Season 2011-12 Fan Articles

Is it time to be co-operative?

Back in February this year, this report was submitted to the government from co-operatives UK, regarding football governance. I can?t recall whether this was covered on here at the time of its release but now seems like an opportune moment to bring this report back into focus given the recent debates on here regarding the lack of people willing to invest in Everton FC.

For those who haven?t got the time to read through the report, it basically champions the idea of a fans co-operative taking over the ownership of football clubs. Now this is not something new and I am aware that it has been mooted many times on here and other websites... but, with Bill Kenwright openly admitting that there is a distinct lack of billionaires, millionaires or even moderately rich entrepreneurs showing any interest in buying or indeed investing in Everton FC, if he or the other board members are serious about trying to find an answer to our current financial plight, then every avenue must be explored ? and this includes looking into the feasibility of a fans' co-operative.

Whether the board have invested any time at all on this possibility and then immediately dismissed it as unworkable is something I am not aware of. However, if they have not, then maybe it would be prudent for them to do so. Can it work? Yes, of course it can if there is enough will but, probably more importantly, if there is enough fan interest. The best current example available that it can work is Barcelona.

A recent article I read in the London Evening Standard explained how Barcelona turned themselves around, not by finding a billionaire owner but by turning to the fans for support. I have reported the main theme of the article below.

Barcelona doesn't have a Billionaire owner, its own rules and structure prevents it. And yet it has been the team that everybody seems to aspire to be. So, is it possible that their fan ownership model could work in the Premier League... and more specifically at Goodison Park?

A few years back, Barcelona?s president ?Laporta? was elected on a reform agenda on the back of a fans protest. The fans called themselves the Blue Elephant group ? not quite the Blue Union but our shirts do have a white elephant printed on the front. Oh isn?t irony wonderful sometimes?

Laporta and his supporters were concerned at poor performance and at rumoured plans to convert the club into a private company, akin to what we have at Goodison at the moment. This could have seen Barcelona saddled with massive debts.

One of Laporta?s first acts was to replace virtually the entire management team with top-class professionals, many of them drawn from outside the football industry. His management paid particular attention to improving financial controls and marketing. Between 2003 and 2009, turnover increased from £108.2 million to £384.8 million. Barcelona has been profitable since 2003-04, and has repaid virtually all its historically-incurred debt.

Perhaps Laporta's genius was the way in which he worked with the mutual structure's potential weaknesses in traditional business terms, and turned them to the club's advantage.

Barcelona could not raise finance through a stock-market flotation or a private capital injection. It can only raise money by tapping its fans. Club membership between 2003 and 2010 was almost doubled to over 170,000, via what it called The Big Challenge (El Grand Repte). Members were recruited all over the world. It went on to aggressively sell them club merchandise, a practice it still pursues. It may have been aggressive and some of the membership probably found it a little tough at times to fulfil the extra financial burden, but I bet none of them where complaining when the European cups and domestic titles landed at the Camp Nou.

So should Barcelona?s success be taken in isolation? Last year Terry Duffelen penned this piece in his blog Pitch invasion, in which he outlines how fan ownership is utilised in Germany. He explains that the basis of the German model is the 50 + 1 rule whereby a minimum of 51% of the club must be owned by club members. This still allows for considerable investment opportunities for private business to invest while preventing them from having overall control of the direction of the club. A Bundesliga club board is made up of delegates selected by the shareholders. That way the supporter membership associations (or Mutterveiren) have a direct say on the management of the club.

The benefits to this method are clear; the fans would have a real voice at boardroom level, there would be no more cancelling of AGMs, no more secret exclusivity deals regarding the club relocating to a retail park outside of the city ? that is of course unless the fans wanted that to happen. In short, we would have a say in how the club was run.

I am aware that both Man Utd and Liverpool fan groups have recently spent some considerable time in trying to sell the idea of club ownership to their own fans without any real success. It pains me to admit it, but both these clubs have far larger worldwide fanbases than ours, and if they couldn?t attract enough interest then how can we?

Well, we are not just any other football club and just because others can?t do it doesn?t mean that we can?t. For long periods of our history, Everton have showed the way. Goodison Park was once the envy of the rest of the country, we were the first to try undersoil heating, our attendances were historically always greater than Liverpool?s, we were THE club on Merseyside and, until the arrival of Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford, we had won more titles than our illustrious but over-hyped neighbours down the East Lancs Road.

I am no accountant and there are fans who read this website that will no doubt be able to punch holes and find flaws in my basic arithmetic here but let?s take a little leap of imagination. If Everton Football Club announced tomorrow that it was seeking to recruit 50,000 members and each one of those members was going to be allowed to have a vote to elect a club president or a board member or two so they could have representation on how the club was run, would you be interested?

How much would you be willing to pay for an annual membership? I am not talking about season tickets here, there are many fans worldwide who cannot attend the games but would love to be able to contribute to the running of the club. Lets say the club asked for a figure of £500 per annum. That would create revenue of £25 million. If the club targeted 100,000 members then obviously the revenue would be doubled or they could ask for a membership fee of £1000 per annum and that would have the same result. Using the German method of 50 + 1, this might help Everton become more attractive to a potential investor knowing that the fans could virtually wipe out the club debt within a couple of years.

Incidentally, the £25 million raised by 50,000 fans could have secured the Albert Dock stadium. Did anybody ask us if we wanted to invest? No, I don?t think so. Maybe the board could have tried, who knows ? we might have said yes!

Now, going back to the Barcelona model, those fans are then targeted to buy club merchandise which in turn increases club revenue proportionally. It seems a little like fan exploitation doesn?t it? The thing is though, you wouldn?t be just a fan, you would be an owner of the club, responsible for investing your own money and having a say on how it was spent.

My main problem with this argument is that I am aware that many fans, especially in this city of ours just don?t have the financial means to fork out that kind of money each year. A lot of us are scratching out a living the best way that we can and see our wives, children and charitable donations as priorities for our income ? and nobody is going to argue against that.

Many fans can just about afford to turn up every other week and struggle to buy season tickets even with payment plans. However, do we as Evertonians really love the club, or are we happy to let somebody else love the club and use their money so the rest of us can bask in the glory if we ever manage to win anything again? Either way, I think the club would do well to at least explore the possibility of fan ownership. I am up for it. However, I just need to find a decent excuse to explain to my kopite wife where £500 has gone from the savings account!

Reader Comments (30)

Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer

About these ads