A lot of Tottenham Hotspur fans wouldn’t touch this story, but I’m casting aside English club rivalry to bring a little more attention to a story about Arsenal, my team’s north London rivals.
Arsenal have launched Arsenal Fanshare, selling portions of shares in the club (their 62,000 shares trade at around £10,000 apiece) to fans. This will obviously increase their influence in matters relating to the club’s governance and future. With the governance and ownership of football clubs around the world very much in the spotlight, this is an interesting development.
But it’s nothing new. The reformed AFC Wimbledon is majority owned by The Dons Trust, a social enterprise formed by the community of supporters of Wimbledon FC. Brentford FC is 60% owned by another social enterprise called Bees United, the club’s supporters’ trust. Over in Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona are owned by their supporters, and the German Bundesliga requires that a minimum of 51% of any club must be owned by club members.
Aside from being hugely successful on the pitch, both Real Madrid and Barcelona have built up enormous global fanbases. The supporter involvement has probably helped these clubs in developing a greater sense of loyalty, enhanced their brands and ultimately their businesses. Arsenal’s Fanshare initiative looks like an attempt to derive some of these same benefits. However, when it is compared to these examples, this step looks a little timid if the intention is to achieve the Spanish results. It will be interesting to see the effects of this scheme going forward. Will Arsenal’s future owners be prepared to cede further influence and control in the name of increasing the success of their business?
Leeds United are my team. Currently they are a club that refuses to disclose who owns them. Additionally, their stadium is owned by a company that is based in the Virgin Islands. No one, not even at Leeds United apparently, seems to know who is behind this organisation.
I think most supporters of my team would like a greater level of supporter involvement but we’re all pretty sure that the current Chairman (one Ken Bates) is not very keen on the idea! Mind, he’s also not one to turn a good money making idea down so you never know…!
At Notts County, the Supporters’ Trust was instrumental in efforts to bring the club out of administration back in 2003. Having grown up as a Nottingham Forest fan, what made me fall in love with Notts was the unity amongst fans (not just from Nottingham but from all ends of the country) during that time. Eventually, the Trust took its shareholding to just over 60% of the club, and a Trust representative was running the club day-to-day (which, to me, didn’t seem like terribly good governance, but that’s another story).
However, last summer, the Trust’s members voted overwhelmingly in favour of giving away (yes, giving away) its shares to a secretive group called Munto Finance. As a member of the Trust at the time, I abstained from that vote on principle, for reasons too lengthy to document here. Munto promised riches: they brought in Sven-Goran Eriksson as Director of Football, and Sol Campbell had a brief spell in League Two with us.
Soon, though, Munto withdrew their backing, and the club was served with winding-up petitions. We were bought by a private owner, Ray Trew, who (so far) seems to be doing a sound job. The Notts County Supporters’ Trust has been left rather discredited, having given away all its influence in the club.
While I support fan-ownership in principle, I think there is still work to be done in establishing best practice in how supporter-owned clubs are run. Also, I’ve come to the conclusion that who owns the club is of secondary importance to whether it is run on a sustainable business model.
Well, the ‘problem’ with supporter-owned clubs in the lower leagues is that they can’t finance the ridiculous levels of deficit spending that enable clubs to march through the leagues to glory.
A supporter-owned club which for geographical reasons has a small fan base will never get to the Premiership because it won’t spend five time its gate money on transfer fees and salaries, a business-person owned club with a small fan base might do (although it’s far more likely to go bust in the process). So supporter-owned clubs in the lower leagues are giving up on an irrational dream of success.
At Premier League level, business people who own clubs won’t give clubs to supporters because their giving up the very rational dream of making effective use of very powerful financial vehicle (whether or not it’s a profit-making business in itself). And supporters can’t raise enough cash to buy clubs.
Barcelona and other Spanish clubs are supporter owned for historical reasons, German clubs for regulatory reasons. Football governing bodies in England can’t force people to give up their private businesses – not least because the owners of those private businesses are (through the Premier League) more powerful than the FA.
The best that’s likely to happen at Premier League level is Arsenal’s enlightened capitalist approach.