In the past few days, there have been rumours that Google and Apple are both considering a bid for the broadcasting rights to the Premier League when they come up for renewal later this year. They remain just that – rumours – and it seems likely that Apple won’t bid, while there is nothing to indicate yet that Google may consider making a sizeable investment in English football broadcast rights. But with both companies expected to move further into the TV and broadcasting industry, it does show other leagues and sports that it may be worth thinking outside the traditional broadcasting methods. Indeed, for some, it may be the only way to grow and survive.

Under the current broadcast rights deal, Sky is paying around £1.6bn to show 115 live Premier League games per season, with ESPN broadcasting the final package of games. Under a deal with the European Commission, the Premier League had to ensure that the six packages were divided between more than one broadcaster. That deal has now expired, although the Premier League is unlikely to risk another legal battle by awarding all games to Sky (or, more unlikely, another broadcaster).

The amounts of money involved are quite staggering and few broadcasters can afford them. Even lower down the English league pyramid structure, where rights are nowhere near as expensive, the cost of producing live games or even highlight shows are still high enough to be questionable in terms of cost-effectiveness. Due to budget cuts, the BBC opted not to show Football League highlights during the recent festive period, despite a full set of fixtures, while in non-League Premier Sports opted to pull out of screening Darlington versus Barrow last season rather than risk sending a crew to a game that stood a possibility of being called off.

And yet with the growth of the internet and the willingness over the past few seasons for broadcasters to snap up as many sport and football rights as possible, fans have been treated to a proliferation of football across a range of platforms to the extent that it’s almost expected that non-Premier League games and highlights will be if not free, then at least readily available. Never mind that football has had its fingers burnt twice in the past with the collapse of both ITV Digital and Setanta, the expectation is there.

This, however, overlooks the fact that if non-Premier League football was thought to be profitable for broadcasters, they would be rushing to show more of it. Ratings for ESPN’s foreign league coverage are low in the UK, while the expense involved for lower league games is high. That none of the commercial broadcasters other than Sky have made a serious play for these live matches in recent years tells its own story. Only the BBC, with its public service commitments, could make a sensible argument for broadcasting lower league football, and with their proposed Delivering Quality First cuts – especially around local radio commentaries – even Auntie appears to be scaling back lower league coverage.

This, then, is the state of football broadcasting in the UK at the moment. Rights for live Premier League games are so expensive to bid for that only a small handful of broadcasters – Sky, ESPN and, given their recent acquisitions of French rights, probably al-Jazeera – are able to offer the vast sums required, while the lower leagues are too expensive to produce to make a serious challenge to Sky for the rights (or, in the case of Premier Sports and their deal to broadcast non-League football, hardly enriching for the clubs involved).

Which is why looking outside of the traditional mediums could be seen as a good thing. For the Premier League, should Apple and Google, two companies with the financial clout to challenge Sky, decide to bid then it could herald the much-needed shake-up of the current near-monopoly on top flight rights. For lower leagues, exploring non-linear options are, quite simply, a must if they are to at least stand a chance of reaching existing fans and new audiences. A new generation of internet connected app-friendly televisions are on the way powered by familiar OS and Android platforms. While it may be a tad hyperbolic to proclaim these will change the way you watch TV forever, we’re already seeing the current generation of IPTVs having a slight shift on the way we consume our television. The world of streaming, tablets, phones and TV is amalgamating as one.

Of the realistic options, Apple appear to be the most curious of those rumoured. The tech company already has a deal in place with Sky to show archive footage through iTunes, while Sky’s successful Sky Go mobile and tablet apps currently offer a slick Premier League broadcasting experience on the iPhone and iPad.

Bidding for expensive UK Premier League rights would also represent something of a risk for Apple, given football’s standing in the US, although globally, given the Premier League’s appeal, it could prove to be a sound piece of business, especially in the long term if it secures the US rights to the competition given the growing appeal of the “EPL” on that side of the Atlantic. But any movement on this, if it were to materialise, would as likely depend on the offerings of Apple TV, how it develops and whether it becomes a mass-market product.

The search giant Google, however, would seem to be much more of a natural fit for broadcasting rights. They already own YouTube, which signed a two year deal to broadcast the Indian Premier League cricket. Under YouTube’s stewardship, the channel racked up a cool 50 million views. In comparison, current rights holder Times India’s channel, which is produced in conjunction with Google, has just under 15 millions views. The appetite and familiarity with well known sporting brands is, it appears, present online and is not discouraged by a non-traditional media company owning the rights.

For Google, the infrastructure (including Android), not to mention the money, is in place, although one complication may be the ongoing copyright dispute between the Premier League and YouTube. Google have also recently shed many extra projects as they get behind their core offerings (while continuing to innovate), and the video Hangouts on Google+ raise an interesting possibility of shared viewing experiences between friends or fans of clubs through special individual channels. There are so many possibilities for sports broadcasting on Google – be it TV, apps, online or social network – it would be easy to spend a whole article speculating on what these may be, but suffice to say the barriers offered by traditional broadcasters would be broken down should the leagues be willing to do so – itself a big sticking point.

It is also worth, briefly, considering Facebook. The social behemoth may not have been mentioned thus far but they have already shown that, on a smaller scale, they can very competently handle sports broadcasting. Budweiser and the FA’s streaming of the Extra Preliminary FA Cup Qualifying tie between Ascot United and Wembley FC may have been a one-off novelty but was a smooth, entertaining and enjoyable experience. Liking Budweiser’s page was a small price to pay for a professional broadcast and the online viewing figures of 27,000 were more than even ITV4 gets for some Europa League matches.

Facebook’s goal of being at the heart of everybody’s lives would fit with acquiring sports rights (especially as the majority of work making it broadcast-ready would probably be done by the partners). It is not hard to envisage live streaming of games through the social network or via the Facebook app on your TV. Again, the restrictions here are unlikely to be on Facebook’s part but from the Premier League or any other body selling their live broadcast rights.

For the Premier League, they have the luxury of picking and choosing, such is the strength and popularity of the product they are selling. Whether they’d be willing to relinquish their grip and allow any sort of fragmentation from the new media companies potentially interested in their rights is another question. For the lower leagues, it is up to them to seize the initiative.

What would the Football League be worth if the rights were sold to Facebook or Google? Would more people be inclined to subscribe or sign-up to an app on a new generation IPTV? Could revenue be raised through pay-per-view subscriptions as well as longer subscriptions? Would lower league or non-League games attract higher audiences if they were streamed via the official page on Facebook or via YouTube? And if these games were readily available to the casual lower league fan, what impact would this have on attendances? None of these questions are easy or even possible to answer, but need to be asked or considered, at the very least.

Or could we yet see a situation where it is not the league who negotiate the deal for the rights, but an enterprising club? Think of the individual rights that are negotiated by La Liga clubs in Spain, but then fragmented and offered to a range of platforms and tech or social companies, not the traditional broadcasters.

Already the individual leagues risk being left far behind when it comes to mobile or TV app development, if they have even considered it. Broadcasters and other companies know that mobile viewing – be it on a phone or tablet – will provide a significant market in the future. Whether the leagues are following suit is debatable.

We could potentially reach a point where an enterprising club with an abnormal fan base for the division they are in – say Luton or Bradford, for example – decide to cut out the middle man and go direct to Google and stream through the official Luton Town YouTube channel and offer special Luton Town viewing hangouts with post-match viewer-engaged content via Hangouts on Google+. Or perhaps the game will be streamed via the official Bradford City Facebook page and IPTV app, with all the social benefits that this brings, not to mention the marketing advantages such a channel offers to the club.

And if these lower league clubs are successful, the bigger clubs will almost certainly want their slice of the action. Perhaps we may face a future where you purchase the Facebook app but opt to watch through the dedicated Manchester City channel rather than the main broadcast, or a host of other fragmented options, while chatting to other fans of the same persuasion during the match. Fanciful? Perhaps. But you can already see the foundations of virtual stadiums just through this method, and this probably only discusses a small part of what could be achieved.

But this does get ahead of what would currently be required. For both Football League and Premier League clubs, there would need to be a majority vote to abandon the collective agreement on income from these football rights. To do so would be hugely controversial and go against the very fabric of the game in Britain. Yet with governing bodies often some way behind clubs and technology in both adoption and thinking, the question is how prepared clubs would be to miss out if a new route makes them more money.

Certainly the aforementioned Manchester City are already leading the way, digitally. Their website is rightly lauded as one of the best in the country and their YouTube channel is both slick and engaging. Should opportunities open up for exploiting online viewing, it is clubs such as City who are likely to be at the forefront. The infrastructure and planning is in place, it is just the league itself that prevents them from maximising their online potential in terms of use of live broadcasts and highlights.

Given football broadcast rights are complicated enough as it is, perhaps we may see another layer added for tablet or TV apps rather than channels accessed through a browser. Perhaps it is these clubs may look to exploit separately rather than collectively. Could online prove an exception and break the collective agreement? Technologically, there are many attractive and exciting reasons for doing so. Legally it may prove more different, and morally it does not sit comfortably with the idea of keeping the game competitive (and would, as likely, provoke a similar reaction to Liverpool’s executive Ian Ayre raising the notion of clubs individually negotiating their international broadcast rights).

Whether these changes in technology and broadcast viewing habits would improve top flight football, or simply serve to make it more tribal and take it further away from its roots is an another question, although one you feel the clubs and league won’t worry to much about if it proves successful, even if they are unable to negotiate individual rights. In an online medium very much concerned with openness and equality, any success in this area could serve to make the bigger clubs even richer. For the Premier League it’s a welcome addition to have on the table. For the smaller clubs, it may become a necessity.

Yes, they may have both a Russian tycoon in Alisher Usmanov and an American billionaire investor in Stan Kroenke, but the club has been run by the Hill-Wood family since 1929 and takes pride in their plurality of ownership. What’s more, unlike several of England’s bigger clubs, the relationship between the board and the fans has always been generally good.

It’s not really a surprise, then, that Arsenal have become the first Premier League club to give their backing to a scheme from the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust (AST) that will see fans pooling their money in order to purchase shares in the club in an attempt to increase the voice of the fans inside the marble halls.

But while this is a first in the English top flight, it’s too early to say just how effective the Fanshare scheme will be. Some bloggers, notably Ahmed Bilal from Soccerlens, have criticised the scheme for promising more than he believes it can deliver

Arsenal fans who aren’t Trust members have initially appeared to give a cautious yet optimistic welcome to the plans. The main question, though, is will this really make a difference to the Gunners?

A fan-filled future at the Emirates

The scheme itself is reasonably simple. The current going rate for one Arsenal share is £10,250, which makes it somewhat expensive for ordinary fans to invest in their club. The Arsenal Fanshare scheme offers fans a chance to contribute to the cost of a share with monthly payments of between £10 and £1,000.

Any fan who puts in the equivalent of one hundredth of the share’s value – currently £102.50 – becomes a Fanshare member. This enables them to vote on club policy that requires shareholder approval, receive detailed financial information about the club, and be able to put themselves forward to attend Arsenal’s annual general meeting, although this will be chosen by ballot.

This Trust-run initiative also comes with the backing of the Gunners’ two biggest individual shareholders, Usmanov and Kroenke, while the club’s chief executive, Ivan Gazidis, has talked about the importance of valuing and nurturing fans. It’s a rare piece of Premier League unity between boardroom and supporters, with the latter potentially able to have their voice heard within the club without any hostilities.

And in this age of austerity, and with noises and aspirations of supporter takeovers at the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle United, it also scores a nice piece of PR for the North London club, although AST member Vic Crescit is adamant this is just a fortunate by-product.

“Arsenal Fanshare is NOT about public relations for the club,” he emails when I put this question to him. “It’s about ensuring OUR club remains OUR club.

“The people involved in Arsenal Supporters’ Trust, an independent not-for-profit mutual organisation, wouldn’t have launched this scheme if they didn’t think it was to the benefit of Arsenal supporters. The fact that the club listened carefully to the presentations made to them about Arenal Fanshare and decided to actively back it speaks well of the board and chief executive Ivan Gazidis.”

Significantly, it’s worth emphasising that this is a project of the Supporters’ Trust and not Arsenal Football Club. Had Gazidis and the board not given their approval, it’s likely the scheme would have gone ahead anyway. That they have the backing from the powers-that-be is an added bonus.

The practicalities: What’s in it for me?

Take, for example, Suarez’s last-minute handball on the line to deny Ghana what was surely the winning goal. In rugby, there would have been no need for a penalty — a penalty goal would have been awarded. Or Lampard’s shot against the Germans. Again, in rugby, if the referee wasn’t sure, he could request a video replay. On a basic level, it seems that Sepp Blatter would be well-employed to drop by on his oval ball counterparts.

The new Hand of God, or why Suarez should be free to handle on the line again

When Luis Suarez palmed away Dominic Adiyah’s goalbound header in the final minute of stoppage time in Ghana’s quarter final meeting with Uruguay, it was the very definition of cynical. His foul denied the Ghanaians a clear goalscoring opportunity and when Asamoah Gyan blasted the subsequent penalty into the crossbar rather than the net, the outrage began.

With both Adiyah and John Mensah missing from the spot in the penalty shoot-out to send Uruguay through, the outrage hit fever pitch, especially on Twitter, where there were suggestions that Ghana had been robbed, and comparing Suarez’s handball to that of Thierry Henry’s in France’s playoff against the Republic of Ireland.

At the very least it seemed perverse that a player could indulge in that level of cheating and seemingly get away with it. Hence the calls for teams to be awarded a penalty goal rather than face the uncertainty of a spot kick.

But before the knee-jerk it’s worth considering one major difference between the handballs of Henry and Suarez: the Frenchman got away with his, with the diminutive Uruguayan didn’t. The referee spotted Suarez’s hands knocking Adiyah’s header away, sent him off, and awarded a penalty to Ghana.

Suarez was punished according to the letter of the law and couldn’t be blamed for Gyan’s missed penalty. The referee had acted according to the letter of the law and given Ghana another chance to cement their place in the semi-finals – a chance that, statistically, they were more likely than not to succeed at.

Given that more penalties are converted than missed, you could even go as far to say as what really killed Ghana’s chances was losing the toss to decide who went first in the shootout. The team taking the first penalty typically wins 60 per cent of shootouts.

But that’s statistics. What we’re talking about here are the rules that allowed Suarez to handball at the expense of a goal, which has lead calls for football to introduce a penalty goal, along the lines of rugby’s penalty try.

Paying the penalty

Briefly, in rugby, if the referee believes the defending team has prevented a try by committing an offence, he can award a penalty try. Crucially, the referee has to believe a try would probably have been scored (or, in rugby league, believes, in his opinion, that a try would have been scored but for the conduct of the defending team). In other words, the referee’s opinion is the final say on a penalty try.

Therefore, this isn’t as clear cut as proponents of penalty goals — such as ex-referee Graham Poll — would have you believe, if you were to apply it to football. It brings the referee’s opinion even further into play, and with it more possibility of human error. Often the penalty try is one of the more disputed calls in rugby.

Suarez’s case is unusually clear cut, insofar as we can be reasonably sure that the ball would have gone into the net had the striker not handled the ball (although he was in such a position to attempt to head the ball). But the problem comes when you then apply the rule practically to the game.

Let’s say on the back of Suarez’s handball, FIFA introduced a directive saying a player who deliberately handles on the line has clearly denied a goalscoring opportunity and the referee should award a goal rather than a penalty.

Firstly, this would mean Harry Kewell’s contentious red card in Australia’s game against Ghana would have resulted in Australia being penalised by one goal rather than giving Gyan the chance to score from the spot.

Secondly, suppose after this directive is implemented, a situation occurs in a high-profile game where a player rounds the goalkeeper and is about to pull the trigger but is hauled back before they can roll the ball into an empty net by a desperate defender. A penalty is award and the defender is sent off but the penalty is saved. The directive is widened.

Then an increasing number of situations occur when a clear goalscoring opportunity is denied, some of them outside the box. Each one increases the argument for awarding a goal for this, but increases the judgement call the referee has to make.

Inevitably the referee will award a goal erroneously at some point in another high-profile game, where a penalty would have been a suitable punishment instead.

In short, implementing this directive would increase the pressure on the fallibility of the referee. The laws for a handball on the line may not be morally just but they are fair and consistent.

A brief moral diversion

It’s also worth pointing out that Suarez’s handball was an extremely unusual circumstance. Normally a player who ‘takes one for the team’ by committing a professional foul does so in the knowledge that they will be putting their team at a disadvantage for a period of play and, in tournament football, ruling themselves out of the next match.

In Suarez’s case, this issue did not come into play. As this was literally the last kick of the game, Uruguay wouldn’t have been disadvantaged by losing a man for the rest of the game. Similarly, the outcome for Suarez would have been the same: he wouldn’t have played in a semi-final regardless of whether he handled the ball or not.

But by sacrificing himself at the last possible moment of the game, he ensured his team stood more of a chance of progressing than if he didn’t handle (a utilitarian action rather than a deontological one).

These situations don’t occur that regularly in football, so to introduce a system based more on human error of the basis that it works in another sport is questionable. You can also argue that Uruguay paid the price for Suarez’s actions as they faced their toughest game without one of their best players.

Watch it again, Sam

But Suarez’s handball hasn’t been the only case where football has been advised to look to rugby for tightening up the rules, in this case video technology for goals, when two high profile errors in one day saw a clamour for FIFA to return to look at the issue.

First, Frank Lampard’s shot against Germany was adjudged not to have crossed the line when replies showed that it clearly had, then Carlos Tevez opening goal for Argentina against Mexico was allowed to stand despite coming from a significant offside position. Again, there was a call for video replays.

In rugby, these are used when the referee cannot be sure that the ball has been placed over the try line. Instead he will ask the video referee if there is any reason why he cannot award a try and base his decision on this recommendation. Similarly, in cricket, the video umpire is used for contentious decisions, usually around lbw.

It’s worth pointing out that even video refereeing isn’t flawless and can’t always be used to provide a clear cut answer, Mark Cueto’s disallowed try for England against South Africa in the 2007 World Cup Final being a prime example. Although the video official was probably right, you can still find plenty of rugby professionals who believe the try should have stood.

But if video replays had been available, would they have helped in either case? Probably not for Tevez’s goal. The linesman missed the striker’s offside and the referee saw no reason not to believe his colleague’s decision that the goal should have stood.

In Lampard’s case, the referee may have chosen to stop play to check whether the ball had crossed the line or not, although again, this would be down to the discretion of the officials. Video replays would only be useful if the officials were able to make the most of them at the time. If the referee saw no cause for doubt then it is unlikely they would be deployed.

As with the Suarez case, the thin end of the wedge argument comes into play here. If video replays were made available to the referee then at what point should the line be drawn. Goals? Penalties? Red card offences? Throw-ins? It’s fine to say take the principle from another sport, but it has to be workable for football.

One further option on top of this would be to give managers the option to challenge decisions by the officials, along the lines of American Football and tennis. While fairer to teams as a whole, whether it should be implemented depends very much on your view of whether it would break up the game to an unacceptable extent or not.

Hawk-eyes

Perhaps a fairer if less wide-ranging solution would be the use of goal-line technology to determine whether or not the ball has crossed the line. In this instance, football would be looking to cricket and tennis, where the Hawk-eye system is in place, rather than rugby.

Quite simply, this would — either via electronic communication or a separate video official — inform the referee whether or not a ball had crossed the line. Or, as an alternative, have the referee refer to Hawk-eye for a decision on a goal.

The goal line technology perhaps has a more pressing case to be solved than the unusual Suarez situation. While still uncommon, there are enough poor goal-line decisions, such as the phantom goal in Reading v Watford or Pedro Mendes’ 40-yard chip for Spurs against Manchester United, that justifies bringing the technology in. Not to mention that genuine goals that aren’t usually have far more of an impact on a game than a handball on the line.

Unlike video referees, there’s also less of a risk of human error here. Granted, technology can take the fun out of the game but in this case, it’s worth being correct rather than relying on human error. A good goal not given is far more galling than a bad tackle.

It’s also worth pointing out that Hawk-eye, and video technology in general, doesn’t reach down to all levels of the game in whichever sport we’re talking about. Rugby, tennis and cricket all only have the technology available to certain levels. It’s not ideal, but it shows how hard it is to reach grassroots with any form of technology.

Speak when you’re spoken to

But amid all the talk of importing rules from rugby, there’s one law where football could learn a lot from its oval ball counterpart. There’s no need for technology, no cost involved and it could be applied to grassroots football: only the captain can speak to the referee.

In rugby, it’s the captain’s job to be responsible for his team and answer to the referee. Dissent is not tolerated and players surrounding the officials is uncommon and often dealt with by a card. This isn’t to say the sport doesn’t still have issues with player behaviour, but there’s a lot more control on the pitch.

The FA have mooted this idea from time to time, most recently around the Respect campaign, while UEFA considered such a move in 2006, as part of a wider consideration in retaining referees in the game.

Suarez’s handball was cheating but was such a large talking point because it was so unusual, as were the calls for a penalty goal.

The odd goal that isn’t given in error is more common but still rare. And while video replays would solve a lot of arguments, they’re by no means conclusive, or even necessary.

In contrast, players intimidating and swearing at the referee is a common occurrence on pitches week in week out at every level. I know which issue I’d rather see dealt with first.

Yesterday, we looked at how the idea of fan ownership has received serious attention in recent weeks, with the growing profiles of supporters’ trusts at English clubs. Today, wrapping up our weeklong series, we look at the the practicalities of cash, stadiums and regulations in fan ownership schemes.

In England, even if the will is there for fan ownership, there are huge practicalities to work around. The relationship between the Trust and the board is a key one. In Arsenal’s case, they have a good working relationship, whereas the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust have been a large driving force behind the Green and Gold protests.

And just because the Trust has the best interests of the team at heart, it doesn’t mean they’re prepared to throw their hard raised money at a club without due care, or that the relationship between club and trust is always smooth. At St Albans, the Saints Trust recently very pointedly rejected a request from the board to inject £10k into the club, firing a perfect riposte to the directors with an open letter.

At Merthyr Tydfil, last year saw the chairman and the Trust locked in a messy battle over cash for the club, while regimes past at Southampton have used PR methods to rubbish the Saints Trust in the past.

Clearly, there is a publicity battle to be fought, and one where a chairman with a good PR team or the ear of the local paper may have the upper hand. Getting a dialogue with the club is a hard job for any Trust.

Stadiums

There is also the issue of stadiums to consider. It’s no coincidence that both Brentford’s ex-vice chairman Brian Burgess and Exeter’s current vice-chair Julian Tagg have both told Pitch Invasion that a new or rebuilt stadium is key to the club’s future.

It’s also no coincidence that one of the most high-profile failures of the Trust movement, Stockport County, have suffered because they didn’t own their own stadium. As Dave Boyle says: “In Stockport’s case, they didn’t get a penny of the money spent on drinks and pies during their own matches, let alone during the rest of the week.”

It’s a situation Oxford United can well appreciate, while Crystal Palace’s financial position was hampered by the complex ground ownership arrangement. For Portsmouth, a small stadium for the Premier League has hurt their earning potential (although you suspect a larger Fratton Park wouldn’t have prevented the losses from mounting up), while Wimbledon simply had their stadium sold with no home to go to.

But Boyle also has words of caution for those clubs who do own their stadium. “There is a downside to owning your ground, as many clubs have used the asset value to borrow money to pay off other losses, in other words using the capital value of the ground to shore up revenue losses. You can’t do that if you don’t own the ground, and that to me is the real thing to avoid.

“It’s a short-term fix for long-term problems, so I’m all in favour of clubs having the rights over income at the club but not at all keen on them having the right to borrow against the value of it. The other issue is that plenty of people are attracted to football clubs because they own land and its pretty cheap. A club which didn’t own its land – or at least couldn’t use it for anything other than football and couldn’t borrow against it – would be a poison pill for the speculators and asset strippers who continue to plague lower-level football. Bees United are looking at some innovative ways in which that might be achieved and we’re helping them with those.”

And one area where all are in agreement is the need for regulation in football. “The biggest issue is finance,” says Brian Burgess, former chair of Brentford’s Bees United trust. “Just how do you finance a competitive playing budget when you haven’t got access to non-football income of one kind or another, whether it’s generated by a new stadium with lots of revenue earning facilities, or whether it’s sponsorship or TV money or just soft loans or equity from wealthy individuals?”

Towards a Level Playing Field

Concerns about how clubs can be kept on something like a level playing field whoever owns it have even started coming from the footballing authorities themselves. Lord Triesman and Lord Mahwinny have both talked about the need for clubs to cut debt-fueled spending. Others recognise that the way financial matters are currently structured in football risk sending even more clubs into administration or, worse, liquidation.

For Burgess, the move to change has to come from the top and he can see evidence of this: “UEFA are bringing in laws now so that in three years time a club wanting to compete in the Champions League or the Europa League will be required to show they’re breaking even.

“That’ll be a challenge for some of the clubs, and that’ll be a challenge for UEFA to enforce it. Time will tell but UEFA are going firmly down that route and they’ve just set up a football fans compliance panel, and Brian Lomax, the previous chairman of Supporters’ Direct, is on that panel. They’ve got three years to try and get things lined up so clubs will comply with that.

“That’s top down pressure from Europe. That, perhaps combined with the bottom-up pressure from supporters and Supporters’ Trusts, might mean the leagues tighten up regulation and introduce some form of salary cap, which they have in the Conference and League Two. A combination of these trends might change the world sufficiently for Supporters’ Trusts to be able to flourish.”

Regulating Football

Currently, there are several sympathetic politicians in the government towards the need for further regulation in football.

Cabinet minister Andy Burnham is a former chair of Supporters’ Direct while the current Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Ben Bradshaw, is also the MP for Exeter. While Bradshaw isn’t as directly linked to the movement as Burnham is, he did supply a lot of help and support to Exeter City back in 2003 and understands how a Trust run club could work.

That could all change after the general election, where the Conservatives may well be in charge. Even if Labour gets in, there’s no guarantee Burham or Bradshaw will still be MPs or will have as much influence. The Conservatives will, as likely, have bigger priorities to deal with as an incoming administration and their natural leanings are towards the free market ideals of the Premier League. But if there’s a big development at a club like, say, Liverpool or Manchester United, who knows what their response will be.

Maintaining harmony

But, away from the Premier League and the wider issues, those clubs under Trust ownership have ongoing daily challenges. As Exeter City’s vice-chairman Julian Tagg says “any progress has to be within the ethos of the Trust.” It’s a tough balance.

Exeter are struggling towards the bottom of League One having enjoyed two promotions in successive seasons. And although the Trust, as owners, aren’t quite the same as the club (the directors), when things aren’t going well the Trust will come in for criticism too, some of it justified, some of it not.

At times it can be easy to forget that here is a group of fans who stepped in to save their club from dying and has turned it from a team with a losing attitude to one with a positive one. But that was some years ago now, in 2003. Today the challenge to to keep that membership growing, engaged and, most of all informed.

Any Trust club will recognise at least part of the criticism by the Scarborough fan in the comments on Tuesday’s article. But as a club gets more successful and, hoepfully, more professional, how does that Trust ethos marry with a professionalism that demands a drive for profit and success?

Perhaps more teams will follow Brentford’s lead and enter into a hybrid model with a wealthy benefactor. Brentford will have £1m a year for the next five years. Exeter City’s Trust put in a million into the club over five years.

Brian Burgess can see these sorts of deals becoming more common. “I think that’s quite a good model for other Trusts,” he says, “because we have to live in the real world. The economics of football as such mean it’s very difficult to compete under the current regime with the big clubs and cubs who’ve got wealthy supporters putting in loads of money. So you need to do this sort of deal and at least we’ve got some safeguards in with the golden share in particularly.”

But while Brentford are keen to show this model can work, Dave Boyle isn’t quite so sure, although he recognises that the Bees were largely forced down this route because many of their plans had to be torn up due to the recession.

“I’m not sure the relationship is sustainable in the medium term,” says Boyle. “I have a problem with the benefactor model in general, so I’d be very reticent about suggesting a hybrid was possible.

“I think we need to move football benefaction out of the category of the trophy asset and into something looking like charitable or arts donations. When people give money to those enterprises, they do so for a warm glow in their hearts, some publicity, and often because they care.

“In football, it always begins with similar language, about someone’s affinity for the club, but soon transpires that they have total control of the club’s policy, the donation was actually a loan and by the end it turns out that it looked a lot more like a calculated business decision or speculative investment gone wrong.”

Perhaps a compromise is in order, such as at Swansea, where the Trust had a huge hand in saving the club and still retains influence and a seat on the board. Or perhaps, such as in the case of Arsenal, it best acts as a watchdog for the fans and ensures the club maintains good communication with supporters’ representatives.

Whatever the future for Supporters’ Trusts and fan ownerships, it promises to be a busy one. Maybe the present focus on fan ownership will prove to be a passing fad, or perhaps it will go from strength to strength, as Vic Crescit of Arsenal’s trust hopes:

“Generally I believe fan ownership, including majority fan ownership and board membership, will be commonplace in the future. I think we’ll look back in 20 years and wonder what all the fuss was about. The level of disaffection and alienation of fans will either be recognised and dealt with or the game will wither and die as a mass spectator activity. It’s as simple as that. I’m optimistic that it’ll be the former.”

When this week-long series on fan ownership was conceived a few months ago, it was practically unthinkable that the dominant headlines in recent weeks would be about a potential supporters’ takeover of England’s biggest football club.

Yet, at the time of writing, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST) has seen membership rise to around 128,000 since the wealthy Red Knights group announced their intention to take over the club with the help of the fans. At the other end of the pyramid, Chester City look set to start again under Supporters’ Trust ownership, and trusts across the land are ever more prominent in the media.

Fan ownership, then, is more relevant in English football than it has ever been, yet it also stands at a crossroads. Will we see the idea of Trust ownership take hold across the English leagues and many more clubs going into the hands of their supporters? Or, when we revisit articles from this period five years on, will it be a curious footnote as the billionaire single owner model reigns supreme?

And what of those clubs already under fan control? Will Brentford revert fully to the wealthy benefactor model? Will Exeter’s rapid rise through the ranks be the undoing of their fan ownership? Will AFC Wimbledon resolve their ground issue? And if a member from a Trust the size of Scarborough comments on here that there is a two-tier membership, what hope is there for a model that involves all fans?

Where, then, does fan ownership go from here?

Fan Ownership vs. the Benefactor Model

Whether the Trust movement takes off or not in the Premier League, the free market idea that billionaire owners are the best way forward has taken one hell of a kicking over the past 12 months. The Glazers at Manchester United, Hicks and Gillett at Liverpool, Mike Ashley at Newcastle and any one of the myriad of owners at Pompey have all galvanised the respective supporter bases at each club in opposition.

For Dave Boyle, the CEO of Supporters’ Direct, it’s not a surprise that the fans are starting to think towards a different ownership model. “I think there were two types of negative response to supporter ownership this time last year,” he says.

“The first was that it was only for the little clubs but with the discussion around Man Utd that’s not really tenable anymore, which in itself is on top of increasing understanding of the way German clubs work.

“The second response was that people could see some advantages to supporter ownership, but couldn’t see what the problem was that meant it was a solution worth pursuing. Linked to that was the idea that the current model delivered cash for player expenditure in an effective and efficient manner.”

It is Manchester United who are currently making the most waves in this area, and for Boyle, the whole saga has opened fans’ eyes to the dealings of the boardroom.

“It seems to me that a lot of people didn’t know how much the Glazer business plan bleeds them dry and how risky it is to the club in the medium-term and beyond. That information has been the catalyst for everything which happened subsequently. But the ground work was done back in the years leading up to the takeover in the campaigns against the club’s various takeovers, and in the anger which was fuelled by the inflation-busting ticket prices.

“But shy of sequestration of the club they need to be bought out, and that means people with money need to come to the table, and clearly, what one might like – 100% mutual ownership – must be balanced against the real world pressures. I’m hopeful that something can come together which will both lessen the need for the club to be so rapacious in its treatment of its supporters, and means that the club has a very strong, inalienable voice for the supporters’ trust.

“Ideally, I’d like to see the a situation where there is a year-on-year increase in the proportion of the club under the trust’s control through a levy on season tickets and merchandise, so the supporters whose revenue drives the club are given increasing ownership of it. That would seem to be both a narrative that fits the rhetoric and would be the only way to ensure that out of this sorry mess, something truly wonderful could emerge.”

But United will be one of the lucky clubs who can call upon a vast global fanbase, should they go down the supporter-owned route. Like Barcelona, the modern-day incarnation of Newton Heath FC will be unlikely to want for cash. Many other clubs are Premier League level may not be able to do the same.

It’s also worth pointing out that if United were to succeed as a fan-owned club in the cash-rich Premier League, they would first need to establish a Trust with a membership of millions rather than hundreds of thousands. Unlike lower league clubs with more modest ambitions, United fans will be unlikely to want to balance a commitment to fan ownership with a modest level of success on the pitch.

The Greatest League in the World

At the other end of the table, Portsmouth’s Trust are engaged in a battle for the very survival of their club. Soundings have already been made to the Conference about re-starting Pompey down the football pyramid, should the worst happen at the end of this season. They could also be joined by their opponents from the 2008 FA Cup Final – Cardiff City have been handed yet another postponement at the High Court as they look to pay huge unpaid tax bills.

Elsewhere, other Premier League chairmen look nervously at their finances. Bill Kenwright has already said Everton need a billionaire if they are to compete, while Eddie Davies at Bolton has just become the club’s main banker. Relegation would hit the Trotters hard.

For Vic Crescit from Arsenal’s Supporters’ Trust, in the context of all this, it’s ever more evident that having an active Trust is vital for any Premier League club.

“The Manchester United Supporters’ Trust has played an indispensable role along with the Independent Manchester United Supporters’ Association in holding the Glazers to account,” says Crescit. “The current campaign simply wouldn’t be happening without them.

“Fulham very probably would have lost their historic Craven Cottage ground if it hadn’t been for the Fulham Supporters’ Trust. Pompey would probably be out of business today if it weren’t for the work of the recently-established Pompey Supporters’ Trust. Arsenal would probably be in sole ownership of either Stan Kroenke or Alisher Usmanov if it weren’t for the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust.”

Crescit points to Spain where, in 1994, the law was changed to require all clubs to convert themselves into Sports Limited Companies. Only four clubs – Barcelona, Real Madrid, Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna – were financially stable enough to avoid this and remain owned by the fans. The rest of La Liga have seen their debts increase tenfold.

“The commercialisation of professional Spanish football is a failed experiment,” says Crescit. “Valencia currently has debts of nearly €600 million (US$810 million). That’s simply unsustainable and living proof that private ownership isn’t the panecea it was made out to be.”

As a concept, then, the Trust movement is currently riding a wave of momentum. But in the final piece of our series on fan ownership tomorrow, we will look at the practicalities of this from the perspective of the bottom line.

Analysing the supporter-ownership model, as we’ve been doing over the past few days, is fine, but it’s no substitute for getting stuck in and looking at the experience of the challenges first hand, as we look at today. Brian Burgess has been involved with Brentford’s Supporters’ Trust from the early days, sat as vice-chairman of the club and was recently elected to the Supporters’ Direct board. Gary Andrews headed to Griffin Park to meet him.

If part of a successful football club is down to luck that the right people inhabit the boardroom, then Brentford can feel luckier than most that Brian Burgess decided to get involved with their supporters’ trust, Bees United. It may have not always been plain sailing for the Bees since the Trust took over but, for the time being, the club’s future and ground is assured. Pitch Invasion caught up with Brian at Griffin Park following his recent election to the Supporters’ Direct board.

There’s a nice anecdote that gives you a clue to Brian Burgess’ way of viewing the boardroom at Brentford. Soon after Bees United assumed control of Brentford in 2006, a friend of the family congratulated him on taking over as vice-chairman. “You own your football club!” she said, excitedly. “No,” he corrected her. “The fans own my football club.”

I remind Brian of this as we settle into the directors bar at Griffin Park. Typically, rather than reminisce about the takeover, he uses it to to illustrate why the fans are so important in the running of Brentford.

“That’s right,” he nods. “The club members vote on issues. There’s a good example of that this summer. Because of the financial costs of competing in League One and the teams we have to compete with this season – the Leeds and the Charltons – the club needed a lot more cash and we couldn’t really borrow any more. The club has borrowed up to its limit. The debts are secured against the value of Griffin Park.

“It really needed a cash injection which the Supporters’ Trust just doesn’t have and cannot provide. A deal was done by Bees United with a very wealthy supporter called Matthew Benham who had already lent us significant sums of money to refinance our previous debts. I think he’d refinanced around four million pounds worth of debt, which is interest free, he took out a loan from Barclays that was two million, for example. So, instead of paying interest on that two million we have that interest free, which has been a huge boost to the club’s operating expenditure.

“But that wasn’t enough so he’s agreed to put more money in as preference shares. He’s agreed to put in a million pounds a year for the next five years. During that period Bees United will retain the majority shareholding. At the end of it there are options, so there are three possible outcomes of what could happen at the end of five years. For five years at least the situation is stable, it’s stable financially, it’s stable in terms of the ownership model because Bees United will be the majority shareholder.

“No one was able to sign that deal until we’d had a vote of the members, so all 1700 voting members had a say in that and 1200 of them voted in it, which is around 70%”

That’s a pretty impressive level of engagement, I say, given the apathy and disinterest many fans have in the off-the-pitch actions, let alone the idea of voting.

“Yes, and 99% of them voted in favour of the deal,” he says. “But the point is it was the fans, those members, who were in control of the situation. If they didn’t want to take this money from the wealthy supporter, if they didn’t want that deal, they could have voted it down. The point is, the club can’t be sold now without the approval of the members.”

Burgess’ may have now relinquished his vice-chairmanship but he still remains a key part of Bees United and recently was elected to the board of the nationwide organisation Supporters’ Direct. Indeed, his interest in fan ownership started back in 1967, when he was a young Bees supporter growing up in Hounslow. At the time Brentford’s owner was Jack Dunnett, a Labour MP for Nottingham, who decided he’d rather own Notts County than the Bees, and decided the best way to dispose of the club was to sell it to QPR. Brentford FC would have ceased to exist.

Although Burgess was too young to get involved in the campaign to save Brentford, the idea that supporters should own their club stuck with him and was the driving force behind him signing up to Bees United in 2001 when the club was, yet again, going through one of their regular periods of financial crisis and losing Griffin Park was a real possibility.

Burgess was living and working in the Midlands at the time and getting heavily involved wasn’t practical, but he soon moved into a consultancy role and returned to London. At the same time, Bees United were looking at possible plans for a new stadium. With a background in engineering, Burgess thought he could help and stood for election to the Trust board. Within a year, he’d been elected chairman.

At that time, there was an option agreement with Ron Noades, the majority shareholder, to buy the club for two pounds providing the Trust also relieved Noades of the bank guarantees he’d used to fund the club, which totaled around four million.

After several years of raising the cash needed to buy the club off Noades, the Trust finally took control on January 20th 2006. Burgess took the role of vice-chairman after tracking down former BBC Director General Greg Dyke, a Brentford and Manchester United fan who’d been on the board at Old Trafford, and persuaded him to take over as chairman.

All the time, though, the Trust had their eye on a new stadium. Often when new owners come in and talk about a new ground, it’s cause for eye-rolling. But in Brentford’s case, it’s acutely needed.

“All the time the long-term strategy was to try and develop the new stadium because we knew we’d never really be sustainable as a business here at Griffin Park. We budget to lose around half a million pounds a year in order to give us even a reasonable playing budget, let alone one that can compete in League One. There’s no commercial facilities here, nothing.

“It’s very difficult for us to earn any kind of serious revenue because there are no corporate boxes, no hospitality suites. During the week we don’t have conferencing and banqueting facilities that would enable us to make commercial revenue. It’s always been the plan to build a new stadium. I’ve been working on it all the way through and at the end of 2007 we did a deal with Barratts to buy this site at Lionel Road and it was obvious then it would become a full-time job.

“We formed a new subsidiary called Brentford FC Lionel Road limited just to focus on the stadium and that subsidiary, 99% of the shares are held by Brentford FC and the other 1% is a golden share for Bees United so that the site can’t be developed for anything else without Bees United’s approval. The idea of that golden share is to give Bees United a veto over that project being scuppered in years to come by the property developer – it’s got to be used as a stadium.”

But a mixture of the recession, a crash in the housing market affecting the new stadium – “Having got so close, it’s desperately disappointing the external economic environment has put a hold on it” – and bad manager choices took their toll on the Bees and held up the stadium, which is where the Matthew Benham deal comes in.

“We started on a high and it went downhill quite seriously for a couple of years – it just shows the importance of having a manager who can spend your budget wisely. I think if you’ve got a good manager you’ve got to give him a budget that’s good enough to compete – no one can work miracles without a sufficient budget. But beyond that, throwing an ever bigger budget at the playing squad doesn’t bring you success unless the manager is really good, so you need both.

“You need the manager and you need a sufficient budget and we had neither for a couple of seasons. Since we’ve got Andy Scott, Andy obviously has done a really good job with a limited budget, got us up as Champions last year.

“Now the standard’s higher, we’re playing against bigger clubs like Leeds, Norwich, Southampton and Charlton and you need more money. Bees United couldn’t raise the kind of money we needed to compete. If we had serious aspirations to get promoted from this league into the Championship you need the Matthew Benham deal, we needed that extra million pounds a year.”

Although the Benham deal creates a Trust-single owner hybrid, Burgess is adamant this is the best deal for the Bees and can see other clubs following suit. “I think it’s quite a good model for other Trusts because we have to live in the real world. The economics of football as much mean it’s very difficult to compete under the current regime with the big clubs and clubs who’ve got wealthy supporters putting in loads of money. So you need to do this sort of deal and at least we’ve got some safeguards in with the golden share particularly.”

One area where Burgess will readily hold his hands up to getting it wrong is in his choice of managers. After Martin Allen left in 2006, Brentford went through three managers in one season, when Leroy Rosenior, Scott Fitzgerald and Terry Butcher all took the hotseat as the Bees struggled at the wrong end of the table and eventually went down to League Two.

“We didn’t have anyone on the board, including me, who really had a clue on how to pick a good football manager. It’s such a big decision. If I had to say ‘what is the one single most important decision a football club board has to take, it’s the choice of the manager. And obviously we got it wrong three times.

“The fourth time we got it right! We could have appointed Andy Scott the first time and avoided three disasters and two years of relegation. Had we got Andy Scott first time round, perhaps we’d have been if not in the Championship, at least pressing for it now. So it set us back a couple of years.”

Burgess is not fond of the culture that calls for managerial sackings every ten minutes but recognises this is part of supporter expectations. “I think in general, there won’t be a majority of supporters who would support taking a long-term view and saying that’s it’s much better that the club survives even if it has to go down to the Conference, rebuild and come back up again – it’s actually much better to be sustainable and running sensibly, than it is to try and get lots of money from somewhere and push for success.

“Trust members might make the long term view. Not all of them though – I think even some of them would want to take the short term view. But you’re always going to be under pressure to get short-term results, not to accept relegation as part of a longer-term strategy. So the short-term aspirations of supporters for success is always a limiting factor, I think, in terms of how sustainably you can run the club.”

Unsurprisingly, Burgess also calls owners who throw vast sums of money at clubs “unsustainable” but also recognises that as long as this continues, smaller clubs are limited as to how far they can compete, but he is also a mixture of realistic and optimistic as to how far Supporters’ Trusts can go.

“One glib answer is it can go as far as Barcelona and Real Madrid because they’re owned by their fans, so in a way there’s no limit. However, you have to look at where you’re starting from and the days where Wimbledon came into the league and were able to rise up into the Premier League and win the FA Cup — in those days anything was possible. And it could be lovely to see AFC Wimbledon do that again.

“But for clubs like us with legacy and debt that we’ve got and the legacy of people on the board who are there not because they believe in the Trust model but because they put money into the club previously and are entitled to a seat on the board you’ve got that legacy that holds you back from fully exploiting the trust model.

“The biggest issue is finance – just how do you finance a competitive playing budget when you haven’t got access to non-football income of one kind or another, whether it’s generated by a new stadium with lots of revenue earning facilities, or whether it’s sponsorship or TV money or just soft loans or equity from wealthy individuals?  I think the best hope for the Supporters’ Trust movement is if the regulatory regime changes.

“I was very interested to read Lord Mawhinny’s speech recently saying that things had to chance, the distribution of wealth, the totally unequal distribution of wealth between the big clubs and the smaller clubs couldn’t really continue, something had to be done to try and even it up otherwise too many of the smaller clubs would go to the wall.”

But for all the talk of what Supporters’ Trusts can achieve, Burgess is quick to point to a very specific legacy of Bees United: putting a roof on the Ealing Terrace, a project that had been talked about to Brentford for around 20 years, and one the Trust-owned club managed in two. It was, as Burgess puts it, physical evidence that the club was progressing.

Even so, the new stadium at Lionel Road remains a key part of Brentford’s future and one Burgess sees as the key if the club is to progress. “I don’t accept there that there’s any limit as long as we get a new stadium. I’ve always accepted we’ll never really succeed above League One if we stay at Griffin Park.

“I first got involved to help out on the new stadium, and that’s always been part of this. It was a strategy when we took over, it’s the strategy now, I don’t really see any alternative to having a new stadium on a new site, which generates a lot more income back on match days and non-match days. But if we get that then I think, well I’d like to think, we can create another Barcelona. I don’t see that we have to limit our ambition.

“It will take time, maybe generations, but as long as we’re financially sustainable in a new stadium with non-football revenue generating facilities, I think it can be done.”

As we’re leaving, Brian insists on taking me to his office so I can get an aerial view of the new stadium. It’s gloomy but the shape of the area that needs developing can be just about made out. Will it have the same intimacy as Griffin Park, I wonder, a stadium where the fans are close to the pitch creating a cathedral of noise? Absolutely, he assures me. This intimacy was one of the top demands Brentford fans put on a new ground. Lionel Road, he says, will not be another identikit stadium.

At Brian’s urging, I walk a different route back to the train station, past the proposed Lionel Road development. What currently resides there is a mixture of waste and industrial land. It is not particularly attractive to look at but it’s easy to see how this could be transformed into something far more useful. It is, perhaps, an apt metaphor for the Trust movement as a whole.

The current impression so far is that Trusts or fan ownership largely works. If that were the case, perhaps Exeter wouldn’t be an isolated example. As Brian Burgess of Brentford has said, a lot depends on luck and the people you get involved with the Trust. Without decent people on board, the best-meaning business is liable to fail.

Trust-run clubs are also subject to the same financial constraints as other clubs, often more so given how reliant they are on membership. To contrast, this season Charlton Athletic’s directors have put in £7m to the club to fund their push for promotion. Exeter City’s Trust has put in £1m over five years. And with football very much a short-term immediate results driven business, Trust-run clubs will inevitably come under the same pressures to deliver.

Perhaps one of the saddest examples of this in recent years is at Notts County. The focus of recent months has been, rightly, on Munto, the consortium that took over the club and turned out to be based on thin air and British businessmen rather than rich Arabs. But what can easily be forgotten is that Munto was handed the keys to County by the previous owners, the Supporters’ Trust.

We’ve covered the financial disasters of County’s history before on Pitch Invasion, but it’s worth quickly summarising how the league’s oldest club could go from fan ownership to a smoke and mirrors consortium.

The Notts County Trust played a key part in rallying the fans and fundraising in 2003 following Albert Scardino’s disastrous reign before unassuming millionaire supporter Hadyn Green stepped in to save the club and take a 49% stake. In 2007, Green donated his shares to the Trust on the agreement that he would be paid £75,000 if the shares were sold on. Four months later, he died.

But the Magpies’ Supporters’ Trust could never really galvanise the club in the way Exeter or Brentford did. County languished at the wrong end of the League Two table, never quite getting a grip on the finances or ownership. Constant infighting and bitter disputes wore the board down. In April last year Trust chairman Jon Armstrong-Holmes survived a vote of no confidence from the members. It was a club and Trust trapped in inertia.

The Trust, or certainly Armstrong-Holmes, leapt on the offer from Munto Finance two months later and he embarked on a drive to convince Trust members of the value in handing the Trust’s 60% shareholding to Munto, describing their guarantees as “cast iron”, adding that Munto were among the most honourable people he had ever met. Members overwhelmingly voted for the Munto takeover and to write off the Trust’s loans to the club. We all know what happened next.

Perhaps even more depressing, though, is Stockport County, a side that could genuinely cease to exist at the end of this season. When The Hatters won promotion to League One two years ago, they were held up as yet further proof that Trust ownership was producing success. Less than twelve months later they were in administration with debts of £300,000. Since then, they have been operating under a transfer embargo.

The Stockport County Trust purchased the club for just £1 in 2005, but had one huge problem. Brian Kennedy, the millionaire businessman who owned both County and the Sale Sharks rugby team, retained ownership of Edgeley Park, meaning the Hatters saw huge swathes of potential matchday income denied to them. Limited incoming finances and a mounting unpaid tax bill, along with overspending in the promotion season, let to an inevitably sad conclusion.

County face being thrown out of the league at the end of the season if they are still in administration. At the current time of writing, former Manchester City player Jim Melrose has, apparently, finally had his consortium’s bid for the club accepted by the administrators but, after all that’s gone on at the club over previous seasons, Hatters fans know not to get their hopes up.

Cherry picking

Finally, a quick mention for Bournemouth, who, for a short-time were a community-owned club after the fans took over to rescue the Cherries in 2007. Here, perhaps, is a classic example of a club that badly needed a blank slate for such a takeover to be successful.

Bournemouth have been a perennial crisis club for over 15 years now and in 2007 the Cherries went into administration with debts of £4m. A supporter-backed takeover saved the club at the last minute after some serious bucket-rattling, but while the club was in the hands of the community, so was the debt. And it was that legacy that weighed down on the club.

Despite bouncing back at the first attempt in 2003 after relegation from League One the year before, the financial problems were growing and that year Bournemouth had to call in the PFA to help pay players wages. With debts spiraling and the stadium sold and leased back, the clubs members voted in 2007 to change the constitution that prevented any one person owning more than 10% of the club, as Jeff Mostyn and Steve Sly took control at Dean Court.

What followed was administration in February 2008, with the club’s debts at around £5.8m. Bournemouth were hit with a 10 point deduction, followed by a further 17 points the season after. They narrowly avoided relegation to the Conference and this season have been operating under a seemingly endless transfer embargo.

Meanwhile, ownership was passed from pillar to post as a range of bids for the club collapsed at the last minute before the Sport-6 consortium took over, only for events to unwind even quicker as the debts mounted up. Munto Finance were rumoured to be sniffing around at one point.

To detail the past eighteen months at Bournemouth is a blog post in itself but, despite resigning during the Sport-6 debacle, Mostyn is still involved with the club as part of a fresh consortium, while ex-Dorchester Town chairman Eddie Mitchell is now the Cherries new chair.

Mitchell claims to have reduced the debt from £1.8m to £800,000 since taking charge but financial details are thin on the ground. Meanwhile, the club faces yet another winding up order. Some jobs, it seems, are beyond both supporter owners or would-be white knights.

The fan who took over from the Trust

But not every former Trust-owned club is in dire straights, even if the move away from Trust ownership has been controversial. York City were saved by their Trust in 2003 after former chairman John Batchelor had comprehensively asset-stripped the Minstermen. Many members battled heroically to keep their club alive as a team that had been through so much finally came home to its fans.

But since 2006, York City have been under the ownership of JM Packing, who own 75% of the shares, with the Trust holding the remaining 25%. The company is the family business of Jason McGill and his sister Sophie, dyed in the wool York supporters and active members of the Trust’s rescue effort back in 2003.

McGill became chairman but three years later argued that the Trust could no longer take the club forward as well as a professionally backed business and made an offer to buy a majority stake in York. Certainly the club was struggling at the time, with relegation to the Conference North a possibility. Under the terms of the deal, JM Packing would put in £1m a year for five years as loans.

When the club sells their ground, Bootham Crescent, as it is contractually bound to do within nine years under the terms of a £2 million loan from the Football Foundatio,n repayment of the £1 million principal to JM Packaging will be waived. But they will still receive the interest on their loan.

Supporters were divided at the time, but plans for the stadium remain on track and York are looking like genuine contenders for promotion back to the Football League this season. Should York get promotion, a new stadium and secure future, then the JM Packaging takeover may seem like an astute piece of business, while the Trust still retain a piece of ownership.

The odd experiment

For all the achievements of Trust run clubs, as well as their respective failures, the club that’s probably generated most column inches with regard to fan ownership is Ebbsfleet United, which is definitely not a Trust-run club, but could easily edge towards that model if the will was there. And despite the blaze of publicity that greeted MyFootballClub.co.uk when they brought Fleet, it’s debatable whether you could describe Ebbsfleet as fan owned currently.

The idea was a simple one: members would sign up to MyFC for £35 a year. The website would then buy a club, funded via the subscriptions, and members would vote on everything from the playing budget to the kit to transfers to picking the team. In theory, it was a footballing utopia; an antidote to the Premier League. In reality, it has been somewhat of a car crash.

Currently MyFC’s membership, after the latest round of renewals, stands at just over 4,000, down from a high of 32,000 in February 2008, and down from around 9,000 members this time last year. You don’t need a degree in maths to work out that this leaves the Fleet with a serious funding shortfall.

In reality, MyFC’s proposition was always going to be a risky venture for Fleet, albeit not for the owner, former journalist Will Brooks. Yes, the cash from the takeover was badly needed by a financially struggling club and, yes, Ebbsfleet won the FA Trophy soon after the takeover, but those are rare high points.

The problem with MyFC is taking a bunch of fans who have no loyalty to the club, promising them too much (picking the team and other innovations), failing to deliver but still budgeting for a decent number of renewals (and this budget can only be done on a yearly basis, making long-term planning difficult). As the membership has dwindled so have the Fleet’s fortunes on and off the pitch.

Tellingly, the current number of MyFC subscriptions is higher than many Trust memberships, including Exeter. But Exeter are in a much more stable financial position, annual losses notwithstanding, than Fleet, which suggests a successful Trust-run club is more than just letting fans run the club — it goes deeper than that. Trust members do not pick the team nor sign the players, or any other gimmick, but they do have a huge say in the way their club is run, democratically. And there lies the difference.

Photo by James Vickery

Go to an Exeter City away game and chances are you’ll hear Grecians fans singing “We own our football club” to the home support. It’s a powerful reminder of just how close the bond is between supporters and their club as City fans revel in their status as one of the few supporter-owned clubs in the country, and one of the most successful.

The Devon club may have become an unintentional poster child for the Supporters Trust movement but, as their vice-chairman Julian Tagg noted yesterday, there is no blueprint for a fan-run club at their current level of League One, far less the Premier League. It is an issue The Red Knights will no doubt be picking over, along with any other top-flight or Championship Supporters’ Trust that harbours ambitions of owning their own club.

Exeter City: the poster child

Whenever the example of Supporters’ Trusts come up, Exeter City are the obvious place to start. The Devon side may only occasionally trouble the back pages of national newspapers, but they’re also the leading example of a successful Trust.

Created, initially, to find funds to buy striker Gary Alexander, the Trust, like so many others, came into its own when the club was at its lowest ebb. In the spring of 2003, Exeter had been relegated out of the Football League and were staring oblivion in the face. Their chair and vice-chair, John Russell and Mike Lewis, had just been arrested for fraud (Russell was later convicted and jailed for this), the debts were mounting and saviours were in short supply.

The Trust were invited to take over the day-to-day running of the club and embarked on a period of intensive fire-fighting. They managed to negotiate the purchase of shares from former chair Ivor Doble at the 11th hour meaning the fans were truly in charge of the club. Had this not been completed, the Trust had a press release drawn up saying they could no longer continue to fund City and the 100-year-old club would have, most likely, been liquidated.

But while Trust members were happy to raise large sums of money, which saved the club in the long-term, much of their current success can be put down to luck or, more specifically, the moment Tony Cascarino drew them away to Manchester United in the 3rd round of the FA Cup. The money from this, and the replay, generated around £1m, enough to pay off a large chunk of Exeter’s debts.

From there the club has gone from strength to strength. After losing the Conference playoff final in 2007, they went one better the following year before securing back-to-back promotions as runners up in League Two. Heady times indeed.

Off the pitch, the Trust was slowly evolving as well, from fire-fighters into a more professional outfit. Exeter fans with experience in the city were brought onto the board, while Denise Watts, a single mum, took over as chair of first the Trust, then the club. This was the ethos of the Trust in a nutshell – any fan could join, stand for election and find themselves shaping Exeter’s future.

But promotion to a higher level has brought a new set of challenges. “At the moment we’re the second smaller club in the division in terms of the number of people our ground can take,” says Julian Tagg, the club’s vice-chair and one of the original Trust members who pitched in at boardroom level in 2003.

“We look at the rugby club [Exeter Chiefs]. They’ve boosted attendences and, via that and their facilities, leisure dollars spent at the ground. This is something, with the current stadium, we can’t quite match. There’s a lot of work to be done now in how we structure the club and how we maintain that Trust ethos, and how we rebuild the stadium to bring in new finance to the club.”

The stadium issue is one of the most pressing concerns for Exeter. Their Old Grandstand is on its last legs and badly needs replacing, the uncovered away terrace needs work and the whole pitch needs moving and relaying before any of this work can be done. The Grecians are reasonably fortunate in that while they don’t own their ground, the local council leases, meaning development, while slow, is possible.

For the time being, though, the club’s attention is also taken up by Exeter’s relegation battle at the foot of League One and while Tagg is confident they can survive, he knows their success on the pitch is tied into major off the pitch activity.

“We can compete in this league,” he says, “and we may even get into the league above, all things being equal. My ambition is always took look at Crewe as an example – much of their success has been down to youth.

“If we can complete our stadium then we can sit down and think about how we go from there, but we can’t do this overnight. Everybody wants instant success – that’s what causes their downfall – and as long as people can be patient, we can get there but we have to do it gradually.

“We sold four young players and it took ten years of work on them before it came to fruition. That’s not short-term at all. If we start with them at eight, nine, ten, who knows what could happen.”

It’s something that has been borne out by the club’s most recent accounts, when they announced losses of £227,000 between June 2008 and May 2009, although taking into account depreciation, the trading deficit stands at £67,092. This includes the sale of youngster George Friend to Wolves for around £350,000. Since then two more youth graduates have departed – Dean Moxey for Derby and Danny Seaborne to Southampton, both for six-figure sums.

Strangely, the club would have been better, financially speaking, to avoid promotion. The Grecians earned just £10,000 from finishing second in League Two. With bonus payments this meant Exeter would have been better off reaching the playoffs or missing out on promotion all together.

The clubs debts stand at £1.8m, although much of this is soft loans from the Supporters’ Trust. Even so, this shows what a hard job a sensible, relatively run supporter-owned club has in the lower leagues. Not that Tagg would ever consider selling up.

“An offer to buy the club would be something the members would have to vote on, and you never say never, but to me the only reason we’d do this is is we’ve failed and I’ve not got involved to preside over that. We’ll do the best we possibly can.

“If someone were to come along and they were genuinely philanthropic and loved the club then we may consider this, but I’d prefer that we stayed in the hands of the supporters.”

Brentford: The hybrid club

When Exeter gained promotion last season, the club that pipped them to first place was another fan-owned club, Brentford. Supporter power, for one season at least, ruled at the top of League Two. But while Exeter have stuck resolutely to the Trust model, Brentford have gone down the philanthropic route and found a rich fan willing to sit alongside the Trust, Bees United, at boardroom level.

Hit hard by the recession and the increased costs of League One, as well as plans for a desperately-needed new stadium, and at their borrowing limit, Bees United realised they needed a significant cash injection to compete and struck a deal with wealthy supporter Matthew Benham, who had already lent £4m to the club to help manage their debt.

Under the terms of the new deal, Benham will put in a million pounds a year for the next five years, while Bees United remain the majority shareholder, giving Brentford a form of financial stability. At the end of this period, Bees United can either buy Benham out and repay his loans, or Benham can exercise an option to become a majority shareholder, with Bees United becoming a minority stakeholder.

However, the Trust would also retain a Golden Share to ensure that Griffin Park could not be sold without their permission and the proposed new stadium at Lionel Road is not affected. Crucially, this deal had to be approved by the membership and 70% of Bees United members voted on the issue, with 99% agreeing to the move.

For Brian Burgess, former vice-chairman of the club and an active member of the Trust, the deal is a sensible one, and something he can see being replicated at other clubs. “I think that’s quite a good model for other Trusts because we have to live in the real world,” he says.

“The economics of football as such mean it’s very difficult to compete under the current regime with the big clubs and cubs who’ve got wealthy supporters putting in loads of money. So you need to do this sort of deal and at least we’ve got some safeguards in with the golden share in particular.”

Without it, Burgess doesn’t believe Brentford would have been able to compete. “The standard’s higher, we’re playing against bigger clubs like Leeds, Norwich, Southampton and Charlton and you need more money. Bees United couldn’t raise the kind of money we needed to compete. If we had serious aspirations to get promoted from this league into the Championship you need the Matthew Benham deal, we needed that extra million pounds a year.

“That doesn’t guarantee that we will get promoted, but the plan is to work towards getting promoted in the next four years and have a new stadium in the fifth year so we can progress from there. Without that million pounds a year, I think we’d struggle in League One and, of course, the danger is that we’d have got relegated again. In League Two because you’ve got smaller teams with lower away support, you just don’t get the revenue. You tend to get into a downward spiral. Obviously we want to get into a virtuous upward spiral.”

Bees United was formed in 2001 in response to worries over the future of Griffin Park and in 2006 the Trust brought the club from then-chairman Ron Noades for two pounds, although a condition of this was they relieved Noades’ company of the £4.5m owed in loans to the banks.

Former BBC director general Greg Dyke, a Brentford and Manchester United fan, was installed as chairman with Burgess as his deputy and although the club was relegated from League One in 2007, they managed to bounce back under young manager Andy Scott. In the meantime, Burgess and Bees United were, like Julian Tagg at Exeter, turning their attentions to their stadium, and rapidly concluded that it needed replacing.

“We knew we’d never really be sustainable as a business here at Griffin Park,” says Burgess. “We budget to lose around half a million pounds a year in order to give us even a reasonable playing budget, let alone one that can compete in League One. There’s no commercial facilities here, nothing. It’s very difficult for us to earn any kind of serious revenue because there are no corporate boxes, no hospitality suites.

“During the week we don’t have conferencing and banqueting facilities that would enable us to make commercial revenue. It’s always been the plan to build a new stadium. I’ve been working on it all the way through and at the end of 2007 we did a deal with Barratts to buy this site at Lionel Road and it was obvious then it would become a full-time job.”

The recession and the housing market crash knocked plans for the new stadium back from the original date of 2012, but it still remains on course as Brentford look to prove that Trusts and wealthy investors can co-exist comfortably at boardroom level.

The new clubs

Further down the chain comes two very unique success stories: AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester. Both these clubs were formed out of protest – the Dons from the football league’s decision to relocate the original Wimbledon to Milton Keynes, while FCUM was a reaction to the Glazers takeover of Manchester United and a desire for United supporters to get back to their roots and ensure that ordinary supporters weren’t priced out of watching their team.

Both have enjoyed impressive rises through the non-league pyramid. Since their formation in 2002, AFC Wimbledon have risen from the Combined Counties League to the Blue Square Premier, including back-to-back promotions in recent seasons, and are currently still in the hunt for a play-off spot. Similarly, FC United won promotion three times in their first three seasons before stalling at the Unibond Premier.

It is, perhaps, no coincidence that both Wimbledon and FC United have enjoyed success at lower league levels. They both started with a blank slate – there was no burden of history or, indeed, historic debts and both had a ready made community and Trust ethos in place (the Dons Trust structure and values can be read here). What’s more, the crowds they were attracting gave them a significant financial advantage when competing in the lower leagues, where income is often scarce.

In many respects, both these clubs can be seen as being the purest and most successful wholly Trust-owned teams (even Exeter City have other minor non-fan shareholders) but as both teams climb the leagues and compete at a higher level, new problems arise. Just as the blank canvas benefitted these clubs at the start, so it also means each promotion is a further step into the unknown.

Chief among these issues is the now-common theme of the stadium. AFC Wimbledon currently groundshare with Kingstonian, although the Dons actually own Kingsmeadow Stadium, while FC United are tenants at Bury’s Gigg Lane. But as the Dons rise up the league, the looming question is whether they continue at Kingsmeadow or look to build a new stadium in the borough of Merton, their spiritual home.

This ties in with the debate about how best for the club to progress as a whole. Gone are they days when the old Wimbledon could rise from non-league to the top flight and win the FA Cup, but if AFC have aspirations to continue their climb up the football pyramid, there will be a level, as Exeter and Brentford have found, where Trust money can only fund so far. For the time being, though, Dons fans are enjoying their status in the Conference.

FC United are a slightly different case as they have no ‘spiritual’ home (unless you count Old Trafford) but are well aware that their own stadium is key to future progression. Currently rental on Gigg Lane is around £5,000 per match. The Rebels have recently submitted plans for a 4,000 capacity stadium to a supportive Manchester City Council (unlike Merton Borough Council, who are lukewarm on a Dons return) and will be looking to the end of their lease at Bury in 2011 as a rough timescale. A ground of their own will give them greater opportunity for matchday and non-matchday revenue.

What FCUM and AFC Wimbledon both have, though, that many clubs can’t buy is a stable well-run board and a genuine sense of community and belonging to the club. And in non-league, where many sides are an unexpected bill away from crisis, that counts for a lot.

The phoenix from the flames

As Dave Lister once said to the hologram Rimmer in Red Dwarf: “Cheer up, death isn’t what it used to be,” and that could equally apply to football clubs teetering on the brink today. If your club went out of business years ago, that was the end – or if a new club was set up with the same name, it would take decades to get back to where you once were as Aldershot and Accrington Stanley can testify.

But if a club collapses financially today, there is light at the end of the tunnel and often the Supporters’ Trust is waiting in the wings to reform the club and put it on a more even keel, giving fans the opportunity to run their club as opposed to an owner with big promises but smaller pockets.

Dave Boyle, CEO of Supporters’ Direct, is one of those who urges fans not to despair if it looks as if their club is going to the wall. “The idea that the worse thing that can happen to a club is that it be liquidated isn’t as strong as it was,” he says.

“Fans would be told of this horrible prospect of the club disappearing and then accept whatever sharp practice, ground sale, asset strip was put forward as the least worst option. Even if that didn’t happen, they’d fundraise like crazy trying to keep the club afloat when their money and energy were never going to do the job.

“But thanks to those trusts and those clubs, we know in fact what people always knew in their heart of hearts – that football in a given community isn’t about the limited company formed to play it in an organised football league. If that company were to be liquidated, football would survive in the community. And, thanks to the success enjoyed by those clubs and the enjoyment their fans have in owning their own team, we see a lot of people being very sanguine indeed about keeping a busted flush of a small town team alive.”

Perhaps the leading example of this is AFC Telford, who were formed out of the ashes of Conference side Telford United. The Bucks were liquidated in 2004 when the chairman and owner, Andrew Shaw, got into business difficulties and had to put his entire empire into administration. But no sooner had United ceased to exist, the Trust was waiting in the wings to create the phoenix club.

Having secured use of Telford United’s New Bucks Head ground, the club was placed in the Northern League Division One. Within three years they were playing in the Conference North, with crowds averaging around 2,000. Far from killing the support for football in the town, Telford United’s demise actually re-energised support. The town rallied round and created a community club that was far more engaged with its supporters. In both potential and execution, AFC Telford are the best possible advert for a supporter-owned phoenix club.

Scarborough Athletic are another example of the supporters rallying to keep professional football in the town after the original club, Scarborough FC went bust in 2007 with debts of £2.5m. Again, a new club rose from the ashes under the management of the Supporters’ Trust, although the Seadogs have fell further than many reformed teams and, after one promotion, currently play in the Northern Counties East Football League Premier Division, groundsharing with neighbours Bridlington.

Tomorrow, we will look at those who’ve not quite been the same kind of resounding successes the Trust movement was hoping for.

Slowly, a behind-the-scenes footballing revolution is growing. Whether it’s Portsmouth’s ongoing demise, the Glazers burdening Manchester United with hundreds of millions of pounds with of debt, Hicks and Gillett at Liverpool, Ashley at Newcastle or, lower down, the Vaughan family taking Chester City to the wall, the spotlight has well and truly turned on the owners. And with fans becoming more alarmed at the mismanagement of their clubs at boardroom level, supporters are asking whether it’s time that the fans took control of their clubs.

Fan ownership, on the surface, seems sensible and logical. These are people who, unlike, say, the Glazers, have the best interest of their club at heart and care passionately about keeping their team alive and successful. Barcelona are often cited as the ideal for any fan-owned club to aim for, while other Europhiles will point to the Bundesliga’s ownership model, where 51% of the club is owned by supporters.

If only it were that simple. Barcelona’s ownership is a unique mix of football, politics and cultural identity, while the Bundesliga has regulation in place securing the fans’ shareholding, and even then this isn’t as clear cut as it sounds. English football operates on very different lines, where the free market reigns. The conditions are quite distinct.

Then there are the clubs who’ve already been owned by their supporters. Exeter City, the leading light in the Trust movement, is adjusting to a higher level, Brentford have moved towards a hybrid model, while AFC Wimbledon face serious choices should they get promotion to the league. Then there’s Notts County and Stockport County, two teams where Trusts have tried and failed.

But with Manchester United and Liverpool fans, and others, pushing for more fan involvement at boardroom level, it’s time to ask if supporter ownership really is the way forward, or whether English football doomed to stick with the sugar daddy model. Over the course of the week, we’ll be examining the concept of Trusts, fan ownership and looking where the ownership model should go next.

The birth of a movement

Each Trust is different, and each was born in a different way. In Exeter City’s case, it was a group of fans who wanted to club together to raise enough money to buy the striker Gary Alexander. For Brentford, it was due to concern over the possibility of losing their ground, Griffin Park, to developers. Newcastle United’s Trust came from their Supporters Club as they looked to find an organised body to represent the interests of the fans. In AFC Wimbledon’s case, their club had been moved to Milton Keynes and, in many suppporters’ eyes, simply ceased to exist, and so on.

But there’s a fundamental thought behind the Trust movement: that supporter ownership is a good thing, whether this is representation at boardroom level or outright ownership. For Brian Burgess, ex-vice-chairman of Brentford and recent electee to the board of Supporters’ Direct, this is a principle that was picked up at an early age.

His involvement was triggered by an incident back in 1967, when Jack Dunnet, the then Brentford owner, attempted to sell the club to QPR and put the Bees out of business. “There was uproar among supporters and public meetings. I was too young to go to these but there was always talk in the newspapers that this was wrong – an individual selling the club – it’s our club and the supporters should own it.

“The club was sold to a consortium of businessmen, who saved it, but I remembered that idea – the idea that supporters should own the club and it shouldn’t be up for sale.”

Nearly 35 years later Burgess joined the newly-formed Brentford Supporters Trust, Bees United, seeing it as an opportunity to realise that dream and in 2006 Bees United took control of Brentford. They are still the majority shareholder, although have entered into a hybrid model with a wealthy supporter as they look to build a new stadium.

Brentford are still a rarity, though, and currently sit in League One, along with Exeter City, a completely Trust run club. After that, you have to look to non-league to find other supporter-owned clubs, such as AFC Wimbledon, Telford United and FC United or Manchester.

Going to the top

But this doesn’t mean that Trusts can’t play a huge part at a higher level. Since the media started turning their attentions to the Glazer buy out of Manchester United and the £716m debt they’ve saddled the club with, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust (MUST) have emerged as key players in both the spread of the Green and Gold campaign and the movement for fan ownership.

If this seems like a pipe dream, last week the Red Knights, a group of wealthy Manchester United fans, met to discuss a possible takeover of the club from the Glazers. It was no coincidence that a key part of this statement was a call to United supporters worldwide to support them. And this involved working closely with MUST.

Duncan Drasdo, the Chief Executive of MUST, called the Red Knights launch “hugely welcome” and in a joint statement said: “Initially the Red Knight Group has effectively set a challenge to Manchester United supporters to demonstrate they wish to see an alternative ownership proposal developed. In the first instance supporters are being asked to do this simply by joining the free online membership of the Supporters Trust (MUST) and swelling its ranks to an initial target of at least 100,000.” To put this into perspective, Exeter City, currently the most successful Trust-run club, has just over 3,000 members.

Even when there is no apparent urgency for fans to band together for their club, the Trust movement is often working behind the scenes both with the club and as a watchdog on the boardroom. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur may be bitter rivals on the pitch, yet off it the aims of their Trusts are remarkably similar.

For Arsenal, this can be summed up in three words: Ownership, representation and influence. The mission statement may be wordier at Spurs but the ideals are the same – an ongoing positive dialogue between fans and the board, supporter representation at board level, and contributing to the future success of Tottenham.

The Arsenal Supporters’ Trust formed in 2003 and Vic Crescit, a long-time member, thinks recent events at Ashburton Grove have vindicated the decision to form a Trust. “The Trust was proved absolutely right in setting up when it did. In recent years we’ve seen the ownership of the club transformed. Stan Kroenke, the owner of the MLS’s Colorado Rapids,  is now the single biggest shareholder, behind him is the Russian/Uzbek Alisher Usmanov on just over 26%.

“Then comes Danny Fiszman on 16% and Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith on 15.9%. They account for around 88% of the shares between them. Around 11% is in the hands of small shareholders like me. Around 1% of the shares are “orphan” shares where the owners have died before selling them or passing them on or can’t be traced.

“The Trust owns a small number of shares held mutually in trust for its members, plus it groups together all the shares owned personally by members. By combining in this way AST has a far bigger influence in the club than the small shareholders would operating on their own in isolation.”

Although the formation of the Trust was initially viewed with suspicion at Arsenal, after the board came in for criticism over the financing of the Emirates, they opened a dialogue with the Trust and the relationship has been good since, although the Trust continues to keep a close eye on boardroom developments.

The challenges of answering to the fans

Although each Trust has different aims – ranging from outright ownership to simply fostering better links between fans and the club – all have a commitment to an open and democratic relationship with the supporters. There are regular elections for members to hold the Trust board to account. It is, in essence, how any democracy should work.

Offering help and guidance is Supporters Direct, an organisation that came out of the government’s football taskforce report in 1999. They may be just over ten years old, but SD have done as much to instigate fan ownership as anybody. Committed to a greater level of fan ownership, democracy and general accountability in football, and other sports, they have steadily grown in influence offering advice on everything from governance and ownership to finances. Accreditation from Supporters Direct is a sign a Trust is to be taken seriously.

But more than this, the organisation is putting serious pressure on the authorities for a more sustainable model. As their CEO Dave Boyle says: “In football’s version of the tortoise and the hare, the hare wins the race and its only two years’ later that the hare’s house is repossessed by the bank for the loans taken out to get bionic implants, which is scant consolation for the tortoise who was sacked halfway through the race. Or, as an economist might put it, all the incentives are in the wrong place.”

But while there is still a serious imbalance in football, Boyle sees plenty of progress over the past decade. “Thanks to the work of AFC Wimbledon, AFC Telford, FC United and Scarborough Athletic, the idea that the worse thing that can happen to a club is that it be liquidated isn’t as strong as it was. Fans would be told of this horrible prospect of the club disappearing and then accept whatever sharp practice, ground sale, asset strip was put forward as the least worst option. Even if that didn’t happen, they’d fundraise like crazy trying to keep the club afloat when their money and energy were never going to d the job.

“But thanks to those trusts and those clubs, we know in fact what people always knew in their heart of hearts – that football in a given community isn’t about the limited company formed to play it in an organised football league. If that company were to be liquidated, football would survive in the community.

“And, thanks to the success enjoyed by those clubs and the enjoyment their fans have in owning their own team, we see a lot of people being very sanguine indeed about keeping a busted flush of a small town team alive. In a nutshell, the worst that could happen used to be liquidation; now people understand that liquidation can be a cause for rebirth as a new, better type of club.”

There is no better place to illustrate this than the recent goings on at Chester City, but many other clubs have seen that rebirth can be a positive thing, to say nothing of those fans who’ve taken the initiative and have not only saved their club but made a better fist of it than previous owners. As Boyle says: “There were people who aren’t in favour of this approach to the game, who said at the start that it shouldn’t happen, and couldn’t happen.

“But that notion – that fans are too stupid / ignorant / passionate to be involved is a hard one to make in public, so they’d said instead that it was a lovely idea, but ultimately unworkable. Thanks to the work of the trust up and down the country, that’s not an argument borne out by the evidence.”

Owning a club, though, comes with its own issues, not least managing fan expectations. Exeter City are a prime example of this – the club was taken over by the Trust in 2003 after their relegation from the football league following the disastrous reign of convicted fraudster John Russell. Since then they’ve stabilised and have won two promotions over the last two seasons.

The club may now be struggling down the wrong end of League One, but for vice-chairman Julian Tagg, a long-time Trust member who has served on the board since the takeover, the pressure on the board is nothing new.

“There’s always been a pressure,” he says, “and that hasn’t changed. The pressure comes from the Trust ethos of running the club and the demands of our membership, as well as the situation of the club. We’ve got to be creative in our approach – we can’t just employ extra people.

“There’s also the question of can we find a way to become competitive. We’re at a level now where there really is no blueprint for how we do things.”

But it’s not just the challenge of League One that Tagg and the Exeter City board have to deal with – it’s also having over 3,000 members, all of whom have an opinion on how the club should be run.

“The club and Trust rolls into one,” says Tagg. “The Trust directors own the club and they, in turn, are bound to the membership, so we’re always going to be dynamic in how we approach the club and how we want to protect the club.

“What we’re really trying to do is to find a balance between an being an operator and a professional club. How we look after these people [the Trust membership] is so precious. That’s why we started in the first place and now the club isn’t in trouble, we have to make sure of its future.”

Brian Burgess has experienced similar issues with Brentford and says much of it is down to making clear the different responsibilities of the Trust and the club board. Even then, there is still the question of where does the line between the Trust and club come in.

Burgess says: “We had to say: ‘Look, if the performances on the pitch are bad, if the manager needs to be changed, that’s the job of the football club not the Bees United board.’ But, of course, as the majority shareholder, you’re interested in the company being run properly, so you’re going to try and want to influence the football club board to do the right thing. And there’s always been a tension in there and a learning curve about how you manage that relationship. To what extent is it arm’s length, to what extent is it right to exert influence, what’s the best way to assert your influence?

“I think it comes down to individuals. If you’re got good individuals that people trust and they’re open, as far as they can be in terms of confidentiality, then it’s a lot easier. When things are going well, it’s a lot easier. When things go badly then there’s criticism and that’s when it’s really difficult.

“We appoint people and let them get on with the job. If they do a good job, that’s great, if they don’t, ultimately, we sack them. That’s how it is – in any business, although it’s more short term than any other, I guess.”

Where do we go from here?

The whole idea of Trusts and fan ownership is hugely complex. As Tagg says, there is currently no blueprint for a fan run club in League One, let alone the Premier League. And while eyes are cast at Barcelona and the Bundesliga, English football comes with its own unique set of challenges for supporters who want to run their club.

Over the rest of this week, we’ll be looking at the successes and failures of the Trust movement, as well as the challenges that lie ahead, the foreign models and in-depth interviews with some of those closely involved with the movement.

But one thing, above all, that is striking about the Trust movement is the ability of fans to put aside their differences and work together for the good of the club; the idea that clubs should belong in the hands of supporters not money men. It’s an idea that would have been laughed out of town ten, perhaps even five, years ago.

As Andy Walsh from FC United of Manchester said at a recent Beyond The Debt rally, rivalries between supporters of football clubs are an artificial construct which masks. the true enemies of football supporters – the people that run the game itself.

Or, as Crescit puts it somewhat more succinctly: “I don’t ever want my football club to become a rich man’s train set nor get rich quick scam. We’ve all seen what happens when we allow the financial tail to wag the productive dog in the world economy.”

In some respects, Aaron Ramsey, Stoke City and Arsenal should all consider themselves lucky, unlikely as that seems right now. Ramsey, for all the horror of his horrible injury, is a young player who may recover and go onto have a successful career. Stoke and Arsenal both have insurance to cover serious, career-threatening injuries to players. Marcus Hallows and Ashton United are not so lucky.

Back in March 2005, Hallows was plying his trade for Altrincham, then of the Blue Square North, when his career was ended in a horrific fashion. Shortly after coming on as a sub against Ashton United in a regular league match, an Ashton United player by the name of Danny White made a late block tackle on Hallows, breaking his right leg.

The injury was so severe that it took half an hour for an ambulance to attend and treat Hallows. His heart stopped on the way to the hospital and, although he was revived, his footballing career was over.

Hallows, now 35 and working in sales and as an Elvis impersonator, sued both Ashton United and Danny White. Two weeks ago, five years after the tackle, Judge Armitage found in favour of Hallows and deemed the challenge to be reckless, ordering Ashton to pay £32,000. With legal fees, the club face a bill for £130,000 – money they simply don’t have.

But this goes further than a non-league team potentially going to the wall, or discussion around yet another bad tackle. It is no exaggeration that the Hallows ruling could have a huge effect on non-league football and potentially radically alter or even kill some areas of the game.

This ruling now sets a precedent for non-league where any player who has suffered a serious injury could potentially claim retrospective damages against the player and club, if that player was under contract. And in many cases, insurance for this simply doesn’t exist.

At non-league level the insurance cover for a club is beyond what many of them can afford. The Unibond League, where Ashton currently play, have tried to organise quotes for group insurance cover but the costs are so high that many teams don’t have the reserves of cash to pay this.

This is not the Premier League, where insurance is mandatory. This is non-league where a few thousand or even hundred pounds can be the difference between success and extinction.

Very few clubs at non-league level have public liability policies and even fewer have a policy that covers player-to-player liability. Even then, there is no guarantee they will be able to claim for injuries caused by dangerous or deliberate tackles. And very few clubs will be able to afford this.

Unlike in Norway or Germany, where insurance and policy schemes are part of the administration of the game, there is no scheme in place at non-league level in Britain, despite warnings for many years that insurance, or lack of it, was a ticking time-bomb.

The future could see clubs, or players, refusing to play due to lack of insurance. Some players may decide the cost of having to arrange their own policies against injuries to both themselves and opponents is not worth the hassle or simply too expensive, while smaller clubs may refuse to take on players without adequate insurance. Meanwhile, there’s ever chance of further litigation from low-earning players whose careers have been curtailed by injury.

Several solicitors have called for the FA to roll out a national scheme for levels of football to help clubs insure against potential litigation, but that won’t come in time to save Ashton United.

Ashton chairman Dave Aspinall believes the club can appeal on points of law, but will need £9,000 to do so; money, again, that the club doesn’t have. But they may have a case for appeal.

At the time of the incident the referee was five yards from the ball and did not give a free kick. Altrincham did not support Hallows in his lawsuit and their manager, Graham Heathcote, has described it as “one of hundreds” seen across the country over the course of the weekend. There is still hope for Ashton if they can raise money for an appeal.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to blame Hallows in all of this. Here is a man who has nearly died, suffered a serious injury and saw his career finished. After all he’s been through, you can understand why he is putting his needs above football. Many of us would do the same.

Aaron Ramsey will probably play again and, in the meantime, expect plenty of hand-wringing and discussion about whether or not to clamp down on tackles. If Ashton United are unsuccessful in their appeal, non-league may not need their own clamp down – any kind of full-blooded tackle could long become a thing of the past.