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My New Year’s resolution: Buy a football club Most
people like to try something different in the New Year. The over-excesses
of Christmas force many towards their local gym or park to exercise dementedly
until they get bored of the whole thing and go back to drinking themselves
stupid to escape the frenzied pressures of modern life.
Having been down that particular road once — I ran out of breath
on the way down and had to walk back — your columnist has come up
with a new and interesting hobby for the New Year, one that involves football
but not any form of exercise. Clever or what?
A few weeks back I paid £35 to join myfootballclub.co.uk, a website
formed to allow football supporters to club their resources together to
both buy and run a professional club.
In this world of Glazers, Abramovichs and Shinawatras the premise behind
the website is to return some semblance of power to supporters by allowing
them to collectively dictate how their football club should be run.
Your £35 membership fee entitles you to a say in team selection,
the right to endorse or veto transfers in and out of the club and the
casting vote on sponsorship deals, television rights and a host of other
commercial decisions. It’s basically Championship Manager, the highly-addictive
computer game, in real-life form.
By November this year myfootballclub.co.uk had more than 25,000 members
giving it a war chest of almost £1million to buy a football club.
Towards the end of that month the Trust that acts on behalf of the website
confirmed that they had agreed a deal with the owners of Ebbsfleet United
to purchase the Blue Square Premier (formerly the Vauxhall Conference)
side for its members.
Ebbsfleet United were known as Gravesend and Northfleet until May 2007
when the club decided to change its name on the back of the new Eurostar
station that was to be located in deepest Kent.
A generous kit-sponsorship strip from the kind people at Eurostar no doubt
influenced their decision to turn their back on the club’s history.
Not that the club has all that much of a history. Gravesend and Northfleet
joined forces as recently as 1946 because neither team could field a team
of their own after the Second World War with Northfleet effectively acting
as a nursery club for Tottenham until that point.
Over the past 60 or so years the club have competed in the amateur Southern
and Ryman Leagues before earning promotion to the Conference — or
the Blue Square Premier as they like to call it these days — five
seasons ago. There’s an Irish connection too with Liam Daish, who
earned five Irish caps in the 1990s, managing the side and Paul McCarthy,
the former Irish under-21 teammate of Roy Keane, still playing at 36 years
of age.
Right now they sit just outside the play-off places in the division and
it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the now fully-professional
outfit could be playing in Coca-Cola League Two next season.
See, I’ve already begun to dream of what might be but if I think
with my head rather than my wild imagination for a moment it’s very
difficult to see how the whole operation is going to work.
The theory on team selection for example is that members will vote on
a number of different selections and formation three days before a game
and that Daish will simply have to do the best with the players he’s
been served up.
The Trust have done a deal with ProZone, the football statistics people,
to ensure that detailed match statistics on every player will be available
on the website as well as extensive highlights of Ebbsfleet’s previous
games.
The idea is that with a selection committee of more than 25,000, the right
team will always be picked because the uninformed and those looking to
have a bit of a laugh will be outvoted by the majority who the Trust hope
are taking the whole thing seriously.
You have to feel sorry for Daish in all of this. This is a guinea pig
project and he, more than anyone else involved in this great experiment,
is the chief guinea pig.
But the whole experiment does have its merits even if some of its methods
may have to be refined on a trial-and-error basis as the season goes on.
For one, any player clearly not pulling his weight in the eyes of the
members will be replaced by the click of a mouse.
At Tottenham this year I’d have dropped Younes Kaboul months ago
and dispatched him on loan to, well, somewhere like Ebbsfleet until he
learned how to defend properly. Now, with Ebbsfleet, I can do this or
at least attempt to, rather than just talk about it to anybody who will
listen.
The deal, although announced in November, still hasn’t officially
gone through but the hope is that early in the New Year me and my 25,000
mates will be running a proper football club from top to bottom.
So good luck on the treadmill or in the park. I’ll be thinking of
you while I’m changing the football world from the couch.
n ciarancronin3@eircom.net |
