Like boxers and politicians, football club owners tend to exit the stage if not battered then certainly bruised and sometimes broke.
Will Brooks quit the ownership game in 2010.
“I had to step away,” says the former journalist and copywriter who had decided to buy a football club three years earlier.
“The financial pressures and stress were getting too much. I remember being at a game and hearing some fans talking about that ‘w***** Will Brooks, I bet he’s not here, watching this s***’. So, I went up to them to say I was there.
“They apologised, a bit, but said the club needed more money. We had put in about £1.5million ($1.9m at current rates) at that point and we were still on the back foot. At that stage, you’ve just got to ask, why are you still there?”
It was a question he could no longer answer. So he left, sold his part of the business and moved to New Zealand.
But, like so many boxers and politicians, Brooks has been unable to resist the comeback trail. He is back and so is an idea that divided opinion then and will do so again now.
MyFootballClub, your chance to “own the club, pick the team” is dead; long live FC100,000, “a more sustainable and exclusive way to own a football team”.
Before we get into the new plan, we need to return to “there”, Ebbsfleet United, a club that had been known as Gravesend & Northfleet until shortly before Brooks bought them.
Well, when we say Brooks, we really mean Brooks and 20,000 strangers who had signed up to his MyFootballClub website and paid their first annual payment of £35 “to get a piece of the action”. Another 12,000 would join in that first season as Ebbsfleet United went to Wembley, won the FA Trophy and finished 11th in English football’s fifth tier.
It was a revolution in club ownership that Brooks started on April 26, 2007, with a 100-word post on a simple website that included a request to “email all the football fans in your address book and invite them to join you”. It could hardly seem more dated now if it was written with a quill on parchment, but it worked.
A week later, BBC Sport’s website published an article titled “Fans given club takeover chance” in which Brooks said he had “created a vehicle that will pool fans’ opinions, passion and wealth and turn fantasy football into reality”. Also published on the website that day was a story about a £100million takeover battle at Manchester City between ex-player Ray Ranson and Thailand’s former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Simpler times.
A couple of months and a lot of media interest later, 53,000 people from more than 80 countries had registered their interest via the website and started debating which club they should buy on its forum pages. Leeds United and Nottingham Forest were the top targets.
“I had always been fascinated with football club ownership and its imperfections,” recalls Brooks, who is now 54.
“I used to go to Fulham and Brentford as a kid — my dad had season tickets at both for a few seasons and we’d alternate. This was in the late ’70s and I remember people carrying blankets around the pitch and fans would throw coins in, which seemed extremely dangerous.
“That’s how they collected money to save the club. It seemed crazy, so haphazard. Could it ever be enough?”
A decade later, Brooks was a young journalist at the BBC’s new weekly Match of the Day Magazine. Full disclosure, so was I, and it feels like a very long time ago.
Intrigued by their stories, Brooks interviewed some of the big “characters” who owned clubs at the time, men such as convicted safe-cracker and Darlington owner George Reynolds, Peterborough United chairman Barry Fry, and David Sullivan, who then owned Birmingham City but is now the biggest shareholder at West Ham United.
“The apparent madness of owning football clubs really struck me and I wondered if there was another way,” says Brooks.
“Those thoughts got mixed up, in the washing machine of my mind, with football simulation games and I just thought if you have a million people paying £50 for a game, why don’t those people get together and buy a real club and do it.”
Brooks shared the idea with friends, pitched it to some potential sponsors and ran it past a few club executives. Nobody hated it, but nobody went for it, either. So, in a “final throw of the dice”, he launched the MyFootballClub website and emailed it to a dozen people.
“It was just me at that point and probably the first error I made was its immediate success — 10,000 people subscribed within four or five days,” he says.
To flip the famous line, they had come before he had built the field.
The exterior of Ebbsfleet’s ground in November 2007, in the week the MyFootballClub takeover was announced (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)
Over that summer, Brooks and a few friends set up MyFootballClub as an industrial and provident society, which took some negotiating with the Financial Services Authority. They fleshed out the website, conducted dozens of media interviews and started looking at clubs they could afford.
The first request for money was sent on 1 August, with members asked to send £35 fees via PayPal. Within three hours, there was £100,000 in the account, £250,000 within 24 hours, and £500,000 within 10 days.
A lot of money, but not enough for one of English football’s larger sleeping giants. Brooks & Co knew their budget would not stretch that far and got into talks with Cambridge United, Halifax Town, Leigh RMI, Mansfield Town and Nuneaton Borough.
But it was with Ebbsfleet United, a team based on the northern banks of the Thames in Kent, that the talks moved to handshakes and, in November, a deal was agreed with the club’s relieved existing shareholders to buy 75 per cent for around £750,000.
Second mistake. MyFootballClub paid that in one go, wiping out most of their cash, with the rest going in monthly chunks as the reality of running a professional team with 1,000 or so regular paying customers and no TV deal hit home.
To compound this basic cashflow problem, PayPal did not do direct debits, so MyFootballClub relied on those annual renewals. The deal to buy the club did not complete until February 2008, which meant the first renewals were not requested until February 2009, 18 months after most members had signed up.
Brooks and his partners knew that some members would not come back, but the scale of the churn shocked them. They needed at least 20,000 members to make the numbers work, but the novelty had clearly worn off and only 12,000 remained.
For some, it was the letdown of not buying Leeds United, Nottingham Forest or whichever big club they supported; for others, it was the disappointment that they were not playing Football Manager for real at all because when it came to MyFootballClub’s most revolutionary idea, picking the team by online polls, MyFootballClub blinked.
The costs of running Ebbsfleet began to mount in early 2009 (Will Brooks)
Ebbsfleet United’s manager was Liam Daish, a central defender the aforementioned Fry once said would “try to head away” an attack by fighter jets.
“If you are going to buy a club and let the owners pick the team, we probably hadn’t picked the easiest one with a guy like Liam in charge,” recalls Brooks, who was given the task of explaining the new selection committee to Daish and arranged to meet him in a pub in Kent.
Buoyed by some leftover valium and a pint of Guinness to “calm the nerves”, Brooks broke the news to his manager. “We actually had quite a laugh and a few more pints,” he continues. “He was really open-minded about the idea. I told him we wouldn’t be reckless and we were going to use Prozone stats to inform the members. He realised the club was in trouble and if this was going to bring in some money, he was willing to work with it.
“But everyone else connected with the club hated the idea of the members picking the team, as did a lot of the members. But then there were other members who only joined because that is what they really wanted to do, so it was a difficult tightrope to tread.
“So, we compromised by having a weekly vote to see who should pick the team: Liam or the members. Liam won every time.”
Manager Liam Daish (holding Champagne) retained team decision-making duties (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Unfortunately, Pep Guardiola could have been picking the team and it would not have made much difference, as the bills continued to come and Daish was forced to work with a smaller and smaller budget.
The £140,000 sale of striker John Akinde to Bristol City — the first transfer approved by online poll — helped keep the lights on during MyFootballClub’s second season in charge, but with the membership declining to 9,000 in 2010, Ebbsfleet United were relegated.
They bounced back in 2011 but nobody was having much fun anymore. Brooks had already left at this point, selling the original website to MyFootballClub’s members for £15,000, and the club was split between its local support, some of whom had signed up to MyFootballClub, and the dwindling but committed online community.
As so often in football, a tax bill brought matters to a head. In 2013, MyFootballClub’s remaining members, 1,300 diehards, voted to share their 75 per cent stake between the club’s supporters’ trust and some minority shareholders. They promptly handed the club over to a group of Kuwaiti investors who are still there, although the group’s first leader was declared bankrupt last year.
Speaking to The Blizzard football magazine in 2017, Daish said: “In the end I had a budget of like £4,500 to £5,000 a week to run a team in the Conference National that was full of ex-League sides and it just sort of fell apart really.
“Because (MyFootballClub) still owned the club, we were probably in a poorer position than we were before because there was no real influx of money. A club of that size is not sustainable on people who come through the gate.
“In the last year, the club was basically on the brink of folding. We were trying to organise events to bring money in. We were going cap in hand to clubs who had sell-on fees on players. With the taxman knocking on the door it was a case of going to the chairmen of these clubs and asking if they could do a deal on the sell-on to get us through to the end of the season. We got relegated, but that was the least of our worries.”
Brooks agrees.
“It was wildly successful at first but, as time went on, like most owners, we struggled,” he says.
“We were never able to do the fun things we wanted to do — putting flatscreen TVs in the club bar, signing players, improving the ground. It was a chastening experience.”
And yet here we are now, talking about doing it again.
Ebbsfleet United are currently rock bottom of the National League, English football’s fifth tier (Henry Browne/Getty Images)
While there is no disputing the fact MyFootballClub made plenty of mistakes, it seems harsh to suggest it left Ebbsfleet United in a worse state than it found them. They were losing money and bouncing between the divisions below the EFL before November 2007 and they have continued in that fashion since May 2013. They also landed the biggest honour of the club’s history, the FA Trophy (the equivalent of the FA Cup for senior non-League clubs).
It should also be acknowledged that Brooks and his partners bought a professional club and ran it for almost five seasons on a model that sounds incredibly modern, but was actually based on pretty old-fashioned platforms. This was before blockchain, social media and streaming. It was also before the likes of Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham had helped to build a global audience for content from British football’s coalface.
“The idea never really went away,” says Brooks. “Even though I was on the other side of the planet, doing something completely different, I would still get a call or an email about MyFootballClub every few months, usually someone asking what I would do differently if I did it again.
“Some people have suggested the crypto route like Crawley Town, and we have looked at that. But I think the key is to improve what we did well and fix our mistakes.”
Having returned to the UK in 2023, Brooks started to work out what MyFootballClub 2.0 would look like, along with a group with backgrounds in online gaming, football administration and recruitment, branding, content creation and fan engagement.
The end result is FC100,000, a five-part plan to build an online community that will eventually become the 50-per-cent-plus-one owner of an English professional football team.
Step one is to find the team. Step two is to attract at least 40,000 members willing to pay £5 a month. Steps three and four are finalise the deal with the club, receive a golden share and seat on the board to ensure member influence. Step five is to take a 50-per-cent-plus-one-share stake in the club when an agreed amount has been invested.
Unlike last time, there is no talk of picking the team, but there is a commitment to turn this club into a 24-7 content factory, with streamed half-time team talks, boardroom meetings and unprecedented access to the players and staff.
“We want influence, not control, a seat on the board and a chance to show people how clubs work,” says Brooks.
The board will make the final decisions, but members’ opinions will be canvassed on everything from new kits to players’ contracts to stadium improvements. There will be no dividends, all money raised will be put into the club and if anyone wants to leave the ownership group, they can. If everyone leaves, the shares are returned to the club.
The votes, behind-the-scenes content and membership-rewards scheme will all be available via an app, although there is also a website that quietly went live at fc100000.com. According to the site, they are making one guarantee, “the cheapest beer in the league”.
Ebbsfleet won the FA Trophy at Wembley in May 2008 (Paul Gilham/Getty Images)
An admirable goal, but there will still be opposition to this idea.
Kevin Rye was head of policy and PR at Supporters Direct, the organisation set up by the UK government in 2000 to help supporters’ trusts gain a bigger say at their clubs and is now part of the Football Supporters’ Association, when MyFootballClub first appeared on the scene.
Rye, now a lecturer at the Wembley-based University Campus of Football Business, was sceptical then and remains sceptical now.
“The problem with MyFootballClub and ideas like it is that we’ve seen them tried and on no occasion can they be judged a success,” says Rye.
“The last time they tried it, it was only sheer good fortune that a Kuwaiti group turned up to save Ebbsfleet United. I’m not sure the club would have survived, otherwise. I struggle to see how much has changed since then. The speed of collapse could well be faster.”
Brooks, unsurprisingly, sees things differently.
“I think when groups of people try to make decisions together, they tend to be conservative and sensible,” he says. “And I am convinced there are 100,000 people out there who would pay £5 a month to superpower a football club up the pyramid.”
(Top photo: Clive Mason/Getty Images)
