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How much say should us fans and supporters have within a club? I mean after all it is our club. Owners, staff, players, they all pass through and aren’t here for the long haul. It’s extremely rare these days to see anything within those category of people investing years and time.
Of course there are exceptions always but by and large it’s a small percentage. The fan owned model of a football club is seen by some as the perfect way to run a sustainable business, more and more this is being looked at as the way forward.
However, they are up against those who can spend moderate or lavish sums on players, on wages and facilities and in a lot of cases they just can’t compete.
We have seen some models used differently in the past such as the failed ‘MyFootballClub’ experiment. For £35 a year you could be an ‘owner’ as part of Ebbsfleet Utd in 2007 and 23,000 people did take up the offer from Will Brooks generating around £500,000.
Brooks had promised supporters involvement in team selection, formations and signing players to name a few parts of the project which drew a blank early on.
Needless to say the project failed as the Fleet despite winning two cup competitions finished 11th in the table and interest began to decline. By 2013 MyFC had sold the club on and were never heard of again.
What promised so much within it’s early concept delivered very little inside five years and almost sent the club into oblivion.
Fans can certainly let hearts rule heads, that would be expected being they are invested day in, day out from the moment they start supporting until their last breath.
Some clubs do welcome fan involvement on anything from small scale such as kit design to a place on the board as the bridge between the boardroom and the terraces.
There are clubs out there who have fantastic supporters associations that assist with the running of clubs, organising away travel and at times being there to assist financially when there are club struggles.
Those helping out and on the board are all volunteers on the whole. The time they invest having done it myself at Step 6 is incredible. If you add all those saved hours without pay clubs are indebted to these people up and down the land and save them a huge amount of money.
There are some very good owners out there, the rogue ones still appear causing destruction and devastation across the game. Whilst fan owned clubs struggle to compete with the deeper pockets of others they are sustainable and not threatened in most cases.
Fan involvement should become a pre-requisite to ensure that representation is heard and remains whoever owns a club going forward. While they may only have a single vote, it’s a voice that has to be listened to.
