Adam, I enjoyed your article and have cherry picked a bit for a round up of media on this subject for my blog Please email me if you had rather I didn’t!

I have a small blog which notes my personal thoughts on the matter, as well as the name change from earlier in the year.

Just another note: I really like twohundredpercent, but really!

“Ultimately, this club has been sold to be the plaything of a few thousand would-be Alex Fergusons.”

As opposed to the bigger, ultimately more significant clubs being transformed into cash machines for leveraged-buyout mavens, human rights-abusing international fugitives, and litigation-happy thugs?

I’ll take the idealistic “internet geeks” (what are we? we’re on the internet, right?) and Fergie wannabes everyday, thankyouverymuch.

Metrologist — I’m heartened by your comments. I think I may join myself to see what it’s like. But there are still concerns about the set-up that I’ll go into in more detail in another post shortly.

Random thoughts:

As noted a couple days ago, I decided to throw my money myfc’s way a couple months ago, so I’m not completely unbiased on this. Waking up and catching this news first thing in the morning - I’m excited. Realistic, but excited.

To comment on this part about supporter ownership in the lower leagues:
“That kind of native effort is, of course, vastly different from myfootballclub.co.uk’s approach.”

While myfc isn’t a “native” effort as some other supporters trusts, I think (in fact, I TRUST) that the “acquisition team” (for lack of a better term) and the 20,000-odd people who’ve stumped up their #35 have taken and will continue to take pains to preserve the existing traditions and culture of Ebbsfleet United, formally and informally. This is absolutely essential in my eyes, and I (for what it’s worth) would be against anything that degrades or overwhelms what the supporters. We as “owners” should tread very lightly.

I suppose some unkind wags could question the very basis for such statements about club culture, since we’re talking about a non-conference club that has gone through an identity change of sorts not many years ago, to go with a merger decades ago. No, it’s not exactly Barca. But I’m particularly sensitive to this line, having been a fan of a third-tier, non big-league team (in the Metros) that others perceived to have “no tradition” when RB took over. Nothing pissed me off so much as that - how ignorant. A comparatively short and inglorious tradition, produced and shared by a couple thousand people, is a worthwhile tradition nonetheless; it was true for Metro and of course it is true for Ebbsfleet United, which is a far older club. It really doesn’t matter where on the pyramid it lies.

That’s my stance, anyway. I think, just from gleaning the myfc forums a while, that the vast majority of people there “get it.” They may not all be local in the sense of living in the area, but that does not mean they aren’t driven to preserve the native character of the club. On the contrary, I think the group has a pretty high ratio of enlightened, right-on, participatory-democratic types, who are inclined to act in ways that enrich and serve the club and its community.

So the naysayers don’t bother me - they may be right in the end, for all we know. Only the people who don’t quite understand the project, and imagine that the next move is to rebrand the club MYFC FC or something gimmicky like that. That’s not on the agenda. No, I think there’s potential for a good marriage of technology and traditionalism here.

Further, I think there’s some real validity to the “Wisdom of Crowds” approach (which, as some people on the myfc board have said, this is not *precisely*, though there are certainly important elements of it). Naif (and complex-systems-buff!) that I am, I do believe that the combined attention of thousands of amateur but motivated supporters-scout-critic-managers can be of benefit to this club. As someone else said somewhere, while the supporters, acting collectively, may not always make great decisions, this kind of process makes it extremely likely that the club will avoid disastrous decisions. I don’t necessarily think the team will now rise irresistibly to the Premiership - not that that should be the criteria. I do imagine it’ll be stable, well-financed, well-attended club for its level. And I believe (and hope) that beyond getting caught up with the fortunes on the field, the kind of people getting involved are likely to recognize the part a club plays in its community, and will seek to strengthen, not corrupt those ties.