Last week, we reported on exhibit A in how to alienate fans in Australia by A-League expansion
team Gold Coast United's billionaire owner Clive Palmer. The club closed three
sides of their stadium, Skilled Park, and capped capacity to just 5,000, forcing supporters out of
their usual position in the stadium.
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Stan Kroenke continues to edge closer to a takeover of Arsenal. He is now at a
29.6% shareholding, just shy of the 29.9% that by city rules would trigger a takeover bid. The
Arsenal Supporters' Trust (AST) sent out a press release about the news today,
which stated that they were opposed to a takeover by Kroenke (and also mentioned they did not
believe one was imminent anyway).
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Well, no-one saw this coming: Ebbsfleet United, the "world's first web community owned club",
has lost most of its community in its second year of operation and the club is spiralling towards
disaster on and off the field.
It's hard to say just how unsurprising this is.
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Clive Palmer, owner of Gold Coast United
Gold Coast United, an expansion team in Australia's premier A-League, have already generated
negative headlines it takes some teams decades to generate: "A-League may hit rock bottom thanks to
the Coast," says Adrian Musolino in today's Roar, which also features another piece titled "Gold
Coast "United" – How to lose fans and alienate people".
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In recent years the model of fan ownership exercised through supporters' trusts has been
increasingly high-profile in British football, not least thanks to the sterling work of the
national body Supporters Direct (SD). Meanwhile, very different yet nonetheless successful models
of fan ownership exist across the continent, as seen throughout the Bundesliga or alternatively
with the ‘socio' model as at Real Madrid or Barcelona.
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When a conference on supporter involvement in English football includes speakers from Barcelona,
UEFA, the F.A. and non-league football clubs, you know something unusual is going on.
This isn't the Leaders in Football conference of a couple of weeks ago, but it might have been
just as important: Supporters Direct's annual conference concluded last week in Birmingham, and it
seems to have cut to the heart of the question of how and why supporters should be involved in the
governance of their clubs.
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As a footballing metropolis, Glasgow and its environs more or less have it all. Â There is
Celtic, Rangers, Partick Thistle, Hampden Park and Hamilton Crescent, where the first ever
international match was played. Not far away are clubs like Motherwell, St.Mirren and Hamilton
Academical. Â Glasgow has had its European champions, its fan tragedies, glories and financial
disasters and, as we'll look at today, clubs who have come, gone and returned again such as
Clydebank FC.
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Usually we take the time to parse carefully through the statements of football's big wigs as
they bury the truth deep below their public statements. But George Gillette's blather in an
interview with a Toronto radio station hardly needs a lot of in-depth analysis.
Seeing through his palpable nonsense is easy from the start as he claimed Liverpool were "in
outstanding shape" as a club because "Economically, it's never been stronger.
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UEFA's Executive Committee meets next week to consider recommendations that could change the
face of European club football. "Financial fair play", as UEFA calls it, is the key item on the
agenda, as the recommendations of the Professional Football Strategy Council (PFSC) made last month
are up for approval (the PFSC was created in 2007, and consists of UEFA's vice-presidents and
representatives of clubs, leagues and the players).
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The BBC's recent pre-season analysis of "Where the Premier League's players come from" offered a
striking picture of the dramatic demographic changes in European soccer over recent decades.Â
Comparing the EPL's 2009-2010 rosters with the same clubs' 1989-1990 rosters, I was particularly
struck by the influx of African players.
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The Irish Times has an interesting piece that paints a picture of the changing
landscape of sponsorship in the football world. Tony Ponturo, for a couple of decades one of the
most powerful men in the sports business world due to his role presiding over the estimated annual
$378 million sports marketing budget of Anheuser-Busch, says that "Over the last few years we
started to pick up something from our sponsorship research that said the consumer more than ever
questioned the whole concept of Official Partnership.
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Last October, then Culture Secretary Andy Burnham put considerable pressure on the Premier
League to increase its clubs financial transparency and regulation with a series of penetrating
questions which asked the League to "reassess its relationship with money". The League, as David
Conn put it, neatly "body-swerved" the meat of Burnham's proposals with its response this year,
which we'll continue to look at.
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At first, I was fooled too. The Football League's official Agents' Fees Report for the 2008/9
season splashes on the introductory page that "In total, League clubs have committed £8.8m to
agents during the last twelve months, compared to £11.1m in 2007/08." And the League's official
website builds further on this headline decline, with Football League Chairman Lord Mawhinney
saying that "Given the severe economic recession, it is encouraging to see these figures
declining.
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Remember when the Champions League wasn't called the Champions League, but it was actually for
champions and not a bunch of runners-up from Europe's biggest leagues? Well, we'll surely never
return to the halycon days of the European Cup, but Ian Plenderleith at When Saturday Comes has a
very good piece on the change to the qualification structure this season by Platini & co.
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Stonewall, a lesbian, gay and bisexual rights charity, released a damning report on homophobia
in English football this week entitled "Leagues Behind Football's Failure to Attack Anti-Gay
Abuse". Stonewall found that 7 out of 10 fans have heard homophobic abuse directed at players
during a game, and branded the sport "institutionally homophobic.
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It was supposed to refocus UEFA away from Western Europe the awarding of hosting rights to
Ukraine alongside Poland for Euro 2012 seemed like a giant leap forward for Eastern European
football when it was announced two years ago.
But now, it looks like all the decision has done is given UEFA its hardest decision for some
time: whether to remove the hosting rights from Ukraine, as stalled preparations for Euro 2012 are
shedding an unpleasant light on all of the problems the game and the nation's infrastructure has
there.
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A summer season for Scotland? John Boyle, chairman of Motherwell, raised the prospect once again
as he advocated a switch to a summer season and a long winter break.
This adds to the support for the move from Walter Smith, the Rangers manager, and Gordon Smith,
the SFA chief executive, but Boyle was far more assertive in making the economic argument for the
move saying "To be candid, I think the financial case for summer football has overrun the football
case.
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Cork City FC have just a few days left. As the club's official statement said today "Following
High Court proceedings today, Cork City FC has been given until Friday to settle its liabilities to
the Revenue."
That amount is €439,000, and it seems rather unlikely Cork will raise that sum by Friday,
despite another appeal to supporters to help out.
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In January last year, ShareLiverpoolFC (SLFC) made a splash as a scheme launched by supporters
to purchase the club. SLFC aimed to raise £500m from 100,000 Liverpool fans paying £5,000 for a
single share. Eighteen months later, the original common criticism of this scheme that the buy-in
price was simply too high for most fans to participate has been addressed, with the share cost cut
from £5,000 to £500 in the new proposal SLFC announced on Friday.
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Hard economic times can also foster innovation, and it's no surprise that a supporter-owned and
run club, FC United of Manchester, this summer became the first club I've heard of to allow
supporters to set their own season ticket prices.
In May, the Unibond League club formed in protest at the Glazers' takeover of Manchester United,
explained their decision:
The Board is excited to announce a radical new campaign in which you can decide how much you pay
for your own season ticket this summer.
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Sven-Goran Eriksson at Notts County? Really?
Yes, in just three years, Sven has gone from England manager to Director of Football at a League
Two club, via Manchester City and a disastrous spell in charge of Mexico albeit, Notts County are a
club with a proud history as the world's oldest professional football club, fallen on hard
times.
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The Italian season opener, the Supercoppa Italiana (Italian Super Cup), between Serie A
champions Internazionale and Italian Cup winners Lazio, is taking place abroad again at Beijing's
Olympic Stadium the Bird's Nest. It's a showy step in Italian football's attempts to keep pace with
the Premier League's branded behemoths and one that also includes a breakaway league reminiscent of
England's league transformation in the 1990s.
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The world's oldest international football stadium, located in Wrexham, Wales, needs your support
to ensure its long-term future, after a recent campaign to save it from speculative property
developers. As David Conn reported in the Guardian this morning, "Wrexham fans have launched a
petition for the Racecourse Ground to be protected by the local authority from being sold off
without a replacement stadium being in place.
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There is something of a buzz walking into your rival team's stadium. Being in a small minority
of a group of away supporters is surely part of it; you're outnumbered, but you're hungrier and
louder as a response. Everywhere around you is enemy territory. It's not home; it's unfamiliar,
it's foreign, it doesn't belong to your club.
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I remember playing a football manager game on the Amiga around 15 years ago that was based
around a European Super League. It seemed pretty exciting at first; I was managing Real Madrid, and
watched a 17-year old Raul pile up the goals. It seemed exotic at the time; in the nascent days of
the Champions League, and with England's years of exclusion from European football after Heysel
still a recent memory, regular matchups between Europe's best seemed a rare treat in computer games
and in real life.
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It sounded like a great deal: as this BBC article led with last month, "Wycombe managing
director Steve Hayes has offered to write off a portion of the club's debt, in return for becoming
majority shareholder." The Wycombe Wanderers supporters' Trust, whose approval was needed for Hayes
to gain overall control of the Club, has accepted his offer.
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While a good majority of the negative attention surrounding relocation of football clubs is
aimed at McDons (Milton Keynes Dons, the franchise that replaced Wimbledon F.C.), and with good
reason, many tend to forget that they were not the first in Britain. In Scotland, what is now
Livingston FC did the same thing in 1995 when they, then known as Meadowbank Thistle, abandonedÂ
Edinburgh in favor of a new stadium in the new town of Livingston, West Lothian.
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I am a founding officer for the Union Football League, an AYSO-affiliated adult league which
plays near downtown Los Angeles. When we heard that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) would
field a team during our first season we were a bit wary.
The field is smack in the middle of Pico-Union, and right down the street from the new police
station.
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No more glory in Burma's top league for perennial contenders such as "Transportation," "City
Department" and "Finance and Revenue." Burma is attempting to recapture the glory days of
football in the country from the 1960s with its first professional league launching this week, but
it's one still tainted by crony connections to the Burmese junta.
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With the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster approaching, it would seem to be
curious timing for a return to standing to be on the national agenda again. But that's exactly what
is happening.
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With the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster approaching, it would seem to be
curious timing for a return to standing to be on the national agenda again. But that's exactly what
is happening.
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With the twentieth anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster approaching, it would seem to be
curious timing for a return to standing to be on the national agenda again. But that's exactly what
is happening.
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The connections between Uzbeki champions Bunyondkur, a murkily financed new Super Club backed by a
murderous regime, and Barcelona appear to go far beyond the similarity of their badges, and cast a
shadow on Barcelona's global reputation for unusual integrity.
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Investigative journalist Andrew Jennings continues to shed an awkward light on FIFA and CONCACAF
boss Jack Warner. His story this week in the Sunday Herald about the man Warner wants to run
football in the Caribbean island of Dominica beggars belief. Here's an extract: Security will be on
maximum alert at Zurich airport when a bizarre [.
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