“anything but participation” is an ironic phrase - gee golly, where else does one even get participation - but you’re correct: the Akinde vote is merely consultative. I wrote that in my previous comment. Consulting the same people who can vote for new board members and thus indirectly shorten the CEO’s and manager’s contracts, that is, so not entirely pointless.

Your emphasis on the alleged sham puzzles me, however. Do you know the manager? Have you heard him say that he’ll fill out the lineup card (please excuse the Americanism) however he wishes? Have you read the 18-month contract he signed after the society acquired the rights to 75% of the club in November (not the actual 75% - that didn’t happen until February)? What is your evidence that he won’t fulfill his contract?

Parts of the MyFC story have been disappointing - even to the website founder - and we’ve lost some good members because they were so disappointed that they would agree that MyFC is a sham…but Daish *possibly* refusing to follow voting results isn’t even on the list of reasons.

Where are your facts, Harry?

The whole thing is a sham - the members *cannot* pick the team.

As for the “vote” for selling Akinde, the vote doesn’t offer anything to the members but participation - there is NO decision making authority, so it’s a pointless exercise.

Four hours ago, I cast a vote to ask “the incumbent manager” (as you call him) to pick the team for me for the Oxford United match on Saturday. I don’t care whether or not he cares what other members like the team to be - I want him to use his best judgment. I vote that way because given the options, I believe it’s the most responsible thing for me to do as a society member.

So far, for every match a majority of the voters have agreed with me. When a majority disagree with me, then a compilation of the majority’s picks (formation and personnel) will start the game. Maybe my trust in the vote counters is misplaced, but perhaps you ought to instead ask yourself why, in spite of the tagline, a majority of voters would agree to have Daish pick the team for them.

Yeah, if we had it to do over again, I might have posted more forcefully that the website owner should have used our money to buy a club that wanted its manager to go to hell (instead of one where the life-long Gravesend and Northfleet - aka Ebbsfleet - supporters appear to want him on a ten-year contract) but this is the club we bought. And I intend to use the limited input I have as a society member responsibly.

Should be interesting to see the results of the consultation vote for selling Akinde.

There is only one person who is going to pick the team for all the matches this season, and that’s the incumbent manager.

EUFC is not owned by the “guys who set the whole thing up”; 75% of the club is owned by the society.

And the society *is* picking the team now. A solid majority of voters is doing that by voting for Liam Daish to use his best judgment. After all, we pay the guy all that money and he led the club to an FA Trophy…That’s very different from “NOT have the option”.

They are now told they will NOT have the option to pick the team after all.

the club is *not* “owned primarily by the guys who set the whole thing up”. It’s owned by the society. And if the society sells the club, “the guys who set the whole thing up” don’t get any money. And the guys don’t get any future money, assuming the new owners don’t want to use the website owned by “the guys who set the whole thing up”. How the society is going to choose a charity to get the sale proceeds, that’s a question.

The society has *not* been told “that they will NOT have the option to pick the team after all”. Some English journalists have written that, but it’s simply not the case. Members are still discussing how to do it. After all, the society is still paying good money for a manager’n'coaching staff that has been doing an excellent job on a below-average budget, and more members are getting less excited about picking the team. (I’m hoping the society will vote to postpone picking the team until the manager chooses to leave, but I’m in a minority so far.)

And “soccer”, you should explain why you believe it’s unworkable. The team picked by the members usually has nine or ten members in common with the manager’s picks. The difference for some of the matches has been whether players were deemed fit or not at the last minute (and in some cases, the members were not even told the players were questionable for the game). The big differences have occurred when the manager and the members disagreed on the importance of a particular game. There have been some discussions about using different formations than the manager, but the manager himself has used three different formations so the discussion isn’t unreasonable. And this was with the manager providing little or no input before the games; if he wanted to get a certain selection, he could justify it with a paragraph or two (yeah, I know - not his favorite thing to do), and members would roll with it.

The leader of “the guys who set this all up” was watching his side at home (Fulham at Craven Cottage) several years ago, wondering why a group of fans couldn’t do just as good a job as picking the team. Now deeply engrossed in a club and his group’s website, he’s learning why. We’ll see how this goes.

I have to agree with you but the more I think about it, the more unworkable it would be if every team position and selection was voted by each and every owner. As the articles suggests, most people don.t even watch 90 mins of the game……many people don’t even live in the UK.

They are now told they will NOT have the option to pick the team after all.