I’m going to be part owner of an English football club

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Most of the schemes I review are designed to make money, but this one’s just for fun.  In one of the more innovative examples of “crowdsourcing” I’ve seen, MyFootballClub is giving ordinary folks the chance to be owners of a football (or soccer, as we call it here) team.

The implementation has been very smart so far.  They started out asking for pledges of £35 (about $70), to be paid when they had a 50,000 pledges.  I’m assuming they’re figuring some ratio of non-participation, but the numbers make it reasonable to do a buy-out of an existing team.

They reached their pledge target recently, and asked for the cash.  I actually couldn’t pay right away because I’m “foreign” (it’s UK-based, if that’s not obvious yet), but today they got their overseas payments working so I’ve put my money in the pool.

The site representatives are current talking to four teams, and I’m guessing as this gets more press and more paying members, that number will go up.  Members can vote on which team should be purchased, though obviously that will depend on availability of both funds and the team.  Given that I know nothing about the teams in question, I chose “I don’t mind” (the phrasing of which makes me laugh a bit).

Once a team is purchased, the idea is that the site members will vote on all major decisions, like player trading and whatnot.  One of the significant upsides to this setup is that there won’t be personality clashes between owner and players.  All money made by the team is reinvested, so there’s much less likelihood than normal of making rash decisions for short-term profits.

No real point to my involvement except that it sounds interesting and I’m curious… but wouldn’t it be funny if a crowd-managed team did better than teams managed by “experts”?

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