Want to run a football club?

Do you feel you could do a better job than your current chairman? There are a legion of fans of various clubs that believe that the fans should own the club they support. Over the years I've managed to experience this at Rushden when Max Griggs (who formed our club) could no longer afford to run the club and handed it over to the Supporters trust, along with a generous donation to keep the club running for the next couple of seasons.

Safe to say it was a bit of a disaster. The fans had hoped for a more openly run club, but it ended up feeling like a closed system, the people who ran the club did not communicate well with those they represented. Even worse the club proved not to be financially viable in the state that it had been inherited and those who were installed on the board did not have the knowledge to bring the club onto a more steady footing. This lead to the club teetering close to the brink after relegation out of the league. Fortunately for us we had a saviour come along in the form of Keith Cousins and the club is now run better and in a better state financially.

Billy Sharpe: One of the few good things to happen under the trust at Rushden

While those who had a go at running the club obviously did a valiant job it showed that unless you have the knowledge to run a football club you shouldn't rush into owning one. A large group of Liverpool fans wish to purchase their club believing they would be able to turn into into some kind of fans utopia, with a completely transparent system of running the club. Problem is nothing in football is transparent. In fact it probably goes for every sport but most prominently Football is a closed community, dodgy dealings with agents occur every season and we don't truly know the extent of how deals are hammered out. Some deals need to be kept secret at least for a period of time in order to stop those involved pulling out, and in the case of some high paid players to avoid them the embarrassment of their true salaries becoming public.

In Spain many of the top clubs have been owned by the fans for a long time, but they have well established ways of running the clubs and those who are elected to run the clubs have helpers around them and are mostly used to running businesses thus allowing them to integrate into running a club easily. Even at those clubs there is little transparency for the fans, all transfers end up surrounded by huge amounts of secrecy and the finances of the club are not fully known. It's all necessary in the world of football. Even the latest football club run by members of the public, Ebbsfleet United, is now struggling. They were taken over by MyFC last year and are run in a revolutionary way, with members having a say in the running of the team as well as they club, but this is now unraveling as those who paid their £35 initially seem to be reluctant to renew their subscription and the club is struggling to get a budget for the next year together.

MyFC looked to revolutionise the way clubs are run

The idea of creating a club truly for the fans is a far fetched one these days, even those who believe that FC United of Manchester is truly open are living in denial. One day it may happen, but in this day and age the idea is just not realistic.