Over the last ten years I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen someone give that argument to Newcastle fans. In principle it sounds great, what better way to ensure your football club is ran exactly how the fans want than have the fans run it?
Its also an argument that I had back in 2009 over the internet and email with sports journalist Patrick Barclay who argued that basically you weren’t a real fan unless you put your hand in your pocket and bought the club. If you’re a regular on toontastic.net or have ever read this thread then chances are half of what I have to say here will be sadly familiar. If not, then come with me and lets buy our football club!
If we do this we’ll be joining an elite band of supporter owned clubs, the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Benfica and English clubs such as Exeter, Newport and Tonbridge Angels….hmmm so it’s safe to say that we would finally be able to argue we are Englands biggest (fan owned) football club!
Surely we can easily do this, after all Patrick was putting forward the Barça model and we beat them 3-2 that time (20 year ago this month actually). For the record, Barcelona have 143,459 members each paying €179. *keep this in mind for later on.
Right…where do we start? well first you need an organisation to run the whole thing. Back in the day I had a small part in the creation of the NUSC which then went on to become Newcastle United Supporters Trust. The NUST are the only organisation that have the necessary links etc to be involved in any fan takeover.
NUST did have an attempt previously which hinged around fans investing chunks of their pensions. It read well but didn’t take off and if Im totally honest I can’t remember exactly what happened but it didn’t take off as hoped. I was never fully sure of the idea but it was something that had to be tried and you couldn’t have got a more committed set of people to take it forward than those that were heavily involved. There will no doubt be lessons to be learned from that.
Now there’s the big issue, money and the little matter of the price…what was it again? oh aye £400m or so, give or take a couple of million either way. Anyone got that spare? No? ok then how about 10 of us at £40m each? 100 chipping in £4m? Bloody hell man woman man come on!
We’re taking up too much space here, lets drop a table in….
| Fans | Cost | How to raise it |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | £400,000 | Sell your family & everything you’ve ever owned |
| 4,000 | £100,000 | Sell your house |
| 10,000 | £40,000 | Re-mortgage your house |
| 50,000 | £8,000 | Sell Car(s) |
| 100,000 | £4,000 | Give up food for a year |
| 400,000 | £1,000 | Give up drinking & smoking |
| 800,000 | £500 | Season Ticket |
| 1,000,000 | £400 | Send your kid to school without school meals |
Now then which one can you afford? Personally, I’d be hard pushed to justify £500 from the family budget never mind joining another 99,999 of you in starving the family for a year.
But lets be sensible about it and set the price at something achievable so we’ll go £500 each and only need 800,000 of us. To put that into perspective, that is every single man, woman and child in Newcastle, Gateshead & North Tyneside plus 80% of South Tyneside (although I’m wary that more than 20% there supports the dark side!).
In order to get them onboard you’re going to need a hefty advertising campaign extolling the virtues of investing so we better add those other 30,000 South Tynesider’s to cover the cost of the ads!
Now of course not everyone needs to put the same money in so you could get maybe a dozen or so big name business types to lob £100k+ in while a couple of my neighbours here in Hepscott could easily manage £10k or so each (the ones in the posh houses not the likes of mine).
Trouble is if someone sticks a million in they’re going to expect something in return, the flash sod down our street who’ll end up killing someone in his Bentley won’t lob that kind of cash in without wanting a seat on the board….arsehole {sorry rant over}. That is not what you ideally want in fan owners. It should be a democratic process.
So we’re going to need rules around how much each person can own a bit like Darlington 1883 who’s constitution states that no person may own more than 15% of the club, in our case that would be £60m worth so we might want to drop it down to about 1% (£4m investment, £500 by the way, gets you a 0.00000125% stake).
So is it possible? Seriously? do you even need ask that question? Lets go back to Barcelona, they have 143,459 members, that’s arguably the worlds biggest most successful domestic club who manage to get 18% of the numbers we would be looking for oh and that is for ⅓ of the cost of an NUFC membership.
We’d be looking for virtually 100% takeup from the population of Tyneside, 92% of Barça’s members are from Catalan, area with a population of 7.5m that’s 1.76% of the Catalan population who have invested in the football club that is seen as a major part of the regions political setup!
Now get 100% of Tyneside to invest in our club with little current ambition, no signs of life and a hugely over inflated valuation. Patrick Barclay was right on one point, any attempt at doing this should have been done back in 2009 when we were valued at £75m, as he said it would have only taken 200,000 of us investing £375 each!
Piece of pee Patrick, so have you still got that £375 sitting waiting?
Musings of a (frustrated) NUFC fan 