Shamrock Rovers and Cork City won the Premier and First Divisions of the Airtricity League in the past week.

Both clubs have come through some turbulent years – at times flirting with extinction – but are now owned by fans’ groups.

Supporters Direct, a football fans’ organisation that has helped over 180 fans’ trusts, believe this model is the way forward for clubs in Ireland and throughout the world. Here’s why:

Supporters’ Trusts and ownership by the fans is not a new phenomenon in the League of Ireland.

Shamrock Rovers, as you will all know, is the most prominent example of ownership by supporters, and the recent resurgence of Cork City under a similar model is another cheering story. Lesser known is the long road being travelled by the Galway United Supporters Trust (GUST) in their restructuring of the financial mess at the club; pretty much the singular reason for their dire league season.

Pleasingly, coverage in England of Shamrock Rovers’ Europa League group match against Spurs was liberally peppered with references from the commentators to the club’s ownership by the fans, and moreover, having rebuilt it, their determination is not just to stand still but to keep running the club properly – doing all in a sustainable manner – and achieve further, without putting it at risk again.

This is probably in part because the media in England have seen 11 years of supporters’ trusts, framed in the ever-increasing debt, bankruptcy of over 50 clubs in the top four divisions since 1992 – including even Premier League clubs. Alongside the rise of clubs like AFC Wimbledon and Exeter City under ownership by the fans – and even the promotion of part-fan-owned Swansea City to the Premier League, they can in all seriousness no longer pat us all on the head when we say fan ownership not only works, but can be successful. It’s an alternative vision of how football can be, and they have to sit up and take notice.

Although Shamrock Rovers’ results have largely placed them in the public eye, specifically their Europa League qualification, results are still fleeting. We all know that one week you can be flying high, and just weeks later, struggling in mid-table. But ask the people at Rovers, and I’d be very surprised if they tell you that short-term results are the point of what they do.

"In my experience, too many football clubs – and this applies across Europe – have all too often been looking exclusively for the next day’s headlines, or worse still, the next day’s planning applications or bank lending rates, rather than whether the club has a strategy for long-term player development, whether the latest marketing campaign has yielded any improvement in income or whether the volunteers or the kids at the club are being properly looked after."

I recently visited a club – somewhere in these Isles is all I will say – where an individual, under his own steam, had established a youth side, which he did with the support of the club, with little or no financial assistance. It brought under the club’s wing a group of youngsters playing in the club’s colours, which could ultimately help to feed the development of a conveyer belt of talent. Yet importantly it also meant that parents, other family members, friends and the wider community would have a connection with the club, as well as all the benefits those connections entail in terms of growth in the long-term.

A few short years later, with little or no notice, the youth team was ditched by the club with no good reason, dumped in a suburb miles away, with the individual concerned left to pick up the pieces. What’s remarkable is the youth side still plays in the colours of the club, and if the regime changed, would be back like a shot, because the value of this association is clear to them.

And that’s where this new(ish) movement in Ireland is not simply about having a fan on the board to make everyone feel better about themselves; it’s about a fundamental cultural shift in the relationship between those who run football clubs, those who follow them, and the local communities in which those clubs are based and which sustain them.

It’s also about doing business better. At Supporters Direct we’ve long since ceased fearing the word ‘business’ when it comes to football clubs. It’s not as if a majority of football clubs even generally grasp the principles; despite the claims to the contrary, too many privately run football clubs don’t even do that bit properly; just one look at the balance sheets, the borrowing, the poor commercial and marketing work of football clubs, tells you all you need to know.

We pride ourselves as a movement of not just being more open, transparent and of being democratic, but also of knowing through a combination of instinct and hard work just what a specific kind of business a football club is and how to run it.

We all know football clubs are special; they’re not simply places we head to week-in-week-out for entertainment – ask the fans of Galway United!

As these fans themselves know, a football club is a living institution, more important to its fans and community than simply the 90 minutes each week, or the current manager, players – even directors and officials.

It’s a collective enterprise. It’s a community thing.

Kevin Rye is Network Development Manager with Supporters Direct. www.supporters-direct.org

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The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) recently published its response to the select committee report into football governance. The inquiry, which opened in February, heard from numerous witnesses from the world of football and published its findings on the 29th July earlier this year.

The government’s response to the select committee’s report sets out a number of recommendations for football. These include looking at the creation of a modern, accountable and representative FA Board, the implementation of a licensing framework administered by the FA in close co-operation with the professional game and changes to decision-making structures within the FA.

The football authorities will now have to work together in order to agree and publish a joint strategy by 29th February 2012 in terms of how they plan to work towards these recommendations. If they fail to rise to the challenge then the government will look to take action via legislation in Parliament.

The DCMS wish to see football authorities encouraging the clubs to have an open dialogue with supporters’ trusts about how their club is run and for fans to be placed at the heart of the club.

The report states that, "Every club should have a dedicated and mandatory supporter liaison officer while every club should officially recognise the relevant supporters groups or trusts and keep an open dialogue with them. They should hold official and regular annual general meetings at which these groups are invited to take part and at which appropriate financial and other information can be shared and consulted upon".

The government makes clear its belief that these conditions should be an integral part of the football licensing model put forward by the select committee. Compliance would therefore be mandatory for all clubs looking to take part in the professional game in England.

The FA, Football League, and Premier League jointly released a statement saying, "The football authorities are grateful to both the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for the time taken and interest shown in the governance arrangements for football. We shall now take time to consider the Department's response as we formulate what the most appropriate actions might be.

The FA, the Premier League, The Football League and representatives of the National Game are already engaged in this process and are committed to keeping the Minister and his Department informed of our progress".

Sports minister Hugh Robertson responded with, “This country is hugely passionate about our national game and there are many reasons we should be pleased with how it has progressed over the last two decades. However, I believe that there are improvements that can be made in the governance arrangements, which have failed to keep up with the changing pace of the modern game. I do not want Government to run football, so this is an opportunity for the football family to work together to benefit the game in the long-term”.

Chair of NUST, Norman Watson, commented, “" I think this Report, if fully implemented, will bring big changes to the way clubs are financed and run towards a more sustainable model, similar to the Bundesliga. It also calls upon the Football Authorities to come up with ways in which the Supporters can be more involved, including being on the Board. Unfortunately, it is not clear in the Report what will happen if they don't, so there is still more work to do. We are working closely with Supporters Direct and other Supporters Trusts to ensure full implementation of the Report. There is still a lot to play for - this is just half-time!”.

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Swansea City Supporters Trust show the way with a 20% stake in the club after playing a decisive role in saving the club from extinction. Their reward only ten years later? – Premiership football!

Anything is possible. On 30th May this year, Swansea City won promotion to the Premier League, less than 10 years after facing administration and having to be bailed out by a local consortium that included the Supporters Trust.

Of course it is easier to start at the bottom than the top but with determination and togetherness a football club can be galvanised to include the input of supporters in their set up.

Swansea City Supporters Trust was formed in the Summer of 2001 and shortly after was sprung into action by actions of an owner who did not have the best interests of the club at heart. A football club on its knees saw thousands of fans rally together to protest against the running of the club and then they voted with their wallets to place together funds to gain their share of the club.

£100,000 was quickly raised and 10% of the club became owned by Supporters. Now whilst that is a good share, having any share in the club is valuable as it gives you a voice (no matter how big or small) at a shareholder meeting and also means that it is only ever likely to go up (in terms of investment value) rather than down. Once in, it is unlikely that generations of supporters will sell for a quick profit.

It may seem pie in the sky to fans of Newcastle but Swansea managed this off an average gate that was little more than 3000 at the time. You have a support base that is many times that but that gives a huge catchment of passionate support that – if united – can work together for the future good of the football club.

If you think logically, as a starting point if 40,000 supporters gave £10 then £400,000 is raised, some will give more than that and thus raise more money. With this the aim should always be shares in the club. 10% of the 40,000 donating £5 per month would raise the Trust £240k per annum – again it may seem pie in the sky but it is possible – clubs have managed it. It is all about putting building blocks in place and working towards your goals.

It has always been said that at Premier League clubs supporter involvement is impossible but it’s not – all it takes is like-minded people to work together for a common cause that we can all believe in – and every fan has their football club’s best interests at heart, don’t they.

Supporters Trusts can ensure that at least part of the club can remain in supporter hands for future generations and that is something that has to appeal . Remember, the bigger the shareholding the better the chance of board representation – definitely something worth fighting for.

It may have been little old Swansea at the time but we come to St James Park this year as a Premier League football club and a current 20% stake in our football club.

A role model that can be repeated elsewhere?

(Phil Sumbler is Chairman of the Swansea City Supporters Trust.  You can find out more about Swans Trust by visiting swanstrust.co.uk or please feel free to contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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Ken Loach once said Supporters Direct was New Labour's saving grace. Now grassroots activism is needed more than ever

As supporters up and down the country prepare for another wearily predictable Premier League season, Newcastle United, the nation's most farcical club, has supplied another slapstick vignette to usher in the footballing calendar. Following a charade involving dressing-room rows, Twitter, and George Orwell, Joey Barton, perhaps NUFC's last remaining good player, was on Monday exiled to the club's free transfer list. Not for the first time, supporters were left scratching their heads at the mysterious idiocy of a club administration that offered no explanation for this haemorrhaging of the squad just days before the start of the new campaign.

By now, the Newcastle fan-base, like that of many other British clubs, is used to being kept in the dark while the game's elite plays corporate roulette with its cultural heritage. And for a long time it has seemed like there is no alternative to a cowboy culture of spectacular mismanagement, exploitation and PR-dissimulation. In football, as in British society as a whole, obeisance to the interests of big business has long been viewed as the only realistic way of running the show.

But as Premier League power-brokers indulge in increasingly reckless behaviour, the idea that a deregulated, market-oriented system can coexist harmoniously with supporter interests is becoming increasingly untenable. What's more, there is a growing sense from the grassroots, even in traditionally conservative quarters, that a tipping point is fast approaching, and that some sort of fight is necessary against a corrupt corporate hierarchy that has been allowed to do whatever it wants for far too long.

For many clubs, the tipping point has arguably already been reached. In the case of Newcastle, following the departure of Kevin Keegan in 2008, the editors of NUFC fanzines The Mag and True Faith came together and decided to form the Newcastle United Supporters Club, an organisation that would soon evolve into the Newcastle United Supporters Trust (NUST). Like other supporters' trusts, the NUST was created using a model given national institutional grounding with the foundation of the Supporters Direct body in 1999/2000, a group that emerged from the third report of the Football Taskforce set up by the Labour government after it came to power in 1997. The trust campaigns for fan ownership similar to that popular in countries such as Spain and Germany, and responds to instances of board incompetence on its website and via email campaigns (in a blog post entitled "Chaos, Confusion and the Sound of Silence" released this week in the wake of the Barton incident, the trust reiterated its commitment to "owning a sizeable stake in Newcastle United").

The example of the NUST shows that football supporters are beginning to come together to form democratic collective organisations, and significantly, using a model created by a Labour government that was otherwise decidedly reluctant to get behind grassroots activism during its time in office (the film director Ken Loach once called Supporters Direct "about the only good thing New Labour have done"). Conversations about football are often coloured by cynicism, condescension and ridicule, or worse, by a suggestion that football fans are liable to resort to rightwing extremism at the first opportunity. But doesn't the example of the Labour-enabled supporters' trust movement offer a much more positive model for a British left seeking to recovering its soul after the hollowness of the Blair years?

Hopefully one day in the not-too-distant future supporters' trusts such as the NUST will realise their goal of wresting power away from the Russian oligarchs and sportswear tycoons who currently maintain control of modern football behind an imperious wall of public silence. Rather than investing effort in technocratic PR initiatives like the "big society" and "Blue Labour", perhaps those interested in reforming our elitist, top-down society should look to the spontaneous, collective, bottom-up efforts of the supporters' trust movement in opposing injustice and indecency, and take this as the inspiration for a more comprehensive rebuilding of Britain's democratic infrastructure.

(Alex Niven is a lifelong Toon supporter and this article is one of his excellent pieces which first appeared on the Guardian online. Alex has written a short book called *Folk Opposition* (forthcoming from Zero Books), which amongst other things, looks at the potential for a revival of grassroots activism in the UK using the example of the north-east and the supporters' trust movement. His blog is at http://thefantastichope.blogspot.com)

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This is the one time of the year when all football supporters should be able to dream that this could be their season, however unlikely that dream might be.

For Newcastle United fans recent months have been more of a nightmare, minimal net investment in players and key players in a war of words with the club hierarchy. As it stands now, we have lost last season's two top goalscorers and arguably the two most creative players in the current squad are almost certain to follow. Some of you may not be too impressed with Enrique and Barton washing the club's dirty linen in public but there can be no denying that the club have handled the situation badly, while exactly what the new signings make of this is anybody's guess.

It can only be a bad state of affairs when fans rely on this public war of words to gauge what is happening at the club.

What are NUST doing? Our recent survey of thousands of Newcastle fans made it quite clear that supporters wanted the club to communicate much better with the fans and it was strongly felt that the Trust should attempt to open lines of communication with the people running Newcastle United. The Trust board had actually already approached the club to try and start talking, despite being rebuffed we redoubled our efforts and pointed to the fact that thousands of the club's own customers (supporters!) were now telling us via the survey, that the best way forward was for the only democratic and organised fans' body (NUST) to talk with the club and try and work together for the benefit of everybody. Needless to say this honest and open approach was again rejected. Fans are in the dark and the lack of communication has created a void which leaves most of us fearing the worst in the coming season, supporters don't expect trophy signings but they do expect those inside the club doing everything they can to work with the people who care about the club and only want a healthy and successful Newcastle United.

As well as community initiatives such as 'Local Achievers' and working towards the launch of a Junior Trust, the Trust board continue to work behind the scenes to put plans in place that would give fans the best chance of owning a sizeable stake in Newcastle United if the chance ever presents itself. Many people including numerous highly qualified and experienced people are giving their time for free, if the chance ever presented itself we know it would be a massive undertaking for NUST to help organise the fans to own a stake and so preparations continue to be made.

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We already know from our own Survey that 75% of Trust members would like to see the club owned by the fans or by a local consortium alongside the fans - so we have given this aim a priority - so how far have we got?

What we also know is that for supporters to own any stake in Newcastle United the opportunity has to be there, whether it is in partnership with the current owner or a different make-up in the future. At NUST we are therefore working to put plans in place so that if the opportunity presents itself, we can help give fans the best opportunity to take that chance.

First of all our legal Constitution already allows us to raise investment from our members. This means we could invite our members to buy shares in the Trust and then buy shares in NUFC with that money.

It is possible that the current Government Enquiry into Football Governance might recommend that clubs be forced to offer their fans a stake through their Supporters Trust.

We have also reached an agreement with the Co-op Bank whereby they would be willing to operate a savings scheme for all those who would like to save to invest - we want as many people as possible to have chance of taking part in any bid for ownership.

We have prepared a draft prospectus, which explains to potential investors how a possible buyout involving fans could work, and based on published accounts and other accurate information, we are also preparing a Business Plan on how the club could be run and financed for the first 3 years after any buyout.

We continue to meet with professional advisors who are happy to give their time free of charge, they share our belief that supporters owning a stake in the club can only be a positive influence on the long-term health of the club. We will let you know how this is progressing. Most of my professional life has been in the funding and acquisition of companies, especially those involving a wide spread of ownership- so you can be confident we have the right level of expertise already on board.

We believe that the club would be able to operate within the new Financial Fair Play rules and be successful within its own turnover which has been around £96m in past years, making it one of the top twenty clubs in Europe in terms of turnover. The crucial thing to get financial stability in clubs is to control players’ wages and we believe that is the main purpose behind the new Fair Play rules.

The club could then potentially operate with certain similarities to clubs in the Bundesliga or say Barcelona, with club partly owned by fans, with strong links to the Community or Region, and with investors looking to the long-term and not short term financial gain. The fans and the other investors would then work together for the benefit of the club

We are determined to work as hard as we can to make this vision work. We will keep you in touch as our plans develop and new contacts are made. Please contact us if you feel you can help in this. Together we can do it!

Norman Watson

Chair, NUST.

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