A few weeks ago, following our piece on Man City’s innovative online work, I was tipped off to a website in beta being built by Sheffield Wednesday’s web team that is one of a kind as an official club production in England: a social networking site that gives fans a forum, the ability to blog, upload photos and videos, make “friends” and create groups.

Unlike Manchester City’s expensive effort, this was built by a Championship club at a much smaller cost, and is an interesting experiment in how clubs can use social media to reach out to fans and build community online.

It’s called Our Wednesday, and we talked to one of the men behind it, James Hargreaves of Sheffield Wednesday.

1) Tell me about the thinking behind the launch of Our Wednesday, the club’s new online social community site. Why was it felt important to create this for fans? What can it do that the main official site doesn’t?

JH: To set up a bit of background – when internet entrepreneur Lee Strafford (founder of UK ISP PlusNet) took over as Chairman of Sheffield Wednesday just over a year ago, online messaging and functionality was identified as one of the ways to effectively communicate to and involve supporters whilst providing convenience for them as customers.

The first step in this was to create a useful online retail environment, where fans can quickly and easily buy merchandise and tickets. The club set about creating a functional portal where supporters can buy their tickets online, print at home and scan their barcode on it for entry on the turnstiles, creating real value for the club and convenience for the fan.

The next step was then to create an ‘official’ community. Online engagement had been neglected by the club’s previous management team and there was a real desire to interact with and involve fans again. Sheffield Wednesday has gone back to its roots of being a ‘community’ club – as evidenced with the gifting of the shirt sponsorship space to The Children’s Hospital in Sheffield. Online engagement is one of the keys to getting supporters re-engaged with their club.

There are plenty of unofficial forums that do a superb job of allowing discussion space for supporters and Sheffield Wednesday have an extremely active online audience through those channels. However, due to the problems surrounding the club over several years a lot of mistrust had built up between – and even within – those communities. We sought a way to counter this and create something different but ‘official’ to begin the long process of getting the majority of online community back into a trusting and productive wider online community.

OurWednesday.com was built mainly as a social networking site to create not only a bond between the club and its fans, but also strengthen bonds between the fans themselves. At the very heart of OurWednesday are positive messages – the ability to add friends, the ability to create groups and find commonality, the ability to share memories with photos and videos, the ability to have discussion – and to have your say – with other supporters and people from the club itself. It’s less about just shouting messages at people via news on an official site and more about involving the supporters in the goings on.

The main difference between OurWednesday.com and the official site is that conversation. The official site is a formal place to go for all your news and information, whereas OurWednesday.com is then about informally discussing all those things and more; thus creating an involvement, buy-in, ‘stickiness’ and adding real value to the wider community. It is our view that the internet is not only about serving information, but about creatively involving all the stakeholders.

The idea is not to replace the main official site or the other unofficial fan sites and forums, but to compliment them in an official, yet informal, manner to build up a meaningful online community.

2) What were some of the drawbacks considered about creating a site that allows fans more freedom to interact with each other on an officially sanctioned site?  How do you moderate all the photos and videos fans add, and do you keep a tight rein on what’s discussed on the forum?

JH: Of course there are a number of potential drawbacks with creating such an online community, especially when it comes to crowd-sourcing a lot of the content from the users themselves and allowing such freedom across the site. However, I am a believer of always trusting people to do the right thing in the first instance and as long as the guidelines are laid out from the start then people are generally very sensible.

I feel there could be an initial mindset that, as an officially sanctioned community, it would be a propaganda machine or that opposing views are not welcome, however we’ve all been involved in internet businesses and communities long enough to know that that simply wouldn’t work – and it’s not what Sheffield Wednesday would want from an online community either.

The content that is added or discussed on the site is entirely down to the users themselves – all that we ask, via the guidelines, is that it is not illegal and is in the spirit of a community club (i.e. no swearing or inappropriate comments). There is no ‘tight-rein’ as such; if a user is annoyed with the performance of the team on a Saturday, then they are entirely free to discuss their frustrations – after all, that is what football is all about!

Indeed, so far the moderators have only had the need to edit a few swear words that have inadvertently dropped through the net and hopefully that will be the case as much as possible on an ongoing basis.

In terms of moderation, currently I myself will monitor what content is added by users to the site along with a very small team of volunteer moderators from the fanbase. As the community grows we will recruit more of those moderators from the community itself and effectively allow the community to govern itself much more – this is an ongoing evolutionary process.

3) What kind of a budget did you have for the site?  What kind of tools did you find to build it for a reasonable cost?

JH: Without going into commercial information, I will say that the cost of developing the site to where it is has been minimal. Using a mixture of experience, open-source technologies, capable supporters from the fanbase and contacts throughout the internet industry we have managed to build a very functional site at a very reasonable cost.

4) How successful has the site been so far?  What has been the main positive and negative feedback that you’ve received about it?

JH: We are still in the early stages of our online engagement and still developing all our web properties (of which OurWednesday.com is just one piece) – and all early signs are good.

We currently have over 1,000 members of OurWednesday’s open BETA trial and that number continues to grow, with usage increasing in all areas across the site. Feedback has mainly been positive with each of our blogs (either departmental updates, or insights into happenings at the training ground) being discussed across both Sheffield Wednesday and opposition teams’ forums (opposition fans are generally impressed with how open and engaging our club is with its fans through OurWednesday.com). As an example of creative and open content that we look to provide, our most popular content to date (in terms of page views) is a blog on humorous applications received for the recent managers’ vacancy.

The only real negative feedback we have received is regarding the registration process and the information that is collected – however, supporters generally understand when we explain the reasoning behind it is to create an account at the online shop, to help make a seamless login across both sites. We’re looking at streamlining this somewhat and also introducing login for OurWednesday.com through a Facebook Connect feature in a future release.

Additionally, our Facebook page has reached over 10,000 fans – which we believe to be the highest number for a Championship club – and our Twitter profile now has over 2,000 followers, again believed to be the highest in the Championship. We believe that this, as well has having one of the most frequently updated official club sites in the Football League demonstrates our commitment to open online engagement.

5) Do any other clubs in England have a comparable official online community site?  If not, why do you think that is?

JH: Surprisingly, a number of football clubs in England do not even have a Facebook page or Twitter account, yet alone something along the lines of what we are doing. There have been one-or-two attempts by clubs at something similar through various hosted solutions, however we believe we are the first club in England to have our own dedicated social network platform for supporters.

There are a number of reasons clubs haven’t yet extended into these avenues. Resources is a big factor in an environment where a lot of clubs are cutting back, however I believe that most football clubs in the UK can be ‘old fashioned’ and are struggling to understand the online marketplace and the benefits of such engagement – we are happy to be a trendsetter in this respect!

Thanks to James for taking the time to answer — check out Our Wednesday to see how this all works in practice.

Big Story
The news this week that Watford’s financial crisis means a team in the Premier League as recently as 2007 are headed for administration, and the ten point deduction that would result and put their position in the Championship in serious jeopardy, came as a considerable surprise to most.

The best explanation of the backstory to what happened to cause this situation comes from Supporters’ Trust chief Graham Sterry, who explains why two members of Watford’s board, brothers Jimmy and Vince Russo, resigned at the AGM this week and demanded immediate repayment of the millions they were owed, the decision that has forced Watford into this immediate crisis.

My own interpretation of events is that the 3 directors representing the interests of Valley Grown Salads (Vince and Jimmy Russo and their nominee director Robin Williams) resigned because it was clear to them that they would inevitably be voted off the Board. A major shareholder had ensured that voting be on the basis of shareholdings of those voting. That is normal practice in a formal poll. Since the Russos between them own less than 30% of shares and the counter parties own in excess of 50% of shares, there could be only one result. The VGS directors resigned rather than be voted off the Board.

However, at the same time, they demanded the immediate repayment of loans made to the Club by VGS. That immediately would force the Club into administration since it would be unable to meet its commitments. Were that to happen, the Club would immediately be docked 10 points by the Football League [ .. ]

This is all about the outright ownership of the Club. We have two groups of people who have invested in the past – one for many years – both claiming to have the funds and, crucially, the desire to continue funding the Club. We should be comfortable but for their inability to work together. Instead we are being pitch forked into administration as a device to wrest control of the Club. The Supporters Trust can only regret and abhor such destructive behaviour. We should not be facing administration.

The Russos have turned down a further £7.5m rights-issue rescue package from that competing investor, majority shareholder Michael Ashcroft, offered on Wednesday, after the AGM. Independent director Graham Taylor concurs with the conclusion that Watford are facing crisis more out of what is increasingly appearing like malice than necessity. ”Yesterday I saw an interview with Jimmy and he said he has not become a bad man overnight. I accept there is always more than one side to a story. But Jimmy, you walked into the AGM earlier this week, nobody knew what you were going to do, you resigned, you demanded immediately your £4.88m, payable within 48 hours. That’s when you did become a bad man. It was not in the interests of Watford Football Club.”

Edit: I recommend you read Twohundredpercent’s take on the Watford situation for an alternate view on Taylor’s comments that’s quite frankly much more informed than this round-up. Excellent stuff, and puts it into the important context of shareholder democracy at football clubs.

Worldwide News

• There is of course plenty on the Champions League draw this morning, which was in no way rigged as the “dream returns” of Mourinho to Stamford Bridge and Beckham to Old Trafford mean we have two months of build-up to that to look forward to.
• Sometimes I just love the hyperbolic wording of the Sun. “Tottenham’s senior players have heaped shame on the club by organising a secret Christmas party in Dublin behind the back of manager Harry Redknapp.” Another piece in the paper adds more by saying “It was an audacious plot planned with military precision.”
• The Daily Mail has a worthwhile piece on Arsenal’s youth academy, with the best part probably the superb picture gallery. It’s all fluff, but there are some superb shots by Graham Chadwick inside the “talent factory”.
• There is plenty on the pressure mounting on Mark Hughes at Man City. David Conn says Hughes has no excuses left, Guus Hiddink is name-dropped again, and at the same time, there’s plenty of speculation that Hughes (even though his position is in apparently in severe doubt) will be allowed to go out and spend many more millions in the January transfer window, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Yet it might not quite be the bonanza it seems, as David Conn cogently points out in the Guardian today.

Promotion still provides significant money to sign and pay the wages of new players, but newly promoted clubs struggle to afford established stars, and Championship clubs ask inflated prices for their better players. In the Premier League finishing places tend to accord exactly with the size of a club’s wage bill – Manchester United and Chelsea pay the most, the promoted clubs have the least to spend. Last season Sunderland spent £40m on mostly British and Irish players, only just survived, and the manager, Roy Keane, complained too many were not good enough. The other two promoted clubs, Derby and Birmingham, went straight back down.

Conn points out that the bonanza only exists because the Premier League does not share revenue with the divisions below as was done pre-1992; that leads to the growing inequality in English football, and a perhaps damaging scramble to get on the gravy train.

The danger seems to be that clubs may be predicating their existence in a boom-and-bust situation.

As twohundredpercent pointed out today, the level of debt in the Premier League in spite of the enormous increases in income over the past few years is alarming: the Big Four owe a collective £1.862bn, whilst the likes of Fulham face severe problems if they’re relegated with their £149m debt.

Football’s boom years have not been uncoincidentally linked with a period of remarkable, sustained economic growth in England over the past decade, a consumption-led extravaganza funded by cheap credit and a property boom that is all now coming crashing down around Gordon Brown’s stony features.



The fear of a sustained economic downturn in Britain, and the consequences this would have for a high-priced consumption activity such as football (where season tickets are now an expensive luxury), is presumably partly driving the Premier League’s overseas expansion moves, such as the much-maligned Game 39 proposition.

Yet ticket prices continue to rise domestically, and remain a cornerstone of clubs’ finances. Season ticket prices. look set to rise at over double the rate of inflation this summer, hitting fans already stretched by rising fuel and food prices hard. What happens if demand falls for tickets, but clubs already have millions invested in the ever-increasing salaries for future years?

Beyond the glitz of the all-English Champions League final and the Richest Game in the World (or Race for 2009 Relegation), the sustainability of English football’s boom remains in question over the long-term.

Image credit: ArcticCorsair on Flickr