Own Your Own English Soccer Team: MyFootballClub

August 18th, 2007 at 7:58 am

as an ex-pro i can say that this is not a particularly good thing, all of your work for selection is done on the training ground over the week, fans decisions will be made purely on performance.
this may even result in players that are not 100% match fit being chosen to play when otherwise a manager would have chosen to start him on the bench and ease him back into fitness.
in addition people on the board are within the football industry do not usually make decisions regarding team selection and tactics, historically when this has happened there have been issues, chelsea & carlisle being the most recent examples.

August 18th, 2007 at 8:16 am

Hi Duncan.

Soccer, here in Europe is a sport all-year-round. I spend plenty of years in US. Although we have American Football, there is nothing like soccer here.

The fans do anything for their club. To be a member of the Real Madrid is more expensive than 70 bucks, and you get a card with a number saying, you are a member: nothing else. To save the club is worth it the technological effort.

I understand that this is news for you.

Mario Ruiz
@ http://www.oursheet.com

PS This is why a group of Americans bought the Liverpool soccer team.

August 18th, 2007 at 8:40 am

This is a tad risky. I mean people who are not on the ground daily could be making massive changes to the club. Which may be influenced by media or popular opinion.

August 18th, 2007 at 9:57 am

I like the idea. Soccer (football) is becoming a bigger and bigger business and everyone wants to get a piece of the action and why not give more voice to the individual who’s buying tickets. More and more EPL teams are being bought up by foreign investors: http://www.soccertraininginfo......_teams.asp

August 18th, 2007 at 10:39 am

You know I am going to monitor this real close. It is really interesting to see how it’s going to turn out. Every fan would love to own a piece of a professional sports team given a reasonable chance.

August 18th, 2007 at 11:26 am

This model is gr8. It should also be applied to startups.

August 18th, 2007 at 12:53 pm

it’s been absolutely incredible.

August 18th, 2007 at 2:52 pm

Not to burst anyone’s bubble, it takes a whole lot more than 1.3 million dollars to buy a club. In Europe, that won’t even buy you one decent player. The Independent newspaper, valued big clubs Arsenal at $567 million and mid range clubs like West Ham at 85 Million, Tottenham at 120 Million pounds. Man United was sold at $790 million and Liverpool at 470 Million pounds. Queens Park Rangers may be bought out for 30 million pounds but that’s a bargain — so my point is that soccer clubs aren’t cheap.

Just for arguments sake, that a lowly English football (soccer) league club cost 20 million, and going by the site signing up 50,000 people raising 1.3 million — that would take roughly 520 milion people to sign up to reach the 20 million pounds mark. That is a ridulously big number! … putting that into perspective, it would take approx. everyone in the WHOLE USA to each sign up TWICE to get that $$$.

One also needs to realize that raising the money to buy a club is just one part, you’ll need a whole more to keep it a float in it’s day to day activities, facilities upkeep, staff salaries, and its league survival to name some. And where is that money going to come from? … if you going to buy a cheap club, the sponsorships and TV endorsements aren’t going to be as good as buying a bigger club — so the owners will eventually need to foot that bill.

My other question is, if they don’t successfully buy a club, what will happen with the money — will everyone get their money back or something?

Third point being, having a club owned and run by that many people will be a nightmare to administer. Could you imagine if everyone tried to vote for a simple decision or club law to be made and come to some sort of disagreement, it’ll be impossible. You’ll also have the guys that paid for ownership that might not make decisions for the best of the club but through their personal judgements — some may not even know what they are talking about, may not have the business knowledge and might just listen to the media and worse case their friends and relatives. The saying “too many cooks spoil the broth” comes to mind.

This seems more like a game than an actual business transaction with the site owners creating false expectations. With the site supported by EA Sports, it might be just that. Spending your money with a Soccer Manager game like Championship Manager or Worldwide Soccer Manager may be a better (and cheaper) than spending it on this and kidding yourselves — hoping it would work out.

Lastly, as intriguing as it is, I do not think that this site is worthy enough to be mentioned on Techcrunch worthy — can’t believe Michael Arrington even allowed this site to be on here.

August 18th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

@ Not Techcrunch worthy! (#16)

20 million divided by 1.3 million = approximately 15.4

50 thousand * 15.4 = 769,230.

So actually, at their current donation rate, it would take around 800 thousand members to get to 20 million pounds. Which is a little less than the 520 million people you think they would need. In fact, if they had that many members they would have around 13 billion dollars, which would probably make them eligible to buy a soccer club or two. (520 million divided by 50 thousand = 10,400. 1.3 million times 10,400 = 13,520,000,000).

August 18th, 2007 at 7:02 pm

How’s L.A. working out for you, Beckham? I see you had 2 assists today.

August 18th, 2007 at 9:39 pm

Although it probably won’t work I do think that it is a great idea. I don’t see how the ‘equal vote’ will work. It might hamper the team if they need to act quickly on a deal and have to wait for people to vote before they can proceed.

I say why stop with a ‘middle-tier’ club. Go all they way to the Premiership, I’m sure that it’s not much more to buy Sunderland.

I’ll donate $69.

http://www.koork.com

August 19th, 2007 at 1:29 am

I am a huge soccer fan, but I believe even a mid-tier english team is going to take “MUCH” more than this site has accumulated thus far. But who knows, this could be a model of things to come.

August 19th, 2007 at 3:30 am

I think the idea is great but running a football is far more complex. All teams want to reach the premiership and they may acquire a team but they will need a lot of money to get the club running and be successful.

I also wonder whether some of the members will still be interested if the club gets relegated or worse still drops into the conference league.

I will be following with great interest to see what happens to this interesting initiative.

August 19th, 2007 at 3:54 am

Another unique way to waste time and money.

August 19th, 2007 at 7:26 am

i hope my team are not a target of this project- if the peope who have bought shares in the company get to make the decisions about transfers and tactics it cannot be a succesful club on the pitch.

August 19th, 2007 at 11:27 am

this story has been doing the rounds for a while… and the best coverage was in the Guardian

http://football.guardian.co.uk.....10,00.html

definitely worth a read

August 19th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

For the latest news of this project, please see

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

Hope to see you on the MYFC forum soon, its great fun, or say hello on to me at myspace

http://www.myspace.com/myfcyorks

best wishes

Yorkfox

August 19th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

#12 “This model is gr8. It should also be applied to startups.”

Interestingly there is a startup that is using this co-op/trust model to reward those members of the community that help them do well. It’s called Cambrian House http://www.cambrianhouse.com/

They call the initiative Community Owned http://www.cambrianhouse.com/h.....ity-owned/

August 20th, 2007 at 4:43 am

I really like the idea, because it is one step further in the direction of a new business order. Wisdom of the crows!!! The only questionsmark for me is whether the public media will influence the individual decision to dramatically (See Hary Seldon on Psychohistory) and therefore no independent decision making takes places (Also the reason for stock market crashes).
Anyway I will participate.

Pros