Photo credit: sasakei on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.

Photo credit: redia_09 on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.

Photo credit: kumama-republicUltra nagasaki on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.

Update: All done. I’m still adding stuff back in, and adding useless features to the site. Let me know if you find anything broken (likely).

Update2: If you want to subscribe to our RSS feed, you’re out of luck right now. Apparently I broke something, so check back here again later.

Of course, sadly, times have changed and Ray’s opportunities to wax about Riquelme have declined.

Nobody idolises Riquelme the way I do. I absolutely worship the ground he walks on, but Pellegrini has seen that cow milked for all of its goodness in Villarreal and the time has come to say goodbye.
Ray Hudson, 8:03 1st

Thankfully, Ray seems to have an endless treasure trove to dip into. Some can’t stand Ray’s pronounced Geordie bombast; and some can’t get enough of his mad ramblings. Increasingly, I fall into the latter category, and the blog explains why.

A tip of the hat to The Offside Rules for pointing me there.

Over 53,000 signed up to phase one. A unique Trust with online voting has been registered with the FSA. The forum has amassed 80,000 posts. Over £700,000 has been collected from members in 70 countries. Nine football clubs have come forward, and we’ve sounded out several others.After many meetings and much travel, we have finally narrowed it down to one. We believe that this football club offers MyFootballClub members the best chance of success.

We’ve agreed terms in principle for the purchase of the football club, and the due diligence process has started. We are doing all we can to ensure an agreement is signed ahead of the January transfer window. And all the indications are that this process will move quickly.

By my math, that means 20,000 fans have invested in this (unless some invested more than the minimum, if that’s possible). £700,000 isn’t going to buy them Manchester United, but the smaller they start the better, to be honest. Smartly, on their site they’re urging members to consider the public relations aspect of the deal.

Every MyFC member will have a PR job to do. Clearly there are ways to go about it. For example, turning up to their ground in your MyFC top might not be the best move. Nor will 1000 messages from MyFC members on their website’s forum go down too well. Less PR offensive, more PR inoffensive will be the key.

To help us with this, I’m confident that the many members we have who write for newspapers, magazines and websites will be wearing their MyFootballClub hats and give our story a fair hearing.

The new owners and the current fans are obviously going to have a novel and tense situation to deal with. Are any of our readers on the “inside” of this venture? If so, what’s the story?

Reading captain Graeme Murty told BBC Sport: “We know that at the moment we are massively inconsistent. It’s not easy to justify spending so much money to watch us perform and this is giving something back to the fans.”

Steve Coppell’s side have endured a difficult beginning to their second season in the top flight and following their 3-1 defeat at Fulham on Saturday are only five points clear of the relegation zone.

“I would be lying if I said that the poor start didn’t enter certain people’s thinking,” said Murty, who is in his 10th season at the Berkshire club.

“It can’t be good going to places like Fratton Park and coming out after a 7-4 loss wearing a Reading shirt. But more than that there has been a growing realisation among the players of how expensive it is, especially for parents who bring their kids to a game.”

A nice touch, even if £5,000 between twenty-odd blokes making more than that each week isn’t a lot of cash. Still, it sure beats the stinginess of a Gareth Southgate, for example, and is good PR for the Premier League a week after the Sport Minister’s scathing comments about the obscene wages in football.

One also wonders what this means for the bigger disappointments this year such as Wigan or Spurs — perhaps they should be paying their fans to go to games. Or maybe they could do them an even bigger favour and win a match.

Photo credit: sasakei on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.

And fortunately, due to the fact I finally installed some decent spam filters on this blog, feedback will now be instantaneous for everyone when you submit it (unless, that is, you include lots of bad words or phrases such as ‘viagra’, ‘credit card no limit’ or ‘New England Revolution rule’).

No longer will there be a moderation limbo for first time commenters, which I hope will facilitate discussion. Which reminds me: if you read this site regularly, why not drop a comment right here and tell us who you are, where you’re from and who you support? The site would be nothing without you readers, after all.

(By the way, we’ll be featuring the ultras from Japan throughout the week in photo daily.)