I just bought my own Football Club. Well actually I just paid my £35 to sign up for a share of the investment fund with Myfootball Club.50,000 members have registered and now the funds are being raised through the £35 subscription. I have no idea if this is the biggest waste of my hard earned £35 and the Web project seems to bring up more problems every time I think about it.
Playing Football Manager for Real
I loved playing Football Manager when I was a kid and have always enjoyed the fantasy football competitions in the newspapers, even when I was in them. All the Professional players would wait with anticipation as the newspapers rolled out their listings of players for the upcoming season. Seeing your name in the paper with a valuation of £3,000,000 is very exciting.
Football Clubs constantly battle to stay in close contact with their fans. Pooling a group of people together on the internet with the only common interest being to buy a football club is hardly a well worked business plan. There is no loyalty to the particular team, no history with the club and it will be difficult to make this a success.
The Downside
Lee Power, the Chairman of Conference side Cambridge United said :
"It's just not workable to have 53,000 fans make decisions on behalf of a club," he said. "Most will have allegiances to other clubs. What's to stop our rivals from buying a significant stake in our club, and acting with vested interests?"
Good point. If your other team, the one that holds your heart-strings is playing the internet club, are you going to influence the selection of the side to the detriment of the teams performance?
he goes on :
"You can't just whisk up genuine commitment by charging £35," he said. "Fifty-three thousand new fans would be great, but are these people going to buy football kits, match programmes, hot dogs? That's what a club needs, not internet voting."
Barry Hearns thoughts on the project were equally downbeat :
"The idea is totally impractical," said Mr Hearn. "One-and-a-half million won't get you far in football these days."
"As far as I'm concerned, when you're running a football club, the ideal size of the ruling committee is one. I don't buy this mass voting nonsense; democracy and football don't mix."
The Upside
Although this is an unusual idea, sports clubs are always looking for new ideas to rise above the opposition. Tech savvy supporters may just jump on board this idea. In Silicon Valley, regular rounds of fund raising for yet to be proved websites easily raise £10s of millions.
Don't believe me. Business.com recently sold for £170,000,000. It is hardly a great website and surely not as interesting as owning your own Football Team.
Google to buy a Football Club?
Football Clubs have been bought up by wealthy investors and Global Branding in Football is a vital part of creating success if you are one of the biggest clubs.
The internet can bridge this global gap instantly. Maybe Will Brooks, owner of the site has in mind bigger fish and will hawk his idea around the corridors of Silicon valley. Google or Yahoo could buy their own football club. In fact if the website can attract 10,000s of visitors every day (as it surely will if there are 50,000 members all checking in to vote on the team for saturday and discuss their ideas for the club), then Brooks will have turned a fun project into a goldmine.
Do the numbers
50,000 visitors a day could easily be turned into £500,000 per year in Google adsense revenues.
Resources
Myfootballclub
Independent Article
Sun Article
Techcrunch Article
