Football club ownership: The Ebbsfleet model

[Acker79]

I would like to see a supporter's representative on the Board of Directors. And not a Horseman.

Someone elected by the fans, such as in spanish football?

 

[Tooting Gull]

It is a great post by FatAddick, in the sense shows exactly what has happened there. But I still don't understand why you as a Charlton fan got involved. Weren't you just messing about with someone else's club, for the same pleasure you might get from playing Football Manager?

And the bit I don't get is how you sound almost resentful that the views of actual Ebbsfleet fans became more important. Outrageous. The people who went before this started, and will still be going when it collapses. Yet you claim it was run "too much for the benefit of the local fans", and sound miffed that those attending has more clout than the internet crowd. I'm sorry, that doesn't compute at all.

Maybe the whole thing was just a shit idea in the first place.

 

[Acker79]

And the bit I don't get is how you sound almost resentful that the views of actual Ebbsfleet fans became more important. Outrageous. The people who went before this started, and will still be going when it collapses. Yet you claim it was run "too much for the benefit of the local fans", and sound miffed that those attending has more clout than the internet crowd. I'm sorry, that doesn't compute at all.

Should the good folk of NSC have more control of the albion than Tony Bloom? Should we decide the team? Should we decide who gets employed?

 

[Easy 10]

There's perhaps a degree of fault on both sides.
The internet majority for spending a relatively small sum to buy into it for a chance of a dabble in a real live Championship Manager, and then getting disillusioned with the ACTUAL level of input they were being afforded....and the local Ebbsfleet fans who were perhaps hoping or expecting this to turn into a self-financing, future-securing blueprint on running a small club with the financial clout of several thousand regular subscribers.

I dunno whether the genuine, match-attending Ebbsfleet fans really bought into this from the start - I suspect many of them were dead against it. In hindsight it was always an experiment doomed to failure.

 

[Tooting Gull]

Should the good folk of NSC have more control of the albion than Tony Bloom? Should we decide the team? Should we decide who gets employed?

Eh? I don't understand your point, seems like a totally different and unrelated question and I think you've confused several issues. This is about 33,000 internet members vs 800 regular fans at Ebbsfleet. What are you on about with Bloom, and where does he come in to this?

But for what its worth, AS LONG AS you've got the right person/board in charge (and we have some perspective there), I'd leave it up to the professionals every time. And the idea of NSC running anything would fill me with dread.

 

[Gwylan]

In Animal Farm the Pigs were in control and they made a pig's ear of it.

I suggest that you read Animal Farm before making comments on it. You'd then find out how far from the truth that remark is.

 

[Easy 10]

Or borrow El Pres's DVD.
Quite an eye opener.

 

[Pavilionaire]

More like "sty-opener"...

 

[Acker79]

Eh? I don't understand your point, seems like a totally different and unrelated question and I think you've confused several issues. This is about 33,000 internet members vs 800 regular fans at Ebbsfleet. What are you on about with Bloom, and where does he come in to this?

But for what its worth, AS LONG AS you've got the right person/board in charge (and we have some perspective there), I'd leave it up to the professionals every time. And the idea of NSC running anything would fill me with dread.

The 33,000 internet members are officially the clubs owners. They are putting the money in. That makes them equivalent of Tony Bloom. That's why they have every right to feel their view point is more important than the fans who showed up before them.

 

[fataddick]

It is a great post by FatAddick, in the sense shows exactly what has happened there. But I still don't understand why you as a Charlton fan got involved. Weren't you just messing about with someone else's club, for the same pleasure you might get from playing Football Manager?

And the bit I don't get is how you sound almost resentful that the views of actual Ebbsfleet fans became more important. Outrageous. The people who went before this started, and will still be going when it collapses. Yet you claim it was run "too much for the benefit of the local fans", and sound miffed that those attending has more clout than the internet crowd. I'm sorry, that doesn't compute at all.

Maybe the whole thing was just a shit idea in the first place.

I joined, like most of the 33k, many months before the club had been chosen, largely out of curiosity to see how the thing would work. When Ebbsfleet United was put forward I argued in favour of a no vote (and voted no myself) for several reasons:

(1) The hostility of the Ebbsfleet fans, whose message board members were a good 80%+ totally opposed to the MyFC takeover from the outset. I didn't think the club was a good choice on that basis. The internet fans of many other clubs MyFC had been linked to, such as Leigh RMI and Halifax, were generally much more positive towards the idea.

In retrospect: I was correct, but I got it the wrong way round. Rather than causing hostility, the tension and pressure from Ebbsfleet fans caused MyFC's elite to pander too readily to them, to the extent of diluting the core appeal of MyFC. This is why MyFC failed, and Ebbsfleet United is now on the brink of administration. In a way Ebbsfleet's fans have cut off their nose to spite their face. More compromise may have led the MyFC experiment to succeed, expand and provide a genuine constant injection of cash to help EUFC climb the league. I guess we'll never know though.

(2) I thought the amount of debt EUFC was accruing was much too high, and it would make more sense to pick a club lower down the pyramid with less debt and more room for growth. People were blinded by the "one promotion away from being a league club" element of choosing Ebbsfleet, I feel.

In retrospect: The debt is in fact double what we were told back then. Had MyFC retained 20k+ members, it may have been maintainable, but with no room to invest/grow. As it is, with 4k members and falling, MyFC will soon pull the plug. A smaller club would indeed have likely been a better bet.

(3) I was worried that if MyFC succeeded and Ebbsfleet grew, it would start challenging Charlton for new/neutral supporters - eg people from the new Thames Gateway housing project - which would be detrimental to the only club I have any true loyalty to.

In retrospect: I was being hopelessly optimistic about MyFC's success, as we all were back then. And also selfish, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Why do I have a problem with the Ebbsfleet fans? I don't, but I think the attitude of many towards MyFC is a little like a starving African child spitting rice back in an Oxfam worker's face. Let's get this straight, random football fans from all over the world have donated over a million pounds to a non-league club in Kent. Money that paid off the majority of their debt, kept them running for two years they would otherwise have been insolvent, and allowed them to hold onto players that might otherwise have left, at least for long enough to win the FA Trophy, their first major honour I believe. I think that deserves some degree of gratitude rather than hostility.

There are MyFC members who travel regularly to Ebbsfleet (a team they had no prior links/affections towards) games home and away from places like York and Leicester. Why they would want to do this - rather than go and watch the team they actually support - I don't know, but they do. Many fly over from the States for the odd game or too. Strange behaviour, but I think that should be appreciated.

MyFC was a great idea in principle, it just failed through a combination of ego, greed, and choosing the wrong club to begin with. [Incidentally, ex-MyFC insiders have intimated that the people behind MyFC had been in discussions with Ebbsfleet before the website was even set up, and the whole thing was a fait accompli from the outset. Don;t know if that's true, but if it is, the only real beneficiary of the whole scheme is the former Ebbsfleet chairman who had hundreds of thousands of pounds of his loans to the club paid off by the MyFC members.]

In retrospect, most people seem to agree the sensible thing would have been to have set up a brand new club. No existing fans (and general football supporter sensibilities) to offend, and more room to adjust investment and ambitions on seeing how well/badly the whole project worked. Hindsight, eh?

 

[Gritt23]

The Ebbsfleet 'model' failed largely as a result of the actions of a handful of members. In Animal Farm stylee, five or six members (plus the guy who set up MyFC in the first place) decided they knew better than the rest of the membership, and started deciding what people could or couldn't vote on.

Even before the Ebbsfleet takeover, it was clear that the 33,000 members had been sold a lie. We were told we would have a choice of four or five clubs to take over; as it was the choice was "Ebbsfleet or nothing". We were told Ebbsfleet United was losing 400k a year, in actual fact the sum was 800k a year (quite a difference, and something that only became apparent a year down the line). Original promises like 'pick the team' - controversial, but clearly one of the things that drew so many people to join in the first place - were pretty much ignored.

Anyone who asked too many questions - such as myself - was simply banned from the message boards (on the simple say so of the out-of-work journalist who set MyFC up). A mass cull of around twenty of the most vocal non-ruling clique members on one day made it clear to everyone else just what sort of a system MyFC was being run by. "Putin democracy" as someone christened it.

The net effect was that the membership fell from 33k in the first year to 9.5k in the second, and they have just entered the third year with around 4k members (this number dropping daily). There's a shortfall of around £150k to even run the club to the end of the season, hence they are now looking to become a limited company and sell shares, with one or two of the richer members like to be become majority owners. They're essentially returning to a normal method of club ownership, with the whole 'internet community-run' angle having very visibly failed.

Is that because they weren't local fans? On the contrary, MyFC ran EUFC too much for the benefit of local fans, so keen were they not to alienate them. So the views of a core of about 800 people who attended games - whether they belonged to MyFC or not - were listened to in place of the 33,000 members. That's why such things as 'pick the team' (justly unpopular with Ebbsfleet fans) were dropped, causing membership to drop to levels where MyFC can no longer finance the club. When it became clear that Ebbsfleet's debt accrual had been vastly underestimated, instead of looking to sell the club on and buy someone more financially realistic (as a truly independent internet community ought to be able to) the MyFC poiltbureau were so wedded to the Ebbsfleet fanbase, any such suggestions were immediately laughed off. MyFC had quite simply become a collective giving free money to Ebbsfleet United FC, nothing more and nothing less.

So what became of the circa £1.5m (plus various other whiprounds) the internet geeks have pumped into MyFC to date? Around £350k went to Will Brooks, the guy who set up the website (and his company), around £600-700k went to the previous Chairman Brian Kilcullen, and the rest went on maintaining the debt. Kilcullen, incidentally, was recently offered the club back for free and refused. He is also, despite the financial turmoil Ebbsfleet are in, insisting that the 40-50k a year he is still owed (for the next 13 years) as part of the purchase agreement is paid, ie money that would keep Ebbsfleet going for a month will instead be going into his pocket.

You can talk till you're blue in the face about "community ownership models", but (in this country at least) the greediest, wealthiest and/or most ego-driven handful of individuals will always take control (and any potential profit) no matter what the ideals of the original model were. C'est la vie.

Quite a bit I disagree with in that post, not too sure where to start.

The idea was indeed flawed from the very start, and far too many of those original 33,000 were as wrapped up in the fantasy as you clearly are, and could never deal with the reality of owning a football club.

"Pick the team" was something that surely stank to any football fan. We all throw our hands up at any owner influence over a manager when it comes to players and picking the team, and yet MYFC wanted to make that a central focus of what they stood for. Not just interference, but actually openly PICKING THE TEAM.

Any NSCer knows how we all have vastly different opinions of players, and just take a moment to imagine NSC expanding to 33,000 members voting on Saturdays team. Are you imagining? Carnage innit. FDM would be in and out of the team depending on who's online, Elphick would have been prematurely dropped the other week, Forster would have been run out of town, not to mention the endless list of young strikers getting thrown in the moment they score twice in the stiffs. Any yet fataddick, you seem to STILL believe that is something that should be done. Would Daish stay? If he didn't would you expect much of a queue at the door to replace him knowing they work for that most hated of all owners, the owner that interfers in team selection? Would you want it at Charlton, would anyone on here want NSC to pick the team rather than Gus? HONESTLY?

Even worse you complain that "MyFC ran EUFC too much for the benefit of local fans". That's where you show how completely wrong you have got it and again how diametrically opposed you are to what most of us want from an owner of OUR club. An owner who runs it for their own benefit rather than in the best interests of the local fans is an HORRENDOUS approach. It was that sort of attitude that the Glaziers, and dare I say Archers of this World have.

Sorry, but a good club owner is doing a thankless task. He is running it for the fans, and dealing with their moaning that they are not spending enough whenever they lose. It's not a bit of fun, it hard work, expensive and ultimately a thankless task. Take the approach of putting the owners before the fans and you are marching down the road to protests and Fans Utd days to oust you.

I do have sympathy with the majority of the 33,000 who were led astray down a fantasy idea. But quite how any football fan can still be defending the ideas such as "pick the team" is just totally beyond me.


The move to return to a more traditional ownership, and allowing the spectre of selling shares to a third party got my vote because the MYFC idea was fatally flawed, and any other move at this stage would only be to compound the failings as they refuse to get out when the club need MYFC to. To flatly refuse to have any other ownership come in would be to stick your head in the sand until the club went bust, and that my friend would be unforgivable.

 

[Pavilionaire]

33,000 members, an FA trophy victory, 26,000 fans turned up that day. MyFC couldn't have asked for a better start than that. If the organisers had kept the members onside might it just have worked?

If you go for a smaller club then it wouldn't have had the initial appeal Ebbsfleet did. I can see the appeal of a Thames Corridor club and the potential that might have over, say, a Halifax.

 

[perseus]

Independent Democratic Supporter's Club

Someone elected by the fans, such as in spanish football?

A representative from the Supporter's Club. I don't think it will happen. Even then, he (or she) would get outvoted as the Supporter's Club shares are likely to be a small proportion of the major holding.

Hey Ref!
The Supporter's Club propose broad blue and white stripes. Veto, the Chairman's wife likes Black.

 

[perseus]

Pigs still can't Fly

I suggest that you read Animal Farm before making comments on it. You'd then find out how far from the truth that remark is.

Napoleon was labouring under the mistaken impression he was a Wolf (like Gordon Brown) in Pig's clothing. Arguable he was a Big Cat, more probably just Top Dog. Blue Lizards would not be allowed on the Farm.

 

[Beach Hut]

Just goes to show Attila's comments are just idealistic nonsense.

How dare you criticise, I would have expected the wrath of the NSC brigade for saying this

 

[Easy 10]

Medication
Medication
Medications what you need.