of the first year ) Thing is, the money will have been spent long ago for those who paid for more than one year.

[billy nick]

Well done jane, you have put in some good research there.

I replied to that 2nd article, as good as it was i hate the fact that its always reported that the people signed up to play "football manager". Its the slur that is always used to describe the people that signed up for MYFC, many of whom would have signed up to get an insight into how a football club was run and to get involved in that process.

Its not our fault the operator and his web team used every excuse possible to keep information from the membership. UnInformed is exactly what the membership were, and the primary function of the membership was to be used as a cash cow.

Hence, that as we enter MYFC'S 2nd year "own the club pick the team" is still the tagline on the site.

At best its misleading and at worst its dishonest, in fact those two words sum up MYFC perfectly.

[Bitch]

Billy Nick - I find it hard to get to the bottom of the MYFC fiasco. The nitty gritty of why it's such a failure is swamped in recriminations from all sides. I'd like to know the answers to...

 

1)It was sold on 'Own The Club - Pick The team'. From my belief, it was the PTT that attracted so many new owners. At what point did the PTT fail and why?

 

2) How was the website/forum and voting set up? And, how was it rigged that the honest punters were swindled?

 

3) I know Gravesend & Northfleet benefitted for a season (so far)as Ebbsfleet FC, as they were financially struggling. But, who profits from the set up of MYFC and how?

 

4)What is the real picture for the survival of Ebbsfleet FC now?

 

(That's all i can think of for now, but i'm sure i'll add to the list as the questions spring to mind).

[billy nick]

1)own the club pick the team was the marketing tagline to draw members in, in fact it still is. How many signed up for this is anyones guess? It failed IMO due to the fact it wasn't implimented for so long, and even then it was designed as a 3 option pick which in effect was watered down, members had lost faith in the operator by this stage. Liam Daish wasn't keen on it and may even have walked if it was brought in, so the operator bottled it and did everything to put members off doing it. If it was brought in for the Trophy final,the media attention would have brought in 100,000 by now!

 

2)The website forum was moderated by employee's of the operator. It is well known that they had many bogus accounts set up so they could abuse the ever increasing number of dissentors. Threads seemed to be highjacted by the same usual suspects jumping on people that expressed a different opinion to that of the operator.

The sale of John Akinde was set up as an opinion poll! yet the results of which were quickly reported to the media as a vote! Members were outraged and demanded to be shown the paperwork showing that the sale of Akinde was dependant on the results of the reported vote. No paperwork was ever shown, in fact anything of importance the membership wanted to look at more closely was always knocked back with the excuse that it was confidential.

In fact the Electoral Reform Society do not recommend E-voting as the potential for fraud is very high.

 

http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=45

 

Voting should have gone through an independant 3rd party IMO as that would have been honest and transparent.

 

3)The operator profited to the tune of

[Bitch]

5) Do members now get the chance to Pick The Team?

 

http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk/

 

* INTRODUCTION

* MILESTONES

* MEMBERSHIP

* CONTACT

 

Own the club, pick the team

 

Welcome to MyFootballClub. You are invited to join over 30,000 members who own Ebbsfleet United and vote on all key decisions from team selection to financial budgets. Membership costs

[billy nick]

The view of a a member on freemyfc and one i agree with.

 

Pick The Team - one of the key catchphrases that got many people hooked on MyFC. The promise (and this was on the original promotional material) was that you could "play Championship Manager for real" (if I can find the link to the archived site on Google I'll post it later).

 

However there are so many holes in the way it was implemented it just shows that either it was not thought through, or it was never intended to actually happen.

 

The idea is, in an ideal world:

- The squad list is published, plus usual playing positions

- Every week the manager publishes a training report

- Every week the manager publishes a match report

- Those reports and the squad information may be read in order for the members to be able to choose which formation and which squad they want to play in the next match.

 

However:

- The functionality to look at and choose the squad has been poor from day one, and though improved a little still leaves much to be desired.

- There are no training reports and few (if any) match reports

- Members are given the choice as to whether they want to choose the team or not, then.. if they want to choose the team, they have to choose which team, formation, etc.

 

Basic issues are:

- Very poor PTT functionality

- Very poor visibility of the team (not everyone is able to watch the matches because of geographical location, or because the MyFC TV doesn't work)

- Very poor information about the team (because it is not provided by any EUFC staff, particularly Liam)

- Some members want to pick the team, but some (typically existing EUFC fans) only want Liam to pick the team (not unnaturally)

- The number of hoops to jump through to get to a team puts off most "casual" members.

- It has been made very clear by those in authority in EUFC and MyFC that they do not approve of PTT.

 

However further to this:

 

- If Will Brooks wants PTT it will happen, because (a) he's in a position where he can promote it to the detriment of any counter argument, and ( he's in a position to manipulate the results. Whether he does (or will do) either of these is immaterial, he is able to.

 

- If Will Brooks doesn't want PTT to happen it will not happen, because (a) he's in a position where he can edit out any arguments for it, ( he's in a position to promote the counter arguments, and © he's in a position to manipulate the results. Whether he does (or will do) any of these is immaterial, he is able to.

 

- If PTT is voted for there are a number of scenarios:

 

----- 1/ Nobody knows (it's not published anywhere) how the actual PTT'd team will be selected; is it a simply majority of those who voted? An aggregation? A weighted list? Fundamentally that's a big problem, and leads to some of the problems below.

 

----- 2/ Whichever team is chosen from PTT (however that happens), if you voted PTT because you wanted to pick the team, but a team is them chosen which is very different to the one you personally picked, why wouldn't you then have the right to say "hang on, I change my vote now because I wouldn't have voted PTT if I'd known you were going to pick that team"? For example you only want the team picked by members if a particular attacker is chosen up front. The only way round that would be to have a picking system similar to proportional representation (it has been suggested but was talked down as "too complicated" by the Web Team).

 

----- 3/ If a PTT team is chosen (however that selection is arrived at), how can you ever prove PTT "worked" - what does "worked" mean anyway in any context in which you could apply it? Do you just mean the members Picked the Team and it won? Or just that you picked the team that was fielded regardless of the result? I'd say it could only be regarded to have worked if it won, so how many times do you try it until you give up and go back to the manager picking?

 

----- 4/ Even if a PTT team was presented to Liam, how do you (any member) know whether the team presented on the match day actually is the team that the members chose (issues around #1 aside)? You will never know because it's too easy for the team to be announced as a PTT picked team when in fact it isn't - you'd never know, never! The only way round this is to announce the PTT'd team far enough in advance so Liam couldn't have chosen it, but even then, injuries can happen, and feigned injuries can happen even easier.

 

----- 5/ If Will/Liam/anyone wants to discredit PTT, they need just announce that the team that lost heavily was a PTT'd team. Conversely, if anyone wants to promote PTT, they just announce that the team that won was a PTT'd team. It's far too easy to spin the results how you want them. If Will particularly, had proven himself to be completely trustworthy then you may not suspect spin, but Will appears to have demonstrated he has no compunction in lying, and has certainly lost the trust of a large percentage of those over here at least. So why should they trust him to do and say the truthful/right thing?

 

 

With all of these obstacles to overcome PTT cannot ever be successful. It can be manipulated, spun, lied around, ignored, toyed with, and even, maybe implemented in some small way after a fashion. But be successful? Never.

 

However, it was a fundamental promotional tennet of MyFC : "Own The Club, Pick The Team". Was it a barefaced lie? Or a Marketing Gimmick that backfired?

[Bitch]

Hmmm... Check out the date of this article.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/6611729.stm

 

 

Last Updated: Tuesday, 1 May 2007, 15:03 GMT 16:03 UK

E-mail this to a friend Printable version

Fans given club takeover chance

By John Sinnott

 

Brooks acknowledged the scheme could encounter teething problems, particularly as regards to members picking the team.

 

He stated: "Before members voted on team selection the head coach would provide a briefing on the previous week's game, the next opponents and potential players and formations he suggests.

 

 

"Then the owners would vote and the head coach would have to follow their decision, although I think the owners would probably follow the head coach's advice.

 

"The head coach would know that this is a club with a difference - where the owners have their say - and, in many ways, the pressure will be taken off him because of this."

 

 

Quote billy nick - "However, it was a fundamental promotional tennet of MyFC : "Own The Club, Pick The Team". Was it a barefaced lie? Or a Marketing Gimmick that backfired"?

 

Looks like the end result was always going to happen...

[Bitch]

Total MyFC membership...

 

Feb 20 9136

Feb 20 9292 A few hours after midnight.

Feb 20 9473

Feb 21 9438

Feb 22 9473

 

http://www.freemyfc.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=556&start=20

-------------------------------------------------------

 

MyFC founder Will Brooks, who is hoping for 20,000 renewals of the

[Big J R]

Watch BBC Local TV News tonight - 6:30-ish.

 

The lunch-time piece shown should be repeated.