AFC Wimbledon's mascot, Haydon the Womble, still has some energy despite participating in the Dons' fundraising walk earlier that day. AFC Wimbledon vs. Eastbourne, 13 March 2010.

Photo credit: Chalfont Don on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

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.”

This week, Chester City FC supporters called for their own club to be put out of its misery and wound up, so they could start over under their own democratic ownership — to ensure they would never again be at the whim of owners who do not have the club’s best interests at heart.

To be forced to the extreme of calling for your club to be put out of business and having to begin again at the lower reaches of the English pyramid system is hardly a decision to be taken lightly. But the beauty of the English set-up is that such a drastic action can be taken yet still fans can have hope for their new club to rise again to former heights, and this time under an ownership system that does not put the club at the mercy of selfish individuals.

Take AFC Wimbledon, famously formed in the aftermath of the franchising of their club to Milton Keynes, an unforgiveable crime against football perpetrated by club owner Pete Winkelman with an eventual, killer rubber stamp from the Football Association as Wimbledon became the Milton Keynes Dons.

The fans’ new club began in the Combined Counties League, the nether regions of English football, but four promotions in seven seasons see them now in the Conference National, the fifth tier of the game and within touching distance of the Football League. They have their own stadium, and crowds that sometimes surpass those they had in the top tier of English football a decade ago.

And so Niall Couper, a former member of the AFC Wimbledon Trust Board, suggests Portsmouth follow the same path in a piece today in the Independent:

I’m an AFC Wimbledon  fan. I will always remember being in the room when a bunch of naive South Londoners filled in a London FA form to formally register the club. Eight years on and that same club is now plying its trade in the Conference having been promoted four times.

Yes, I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss turning over the likes of Liverpool, Manchester United and, most of all, Chelsea – but since AFC Wimbledon emerged from an FA Commission’s decision to allow my club to be stolen away eight years ago I have gained so much more.

I now support a club bedded in the local community. It is run by the fans and for the fans. Gone are the days of dodgy owners – and Pompey have had more than their fair share of those. Gone are the days of players with huge egos. Each new AFC Wimbledon player undergoes an initiation into the club that stresses its ethos, its commitment to fan ownership and its fervent opposition to football franchising. I seriously doubt Sol Campbell ever underwent such a similar experience at Fratton Park.

AFC Wimbledon also owns its own ground – bought by the fans – and now gets attendances around the 4,000 mark. Indeed, when we played Luton earlier this season our attendance was higher than the equivalent fixture years ago in the top flight.

Yes, there are huge logistic problems in setting up your own club, but there is help to be found through the likes of Supporters Direct, the masterminds of the growing Supporters Trust movement across the country.

Pompey fans should get in touch with them now, get organised and go for it. After all, Wimbledon were never the biggest club – and look what we have achieved. Portsmouth are a far bigger club than we ever were – just imagine what AFC Portsmouth could do.

Pioneers that they were, in some ways the decision to start over for Wimbledon fans was made if not easy, but logical for them by the move of their club to Milton Keynes. But their progress sets an example in the context of what would be an even harder decision for Pompey fans in some ways.  Just as Chester City’s Supporters’ Trust this week called for their club to begin again with the help of Supporters Direct, it may be time for Portsmouth fans to consider similar, drastic action.

Barrow AFC's home ground, Holker Street, after a match against AFC Wimbledon in the Blue Square Premier. November 14th, 2009.

Photo credit: Chalfont Don on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

Wimbledon’s board, attracted by Peter Winkleman’s Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium, wanted to move the club to a new location nowhere near their original home, in an attempt to parachute in a Football League club to a city that couldn’t be bothered to gain one by the old-fashioned method of winning football matches.

As we discussed in the first part of this series, the Football League Board had rejected the move, but Wimbledon had appealed, and it was now up this F.A. panel to decide. It was up to three men to determine the future of a club over a century old: Alan Turvey, chairman of the sub-conference Ryman League; Raj Parker, a commercial solicitor; and Steve Stride, Aston Villa’s Commercial Director.

The report outlined all the negative reaction this had drawn. In the “objections” section, it noted that opposition had not just come from Wimbledon fans; “respected football writers”, “a Parliamentary All Party Committee”, “Merton Borough Council” had all expressed their disapproval, “and of course the Football Association, the Football League, the FA Premier League and the Football Conference Ltd have all provided statements which stress the identification of clubs with community, the sacrosanct nature of the pyramid structure based on sporting merit (English football does not allow a franchise system)”.

Most of the hundreds of communications the panel had received were against the proposal, it said. “Supporters’ associations and individual fans from many other clubs and people from as far afield as the United States, Australia (Wimbledon Supporters Down under), Russia and Norway have also expressed similar views.”

The panel, in a 2-1 verdict, concluded that despite this, “Our decision is that, in light of its exceptional circumstances, WFC should be given approval to relocate to Milton Keynes.”

The report argued Wimbledon F.C. faced liquidation (this remains unclear as the club did not release its accounts), that it had “no viable South London” prospective ground (despite claims to the contrary by Merton Council) and most amazingly, that “WFC’s links or roots in its community are of a nature that can be and are agreed should be retained by WFC and MKSC, albeit in a new location. The Football League can ensure these links are put in place and preserved.”

Peter Winkelman, heading the Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium, could have written parts of the report himself. The report noted that “His enthusiasm for the project and it has to be said for Milton Keynes itself, was almost infectious, and obviously genuine. . .He believes that with over 40,000 school children in the area WFC will be fantastic news.”

“The potential fan base is huge. 8 million people live within one hour’s drive,” it blathered, as if Wimbledon were moving from a sleepy village on a remote island to a thriving metropolis. The report contrasted Winkleman’s vision of a 45,000 seater stadia with Wimbledon’s poor attendance figures and squalid groundshare with Crystal Palace.

The report added that “WFC intends to work with the fans to win them over and communicate with them to preserve the Club’s identity and meet their concerns as to travel. A glossy brochure has been produced which makes the case.”

The summary did, reluctantly, note that for some odd reason this “glossy brochure” had not won over the vast majority of Wimbledon’s fans to the move. “The most difficult issue was, obviously, how to win the hearts and minds of WFC’s fans to this proposal and to make it possible for them to continue to support and identify with the Club.”

This, though, would be easily remedied. The Board had agreed to subsidise travel and season tickets! Fans would even be consulted on the design of the stadium “to properly reflect the history and traditions of WFC.” Fans weren’t being consulted on where the stadium would actually be located, since they might want that to, well, “properly reflect the history and traditions of WFC”, but they could have a say in the design.

Dave Boyle, writing in Four Four Two magazine, captured perfectly this madness. “The report descends into farce by the end with the Commission seriously arguing that fans might find the transition to Buckinghamshire easier if they arrive at the new stadium along Fashanu Way or Sanchez Avenue. They also feel that if a museum was built in Wimbledon it would lessen the blow.”

The report dryly observed that the fans did not quite see the issue as one of marketing, but of life or death for their football club, inextricably linked to their community.

We heard both Mr Kris Stewart (Chair, WISA) and Ms Louise Carton-Kelly (Chair, the Dons Trust) in person. It was clear from their evidence that they care passionately about WFC[..]

Perhaps the most important point put forward by WFC’s fans is that the Club would die as WFC upon a relocation to Milton Keynes. Indeed when Mr Stewart was, in effect, asked by counsel for the Club, to choose between life for the Club in Milton Keynes, or death in Merton, he replied that he regarded both as death. Instead he hoped to resurrect the Club and start at the bottom of the pyramid. He would of course be free to do that if the circumstances so arose.

The committee was unmoved. “We do not believe, with all due respect, that the Club’s links with the community around the Plough Lane site or in Merton are so profound, or the roots go so deep, that they will not survive a necessary transplant to ensure WFC’s survival.”

The panel, with all due respect, was wrong. The fans founded their own club, A.F.C. Wimbledon, and have fought tooth and nail to ensure Milton Keynes Dons are not able to lay claim to any of the history of the club. This was finally recognised by all parties last year when Wimbledon’s honours were returned to Merton. We will look at how the two new clubs have fared since the panel’s decision in the remainder of this series.

Photo credits: dogbreath1; szczels

The former are a non-League supporter run club created in protest against the move of Wimbledon F.C. to a town sixty miles away with no connection to the club’s history. The latter are derided by A.F.C. Wimbledon fans as “Franchise F.C.”, yet the media are now lauding MK Dons’ success as they sit atop League Two.

Before exploring what’s happened in each case and the meaning of it for the future of football, we’ll need to explain the remarkable rise and fall of Wimbledon F.C. in the first place.

Wimbledon F.C. rose from the grit and mud of Plough Lane in the Merton Borough of London. They had long plied their trade in the nether regions of English non-League football since their founding in 1911, but made their name with some F.A. Cup giant-killing heroics in the 1970s, eventually winning a place in the Football League.

Not ten years later, now in the top flight thanks to a series of promotions, in 1988 Wimbledon headed to the F.A. Cup Final to take on Liverpool. Vinnie Jones (pictured right on another occasion making friends with Paul Gascoigne) and the rest of the “Crazy Gang” beat the “Culture Club” at Wembley Stadium 1-0.

It was an upset, but not another giant-killing, for Wimbledon weren’t half-bad: though criticised for their primitive style, they finished eighth in the top flight that year, and would stay there for another twelve years despite relatively small crowds and strictly limited financial resources.

That same year, the club’s hopes to build a new ground in Merton foundered. Again and again fans dealt with disappointment, and protested against new plans by their owner, Sam Hammam, to merge them with south London’s Crystal Palace. When Hammam said new football legislation made Plough Lane impractical, they ended up at Palace’s Selhurst Park anyway on a groundshare in 1991 that would last through the end of the decade, but they at least kept their identity.

Six years later, as David Conn puts it in The Beautiful Game?, “their soul was slowly freezing over at Selhurst Park” and Hammam cashed out, selling 80% of the club to two Norwegians. Soon it emerged that the Norwegians had bought in with a scheme to find Wimbledon a new home. But not only was it not in their native borough, nor in London, it was not even in England: the owners wanted to pack up and take the club to Dublin.

Over supporters’ protests, the Irish franchise idea was approved by greedy fellow Premier League owners who fancied a larger slice of the Irish appetite for English football. The Irish F.A., however, had other ideas, and convinced the English F.A. to step in and block the move.

It was a short-lived victory for Wimbledon fans. Hammam had left the club, and a new chairman, Charles Koppel, arrived in 2000. The same season, Wimbledon fell out of the Premier League and lost over three million pounds. The fans wanted a return to Merton, but Koppel said it wasn’t feasible.

And then along came Peter Winkelman, described by Conn as “a shaggy haired music producer with a salesman’s silver tongue” and a man with a plan: to move Wimbledon to his own town, Milton Keynes. It was all part of a property development plan involving a new stadium and supermarket for Milton Keynes, 45 miles north of London.

Milton Keynes shopping centre [Mike and Debs]

Milton Keynes was the largest of the Government-created “new towns” of the 1960s in the south-east of England, built to soak up and relieve the congestion in London and known as a somewhat sterile place. Winkelman said that it was the largest town in Europe without a professional football club. There were four non-league teams there already, but Winkelman argued a major new development project would be more easily financed by transplanting a current League team there as bait.

The Wimbledon board embraced the idea, as the owner’s had put themselves in trouble after their original plan to move the club had been scuppered. The fans were furious. To move the club 62 miles away, to a home not even in London, to a place with no connection to the club at all, was absolute anathema.

The Football League’s rulebook was a serious issue for Winkelman to deal with. It stated that “The location of the ground, in its relation to the conurbation. . .from which the club takes its name or with which it is otherwise traditionally associated, must meet with the approval of the Board.” It didn’t. The Football League Board voted against the move in August 2001, and fans praised the decision as a victory against the introduction of the concept of “franchising” football teams to England.

Milton Keynes Station [UKPlus Photos]

Koppel appealed, and the matter was ultimately decided upon by an F.A. panel in 2002. Stating the club’s financial future was too bleak as things stood, and claiming to see no available site for a new ground in South London (despite a Merton Borough councillor’s assurance a 20,000 seater stadium was viable at Plough Lane), the panel approved the move.

As When Saturday Comes wrote at the time of the “They decided, like a character from Alice in Wonderland, that Milton Keynes is Wimbledon’s real home.”

The second part of the series later this week will look at what became of this wreckage.

The last five years as an AFC Wimbledon fan have immersed me in non-League football. Up to then, I thought of non-League in much the same way as many who have not fully experienced it. Corinthian amateurs playing for the love of it, fans united in pursuit of survival rather than unrealistic dreams of global domination, officials motivated by simple service rather than power-brokering and politicking.

There is much of the non-League story about which English football can be justly proud. The depth of competitive football across the country is something that truly marks it out from many, many other countries and that is in no small part thanks to the unpaid hours put in by supporters all over the country. The culture of personal sacrifice, or pitching in for the greater good with no reward other than just making sure a team can take the park and the punters can pay over the turnstile.

But there is another side to the game which is less than admirable. I consider myself a friend of non-League football, and occasionally, friends have to tell people some home truths that might seem harsh. Like friends in our personal lives, I hope that people understand they are motivated by a desire to see the game improve and become what it could so easily be.

The Challenge of Non-League Football

It is important to recognise at the start the obstacles many clubs have to deal with. They are trying to compete against people with better resources, better access to the media and more pull with unaffiliated football fans. There is a justified sense of resentment at the way in which the better appointed within the game seem to go out of their way to make life difficult, such as with the scheduling of European matches.

But the idea that if some things from ‘big football’ simply disappeared life would become good is both untrue and dangerous. It stops the microscope being turned inwards to see what problems lie there.

For starters, there is a simple reason why non-League topics do not get coverage on national and regional TV or newspapers. Clubs outside the top six in the Premiership can make the same claim, and with more people watching the Football League clubs each year than the Premiership, it is a justified grievance. But below the bottom tier of the Football League, the lack of coverage reflects the reality of the audience’s interests, not bias against the non-League game.

Take midweek matches. There is absolutely no chance of the bigger clubs holding a moratorium on week night fixtures. Therefore smaller clubs would be better advised to try to work out why people prefer their sofas and TV than vainly hoping for the European Cup will revert to its old knock-out format.

Now, I’m sure that some would cite a chicken and egg argument here. The lack of coverage the non-League game gets does contribute to the lack of profile the top flight gets for free in every daily newspaper. But regardless of what came first, the top flight is not going to forego coverage, and nor are the newspapers about to radically re-appraise their policy.

Changing Non-League Football

Change is going to have to come from below. And that change might include the ‘exclusive’ atmosphere that some clubs cultivate. Make no bones about it — following non-League sides is a labour of love. To keep the faith in the face of the rival fare on offer, the facilities provided and the length of journeys involved requires an uncommon sense of attachment. But maybe this virtue is also a potential problem?

Let me explain. If football fandom is obsessional, to extend the metaphor, non-League is a little kinky. It is an acquired taste, and like stilton, black olives and real ale, things that need effort to be acquired will always be minority pursuits in competition to the blandness of the mass-market cheddars and lagers.

But in an environment where the very existence of a club is permanently in doubt, what tastes are people being invited to acquire?

The Siege Mentality

When some Manchester United fans intimated they were thinking of starting their own team (ultimately FC United), many in non-League criticised them. Why did they not all start watching nearby Altrincham or Droylsden? The point is that the whole reason they wanted to start again was because they were annoyed at having someone steal their club. The last thing they wanted was to do the same to others.

More cynically, officials of one club effectively offered to sell FC United their league place in the Conference as long as they played in that town, an offer the FC United board immediately refused. At AFC Wimbledon, some long-standing officials of Kingstonian intimated that a merger between the two clubs would make most sense.

Sadly, the fans of both FC United and AFC Wimbledon continue to be on the end of grumpy letters in the Non-League Paper and on various internet forums. The main crime they appear to have committed, though, is simply to be new. They have not got the battle scars from flirting with extinction, nor the enamel badges of the glorious FA Trophy run to the semi-finals way back in the day.

Through my day job I have been lucky enough to travel the country working with fans at the 45 non-League clubs who now have a Supporters’ Trust, and through Wimbledon I have seen a lot more clubs. At many there is something there that looks like a siege mentality. There seems to be a lingering passive-aggressive sense that everyone is being measured by how much — or how little — they are doing for the cause. Are they a real fan? Do they do enough?

Let’s imagine you have moved to an area with a small non-League club. You don’t want to go to the professional club up the road; you like the idea of non-League football and you’re attracted to a place without the exploitative attitude prevalent higher up the leagues.

You’ll find that the price to get in will more than likely be over £10, which surprises you, as the place looks and feels ramshackle. The toilets are pretty basic and you might see fixtures and fittings well past their useful life, victims of one-too-many cutbacks on year-end maintenance having to be shelved through lack of funds.

You’ll be asked to add to your spending for a burger that is often unedifying and potentially unhealthy. There is the commemorative badge to buy, the collection of old programmes to peruse, the Race Night to go to, the end of season fundraiser to turn out for. There is an all-pervading sense of this club having to practically suck money out of people over and above the basics of a match ticket and a cup of tea.

So you contribute but wonder why, despite this, the club seems to be living hand-to-mouth and whether things could perhaps be improved on the cost control side of things, with every bill a crisis waiting to explode. You are told — like an article of faith — that the board and the officials are tremendous chaps who work ever so hard and have done for years. The fact that the benefits of their efforts are not particularly clear is neither here nor there.

The Supporters’ Club often do not seem interested as there is a raffle to organise, and ultimately one would not want to annoy the directors by asking difficult questions. What if they stop the players attending the end-of-the-season function organised by the Supporters’ Club? The whole thing feels like a fund-raising scheme that occasionally plays a match and you would be forgiven for deciding that it is not for you.

Best keep to oneself darker thoughts about rampant egos of many of the people who have become owners or Chairmen of non-League clubs, musings about why people are prepared to get involved in this level, about the status of the loans the board makes, and whether the ground is being lined up for redevelopment.

The Endless Crisis

It has been going on so long that many simply accept this as the natural order of things. Every few years, the budgets get blasted apart, a crisis ensues, and new local worthies come forward. They run the club the same way as their predecessors, the debts build up and there is a crisis again a bit later leading to a new set of worthies coming forward. Repeat again and again, with a ground sale and new stadium thrown in every generation or so.

Except each time, a little bit more of the club dies. A few more supporters disappear, and a few other potential fans walk away. And a strategy for success that seems to be based on importing the worst features of the professional game will never resolve it.

There is a palpable sense that so many clubs are so desperate for success, so desperate for an end to the incessant work and fund-raising that they will be grateful for any benefactor in a storm, who often as not will leave a few years hence. To paraphrase the Life of Brian, fans say “you’re the saviour of the club, and we should know, since we’ve followed a few!”

The days when non-League football could regularly get five-figure crowds have gone, as have the clubs who were best placed to get those types of crowds, most of them having become league clubs over the last 40 years.

Community Clubs

The only path to success for non-League clubs is to truly re-orientate themselves as community clubs: owned by their communities and run by them, not by an assorted collection of businessmen of dubious strategic vision, nor giants of the local football scene who have been doing it their way for so long that they have forgotten that new ideas are always needed. All of this is, of course, dependent on a volunteer army of well-meaning fans who have for too long acted as though it is tantamount to treason to ask that their love and loyalty be rewarded with a meaningful stake in the club, and a say in how it is run.

Non-League football — away from the hype and greed of the professional game — is well placed to enjoy a renaissance as people want to see their local club and be filled with pride at being able to identify as a supporter of it. As fans of AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester have shown, people who have enjoyed the Premiership can find a lot more to cherish further down.

But for it to happen, the current generation have to change the vibe. There are good times waiting to happen across the country if supporters can grasp the opportunity to make it happen and take on real involvement themselves. Time to get the party started!

Photo credits: Jon Hall; hugovk; twohundredpercent; mo davies