interesting article

[Uncle Urchin]

Just before kick-off of Wednesday's Champions League final in the Athens Olympic Stadium, there was a kerfuffle on the running track in front of where the Milan fans were gathered. All eyes were turned towards a scramble of photographers and cameramen. In the midst of the mayhem was the tiny, shiny figure of Silvio Berlusconi, the club's owner and the former Prime Minister of Italy. Looking in the flesh oddly like his own waxwork, Berlusconi clearly has taken the Joan Rivers approach to ageing, the one in which the comedienne has convinced herself that if you have enough surgery, no one will notice you getting older.

 

As he stepped out to glad-hand his people, Berlusconi was back where he started. In the 1990s, he used the platform of owning the country's most successful football club to get ahead in politics. Now, with his political career in pieces, he was doing his best to take credit for his side's progress to another European final. When he eventually grinned his way to the VIP enclosure, he took his seat alongside his counterparts from Liverpool. With none of Berlusconi's European experience, for the Texans Tom Hicks and George Gillett this was all new. How thrilled they were to see that by reaching the all-star continental pennant play-off, their new franchise was expanding its global brand-reach in mouth-watering directions.

 

It was watching events like Wednesday's, and the way in which our leading football clubs have increasingly become vehicles for the politically and financially ambitious, that led a former football journalist called Will Brooks to the conclusion that there must be a better way. What if he could engineer a method in which ownership of a team, instead of lying in the hands of those whose motivation was solely personal, was genuinely communal? What if a system could be found to make a football club once more just that: a club?

 

"I'm a Fulham fan," Brooks says. "I remember, in the dark days of the Eighties, looking round Craven Cottage and thinking that if all the 5,000 people here just put in a few quid each, we could save it together. There was no way you could do that back then. But with the internet, you really do have the tool to do it." So he established www.myfootballclub.co.uk. The idea is a simple one: 50,000 fans will pay £35 each per season, and together they will buy and run a football club. It is an idea that clearly has struck a chord. He launched at the end of April, and already more than 25,000 people - at the rate of more than 400 a day - have signed up to be part of his revolution. At this speed, he will be shopping for a club by the end of June.

 

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"I don't want to sound like a clairvoyant, but I'm really not that surprised," Brooks says. "The idea of fans owning their own club has been around for a while. Everyone sees the sense in it, it's just been a question of finding the wherewithal. Really this is a lot more efficient than shaking a bucket outside the ground."

 

All this has been achieved without a specific club in mind. Brooks doesn't know who will be purchased. That is for the members to decide, via a vote on potential targets, once the money has been raised.

 

"Chris Moyles has been getting his Radio One listeners to sign up in the hope that we could buy Leeds," he says. "At the moment, they are at the top of our voting wish list [with Cambridge second and Accrington third]. But, to be honest, I don't think Leeds is going to happen. It is more likely to be at Conference level, where the promise of more than £1 million a year coming in from our members would be really attractive. Plus, we're about to announce a really big sponsorship deal. This will all be in addition to existing revenue streams. We're talking about making a huge difference: all our money would go into the club, we will take nothing - not one penny - out." Who, though, wants to buy a club they might not even support?

 

"I admit the chances are we won't end up buying the club you want," Brooks says. "But the club we do buy could become your second team. Anyway, you will be much more intimately involved in our club than you ever could be with anyone else." That is because by owning a football club, Brooks really does mean own it. The idea is that £35 buys annual voting membership. Members will democratically decide on everything, from the colour of the paint on the dressing room walls to the price of a cup of Bovril in the refreshment stalls. Trying to get a constituency of 50,000 to agree on such details, however, sounds like a recipe for disaster.

 

"I don't think so," Brooks says. "You can have eight people on a board who can't agree on anything and they can completely paralyse a football club. This way, once a majority has been reached, that's it." That includes the football side of things. In a way that not even the likes of Doug Ellis and Roman Abramovich have been able to engineer, Brooks insists that his members will be both chairman and manager. They will vote to pick the team, decide on tactics, run the rule over possible transfers. A head coach will be appointed who will be obliged to act as instructed by the voting members. Given the rows that erupt in most football clubs when the board attempt to influence playing issues, this is surely the most revolutionary of Brooks' ideas.

 

"I used to work for Match of the Day magazine, and one thing I learned is that people within the game look down on the opinions of fans," Brooks says. "My contention is that the supporters know a lot more than they are given credit for. I think there is a real wisdom in crowds. Decisions can be made quickly by the website, and I think it will give people a fantastic feeling of ownership." Indeed, the sense that £35 a year effectively buys you the right to behave like a football god is an attractive proposition, like playing a live version of those Championship Manager computer games. The question is, however, will any coach be prepared to take the job on, knowing his hands would be tied by internet voting?

 

"Well, I'm sure there will be someone out there happy to get involved in a unique project," Brooks says. "Besides, I'm sure it will be nice for them, if things go wrong, to blame the fans for a change. That's a new inversion, isn't it: football manager blames supporters." As for the man with the idea, he has no ambitions beyond running the website.

 

"I'll have just the one vote, same as everyone else," he says. "I've no interest in becoming chairman of a football club. I'm really not in this for myself." Which is not something that could ever be said about Silvio Berlusconi.

 

[Slartibartfast]

Wow that sounds like a great idea, what happened next?

[Yorkshire Fan]

They all lived happily ever after?

[Slartibartfast]

Even the green eyed monsters who didn't support the lucky club?

[Uncle Urchin]

morning chaps, the article was a cut and paste from independent magazine, there were two others that I found also with fotos of the mysterious mr brooks and his partner michael fiddy who by chance is in insolvency expert and who's claim to football fame was to lose 45 million in one year when he was chief executive at fulham...interestingly enough both people profiles have been deleted for some reason which is strange because they were both already in the public domain...

 

as for your comments fartarse...don't make yourself feel better by convincing yourself that everyone else is jealous of this...more like concerned for you..

[EUFC FAN]

Originally Posted By: Uncle Urchin

"I'll have just the one vote, same as everyone else," he says. "I've no interest in becoming chairman of a football club. I'm really not in this for myself."

...but the creaming 21% off all the 35 quids and selling advert space on the website will not making a poor person will it!!!

[American FLEET FAN No1]

Happy birthday FAN , have a good one!

[Ian Whitchurch]

EUFC fan,

 

I recommend you look into the costs of streaming video. A couple of thousand simultaneous connections wont come that cheap, if they intend to livecast training sessions and matches (assuming the FA is ok with the IP issues).

 

Cheap websites are, well, cheap. But you can spend a lot of money supporting video for many simultaneous users.