Sports 2.0: The Next Level of Fan?  |  January 30, 2008  

After a lengthy period of due diligence and assorted financial wrangling, me and 27,000 of my closest friends have just become the first online social network in history to purchase a controlling stake in a professional sports team. MyFootballClub, based in the UK, is an extremely unique venture where the 27,000 owners of the team are literally calling the shots by voting on team line-ups, formations, player transfers, contract negotiations and all the other nitty-gritty aspects that come along with day to day management in the lower leagues of English football. We own the club. We pick the team. Not bad for 35 pounds each. Just to save you some time, 35 pounds multiplied by 27,000 is the equivalent to $1,884,173.00 Canadian. That buys a lot of soccer team. You can still get in on the ownership action as we are currently accepting new members.

This past week, following several months of negotiations and paperwork the MyFC members officially ratified our agreement to purchase Kent County's Ebbsfleet United, currently sitting 7^th in the Bluesquare Premier League, by a 95% margin. Thanks to our purchase, virtually all of the club's debt has been cleared and the long-term future of the club has been ironed out. The club is now effectively the richest in the Bluesquare Premier League, formerly known as the English Conference National, and it is likely the only one with a such a diverse and deep international following.

While members are primarily UK-based, but several dozen Canadians are on board, hundreds of Americans, Swedes, Colombians, Danes, Brazilians, and Chinese. Imagine, a sports team where the owners sitting in the 47^th floor of a condo in Dubai carry just as much weight as the guy who lives in the roughest council flat in Brixton. Members don't actually profit from owning the club, we all have a voting share, but no opportunity for financial gain. This helps ensure that our collective decisions are made with the club in mind and not our own bankrolls.

While our team's players may not be banking millions of pounds a year like top English Premier League players, our squad are still 100% professional and play exclusively for us. One of the exciting parts of English soccer is the fact that teams progress up and down through divisions based on their finishing position at the end of the season. Over the course of several years, it is not uncommon to see obscure clubs rocket through the league based on a steady stream of good results. In contrast, once mighty Leeds United (who in the year 2000 were playing at the top level in the Champions League semi-final) are now plying their trade in League 1, which is (confusingly) the 3^rd rung of English soccer.

The MyFootballClub website has videos, member forums, and contains a wealth of information about the club. 24 hours a day, members are interacting with each other and engaging in the latest and greatest way to enjoy the international male language of soccer. There is a central management structure to the MyFootballClub community with several paid staff members keeping the gears running smoothly behind the scenes. It is a social network with collective spending power and it could very well be just enough power to shake English football to its very foundations.

For example, Ebbsfleet's players had been using relatively worn out soccer balls during their training matches and their portable nets were in a shoddy state of disrepair. Even before MyFootballClub had sorted out the Ebbsfleet purchase, the team put out the call to MyFC members to help raise money for new balls and nets. The team raised the requisite 1600 pounds in a mere six hours.

This is the first example of a crowd-powered business where several thousand people came together to form a multi-million dollar entity that has now officially become a for-real venture with peoples livelihoods at stake. The history of our team and its role in the community is also on the line and there is a real collective responsibility amongst MyFC members not to screw this whole thing up.

There is talk of transferring MyFootballClub's ownership model into other sports. Imagine owning a piece of an AHL hockey team and getting to vote on the different lines, call-ups and player signings. Is a fan-run team in the CFL really that far-fetched an idea? Is this the next great evolution in professional sports? Is a few thousand people with credit cards and internet access really that powerful of a force if we all put our heads together? As I see it, the answers are no, maybe, and I certainly hope so.

We just won a 2-1 thriller against Burton Albion and Ebbsfleet is a mere 3 points out of the playoffs, which could see the club enter the upper-echelons of English soccer for the first time in its history. As a proud co-owner of an obscure sports team from a small town in a country I've never been to, I can still say it loud and say it proud- “Up the Fleet!”

Andrew Rideout