Gary Andrews

It’s official – Ebbsfleet are now in fantasy land. Earlier today nearly 96% of myfootballclub.co.uk members who voted to purchase a 75% stake in the club, while a similar number of members who logged onto vote also gave their go-ahead to allow manager Liam Daish to strengthen his squad during the rest of the transfer window.

Now begins the interesting part in what could be a make-or-break 19 months for the Kent club. If, and it’s a big if, things go well Ebbsfleet could become more than just a curious footnote in football ownership. Daish strengthens his squad, Fleet make a charge towards the play-offs (they’re too far behind to take the Blue Square Premier title this season) and the momentum they build up this season, plus a rash of new members enamoured by the concept, but who were holding off to see what could be achieved sign up, and Ebbsfleet continue their push towards league football. That, at least, is the best case scenario.

But there are still a number of questions and issues that still need to be overcome if MyFc is to become a success. The concerns I had over the transfer dealings when the deal was first announced still stand, so I won’t revisit them, bar a few quick notes.

Firstly Liam Daish sounded a note of caution earlier this month when he said he was still unsure what his role would be. Reading between the lines, it seems like a polite if firm message to MyFC members not to do anything too daft too quickly and to clarify uncertainties. I’d imagine there’s also a note of frustration here about being hamstrung in the transfer market while the takeover was approved, although in that respect the situation is no different to any other manager at a club in the midst of a takeover. But it would have helped the club if MyFC had completed the process sooner.

Secondly, given the current climate and penchant for manager sacking, Daish has every right to be nervous over his position. What if Ebbsfleet go through a mini-slump, fall short of fan expectations or simply commit the crime of playing unattractive football?At what point through lean, or not so lean times, will the members lose patience?

Finally on this front, there was a rather unhappy letter in this month’s issue of When Saturday Comes (sorry, no link) from a MyFC member in response to their article on the (then) proposed takeover, which made the point that while you’ll get a few muppets supporting every club, the majority would be taking an active interest and balance out the more irrational decisions. Wisdom of the crowd, if you will.

But it’s worth repeating that not every fan (and this includes long-time Ebbsfleet fans) will have knowledge of the transfer market or the state of the team. If Liam Daish wants to sign a promising unknown, who’s to say the members won’t reject this in favour of an aging journeyman because said journeyman is more of a name with a proven track record? As for team picking, well, go back and read my original post on this. In football, given an experienced manager with a good track record or a huge collective of football fans with varying degrees of experience and opinions, I know which one I’d trust every time.

For me, there’s fresh questions over the long-term viability of the MyFC vision. In the short term, as excitement grows there’s bound to be an upsurge in membership (and that’s happened today), but the real question is how long the members are signing up for. If Ebbsfleet wants to be sure of a stable financial footing, they need to be tying existing members into two or three year subscriptions minimum and get them to extend those subscriptions at the earliest possible opportunity.

The danger, as I’ve stated before, with this type of model is members getting bored or going elsewhere. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Ebbsfleet supporter, then of course you’ll be there for the long haul, just as the majority of supporters’ trust members will carry on saying their subs no matter how lean the times are on the field. But take ‘casual’ fans, those viewing it as a novelty, an interesting experiment, or who just fancy having a second team. It’s a lot easier for them to walk away from this. Who’s to say that after a couple of years they’re not going to decide the £35 could be better spent elsewhere?

Or perhaps they get frustrated with how MyFC is run. Already we’ve now got thepeoplesclub.co.uk, which appears to be the Talksport to MyFC’s 6-0-6 and run by an even more demanding and hysterical bunch (and say what you like about MyFC, at least they’ve sounded reasonably balanced and grounded throughout, even if the ideas may not be). The People’s Club were turned down after they approached to buy Kidderminster Harriers, but suppose they pick a more attractive team than Ebbsfleet, or their team starts getting better results than Fleet. It’s not inconceivable the more fickle MyFCer will take their membership elsewhere. After all, both businesses are targeting similar types of fans.

What is concerning for MyFC, though, is the number of people who simply didn’t take part in today’s vote. This was the big, important vote that would determine the course of the organisation and out of 27,278 members, only 18,112 actually bothered to cast their vote. That’s just under a third of paid-up members. If they can’t be bothered to vote either yes or no to actually buying Ebbsfleet, are they really going to be on the terraces week-in week-out?

Indeed, you’d have thought that given all the hype and press coverage surrounding MyFC’s takeover, and you’ve got over 27 thousand members, that Fleet’s attendances would have swelled. In reality, they’ve remained firmly entrenched in the high 900s, which is about par for a club of their level. Again, this should set alarm bells ringing, and goes back to the point of picking the team. If just a small percentage are watching the game each week, how the hell can they make an informed opinion on the team. Ok, so MyFC will make prozone stats available for all members. That’s still a poor substitute for watching a game.

[And as an interesting aside, the statement on their website about the takeover is timed at 11.15am, when voting was meant to finish at midday. A small point, perhaps, but a curious one nonetheless].

Finally, onto the statement they released ahead of the vote, which is a curious mixture of legalese likely to go over the average fan’s head, promotional puff and the odd nugget that is useful for making an informed decision. Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion found it baffling and cast a ‘no’ vote on the basis of it, while 200 per cent had many concerns, which I share. Rather than repeat them here, go and read his whole post, although I’d like to emphasise the part where MyFC claim their new stadium could be built free of charge. I’d be really curious as to how exactly they aim to achieve that.

As with when MyFC first made their announcement, there’s as many questions as there are answers, and many of those answers spawn new questions. Maybe these concerns are being dealt with, but it’s difficult to tell.

As before, I maintain MyFC will probably be a success for MyFC in the short-term, and no doubt the site’s evangelists will take delight in pointing this out. But will it still be a success 36 months down the line? If MyFC do succeed, I’ll happily doff my hat to them and admit some of my concerns were ill-founded. But for the time being the nagging suspicion remains that this odd, if worthy, project won’t last the course and it’ll be the real long-term Ebbsfleet (sorry, Gravesend and Northfleet) supporters, who’ve followed the club through the best and worst of times, who will be the losers.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Ebbsfleet United, fantasy football, MyFc, MyFootballClub.co.uk, The People's Club

Of all the places in the world, Ebbsfleet United seems a strange club to attempt to start a footballing revolution at. But today there’s much hype, excitement and general hyperbole about the future of football, as fans site myfootballclub.co.uk announce their takeover of The Football Club Formerly Known a Gravesend and Northfleet, or TFCFKAGAN for short.

For those not 100 per cent au fait with the altruistic website’s aims (and who can’t log onto it due to the heavy amount of traffic), it can basically be signed thus. Twenty thousand plus members have all chipped in £35 with the aim of buying a club, and running it along open, transparent and democratic principles, where the fans have control and vote on all aspects of the club, right down to team selection.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? The REAL fans reconnecting with a club and keeping out all those evil millionaires who so slight the Beautiful Game. Which is fantastic, but this is a football club we’re talking about – a private business – not a peace keeping mission to restore democracy to Pakistan, which seems almost more in keeping with the site’s mission statement.

Still, there’s been a real grassroots fans movement in recent years, with Supporters’ Trusts coming to the fore. Surely this is not only a logical conclusion, but good news for the game in general.

Well, in a few words, no. No it isn’t.

In longer words, It’s as near to pure communism or socialism as you’re going to get in football, and while a community owning the club is, in principle, seems attractive, there’s all sorts of areas that are heading for trouble on this.

Firstly, there’s the potential for this to be a footballing version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. You’ll have some people with more experience than others, you’ll have some with better ideas than others, and you’ll have some with inflated senses of their own importance. Eventually there’ll be the realisation that pure democracy within a business such as a football club isn’t effective, and there’ll be much bickering as those at the top try to convince those at the bottom that THEY KNOW BEST.

Secondly, I can’t see somebody like Liam Daish, or any other football manager worth his salt being overly happy about having his tactics and plans dictated to him by fans. These views may differ wildly and you’ll probably end up with a conservative consensus formation for most games. That may be fine for some, but on other occasions a more attacking or specific formation/tactic may be required for a specific game. That’s what scouts are for. Having fans, especially a large number of whom who’re not familiar with lower league football, and who won’t have the inclination to scout Crawley v Droylsden to get a handle on tactics, is another recipe for disaster.

You’re also going to face problems with firstly signings and secondly cash flow. I can see a vast proportion of those who’ve put money in wanting ‘names’ to sign for them and there’s a real danger they could end up signing aging pros at the end of their career on vastly inflated salaries, at the expense of gems from the lower leagues, or even the youth system.

Take Dagenham and Redbridge. Their top scorer last season, Paul Benson, came from way down the lower leagues (not much further above park football), while Craig Mackail-Smith, now at Peterborough, also came from down the lower league pyramid. My team Exeter City signed a guy called Matt Taylor from Team Bath over the summer, who is somewhat of a lower-league Vidic and has turned out to be somewhat of an inspired signing, having netted for us half a dozen times this season from set pieces, make a couple of vital goal-line clearances and is generally a defensive colossus. Again, not the kind of player a group of fans would vote on, as they’d have never heard of him. That’s the manager and scouts’ job.

This doesn’t even consider the very daft idea of transparency which, presumably, involves ensuring the balance sheet is available to all. If rival clubs know how much cash the club can spend, they’ll adjust their prices upwards accordingly. That’s not going to help Ebbsfleet.

Also, there’s the players to consider in this as well. How would they feel knowing their future ultimately lies in the hands of the fans rather than the gaffer, who’ll often see things on the training ground the rest of us aren’t privy to.

For example, last season two Exeter players – Richard Logan and Dean Moxey – were out of contract. Logan had been signed in January on a six month contract and had looked average, bar the odd spectacular goal. Moxey was a youth product who’d had an injury hit couple of seasons and appeared to have lost his way. I advocated releasing them both. Paul Tisdale begged to differ with my opinion, and those of a vast proportion of our fanbase. The upshot? Logan is currently our top scorer having reached double figures before November, while Moxey is having the season of his life and has easily been our best, most consistent player and should be the first name on the team sheet each week at the moment. Goes to show what I know.

In the short term, and with the type of cash they’ve apparently got floating around, it could work. TCFKAGAN may sign a couple of decent players for their push to the play-offs, it’ll attract interest, and potentially more cash, for the club.

But the BSP (or Conference to you and I) is a notoriously difficult league to get out of , and if the success takes a while in coming, I can see interest in this dwindling as all those Premiership or casual fans who’ve got enthused lose interest in a team that’s hovering around in the top-tier of the non-league and gradually start to stop paying their subs.

Sure, Ebbsfleet may pick up a few extra fans, but how many of these will be there come the end of the season, or even the following season when Fleet need to travel to Northwich on a cold, wet Tuesday night to keep in touch with the play-offs. Say you, as an Arsenal fan, put you cash into it, but the team had a poor run of form and it was a choice between stumping up a bit more cash or staying in to watch the Gunners in the Champions League on the box? Which would you choose?

Finally, I think their choice of club is a poor one. Ebbsfleet are a bit of a ‘one of those’ clubs. They periodically threaten the play-offs and have a reasonable band of support but, much like Woking, they’ve not really achieved anything in recent years and suffer from their proximity to bigger teams in nearby London. They also changed their name to an as-yet non-existent place to tap into ‘burgeoning’ support, a la Franchise FC. They’re reasonably stable, but suffer from having bigger, ex-league clubs around and other non-league clubs with sugar daddies.

Myfootballclub would have been better, and more welcome, investing into a club with history and/or troubled by debt. Someone like Halifax or Swindon, for example. In that case they’d be more welcomed by fans and there would be a real sense of ‘Hey, we can achieve something here. We can awake a sleeping giant.’

Ebbsfleet, with no disrespect, are a bit of a ‘nothing’ team. They’re not especially bad, they’re not as good as the top teams, they simply exist. It’s hard to get excited about that kind of club, just as it’s hard to get excited about Chelsea suddenly buying their way to the best manager and players in the world. To be honest, even forming their own team and working their way up through the non-league pyramid would be a better, and more satisfying idea. You just can’t buy passion.

It could give them stability (although TCFKAGAN has always struck me as a very stable club). What’s more likely is, after a good first season, the great scheme will hit a few unforeseen problems and they’ll either start running into financial and administrative difficulties, they’ll start slipping down the league, or, as is most likely, they’ll be forced to sell. I give them about 36 months before the dream turns sour and TCFKAGAN is on the lookout for new owners.

It’s a nice idea in principle, but will bring chaos in practice.

There’s actually a couple of clubs out there who operate a similar, but more practical method. AFC Wimbledon immediately spring to mind, and that’s largely because they’ve got such a dedicated and large fanbase determined to stick one to Franchise FC. And good on them. Their model works because they’ve started from scratch, everybody’s clear on their aims and objectives and they didn’t try to shoe-horn an existing reasonably-well run football club, and an idealistic fans model together.

Exeter’s the other example, with the Supporters’ Trust taking over when we were on the verge of folding. But even then, there’s the realisation that we can’t have complete democracy and transparency in everything. Our original model worked well for the first season and a half, but there was soon a growing realisation that a fan’s passion was no substitute for business nous, and we couldn’t ask the supporters to dig into their pockets every time we needed cash.

We’ve now got a clearer line of communication between the Trust board (the majority shareholder) and the club’s directors – we’ve got a more business-like, commercial operation in place and we’re one of the very few teams now in the lower leagues to turn in a profit. It’s also very satisfying to know those in charge are, ultimately accountable to us – the fans – and we’ll never again be fleeced by a couple of conmen.

That’s not to say the Trust model is perfect, and there are problems and issues I won’t go into here. Trusts such as that at York City eventually sold up. There’s also the issue of investment. If a rich Exeter supporter offered to invest in the club for a space in the board, it that would cause a serious amount of soul-searching.

Fan involvement, and money IS a great idea, and I honestly believe more clubs should have some form of supporter trust representation involved at boardroom level, if not as majority shareholder (this won’t work for everyone) then at least being a shareholder with a say in how the trust is run. I’m a passionate believer in Supporters’ Trusts and think their involvement is generally a positive thing in football, even if they come equipped with their own set of problems.

But myfootballclub.co.uk? It’ll go down as a worthy and well-intentioned, but ultimately unsuccessful, footnote in the annuls of non-league clogging.

I’d be interested to see what bloggers with a good understanding of economics, like Tim Worstall and Chris Dillow, make of it. But, for the time being, Two Hundred Per Cent has the final word:

“Ultimately, this club has been sold to be the plaything of a few thousand would-be Alex Fergusons. Whether this proves to be beneficial to the club and its supporters is open to question, but one thing remains certain. Myfootballclub and Jason Botley have done very nicely indeed out of this, and would appear to be the only thing that matters to them.”

UPDATE: Brian’s not too impressed either.

written by Gary Andrews \\ tags: Ebbsfleet United, football, good intentions, myfootballclub, supporters' trusts