When Downing Street briefed its intention to include a plan to give football fans more powers in the running of their clubs in Labour’s 2010 general election manifesto, the critics carped that this was another pie-in-the-sky proposal from a government that was gasping for breath. While the cynics suggested it was a craven attempt to curry favour with a section of the electorate who rarely makes it to the polling station, Gordon Brown’s commitment to football governance had far-reaching consequences.

Eager to nullify Labour’s unexpected lurch into the beautiful game, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats rushed out pledges of their own. After the formation of the coalition, there was even a commitment in the coalition agreement ‘to support the cooperative ownership of football clubs by their supporters’. For much of this parliament, there has been a strong cross-party consensus on the need for reform of a game that has slowly been eating itself. New sports minister Hugh Robertson described football ‘as the worst governed sport in Britain’ and a select committee inquiry into the game’s governance endorsed radical proposals like a more independent FA, a licensing system similar to the one that operates in Germany to eliminate debt and regulatory tweaks to give supporters’ groups more rights to run their own clubs.

How disappointing it was to hear on Friday, the same day that Port Vale came the latest in a long list of British sides to call in the administrators, that the football authorities had produced such a pitiful response to the select committee report. In a begrudging acceptance of the need for change, the ‘core’ football stakeholders delivered a fudge that demonstrated precisely why so many fans now question whether they have the game’s best interests at heart. The FA stood accused of surrendering the authority to investigate their members, while leading football writers described the game’s governing body as languishing in the Premier League’s shadow.

Most serious of all was the government’s apparently ‘enthusiastic’ welcome for this piecemeal package. The vague recognition of the benefits of licensing was far from ideal, given that this safeguard against the English’s game debt mountain would be the most effective means of making football sustainable. Since 1992, 92 clubs, from Premier League to what was formerly known as the conference, have become insolvent – the equivalent of the entire top four divisions of professional football. The spectre of Portsmouth looms large, with the troubled south coast club in their second spell in administration in just two seasons, and poor old Darlington have had four periods of insolvency in 15 years.

As with so many other issues the government has mismanaged, there’s a real opportunity for Labour here. Our record on football in government was respectable, from the setting up of Supporters’ Direct, which still helps supporters run their own clubs today, to the work of the Football Foundation in promoting the grassroots game. The Labour benches aren’t short of passionate speakers on the subject either. Steve Rotheram’s emotional Hillsborough tribute was one of the best parliamentary addresses in recent memory, while Tom Greatrex brings to the Commons the experience of having founded a Premier League supporters’ trust at Fulham. If Ed Miliband wants to continue his recent upsurge in the polls, he could do far worse than backing the campaign for more imaginative reform of the people’s game.

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Daniel Crawford is a Labour councillor in the London borough of Ealing and on the committee of the Fulham Supporters’ Trust as Communications & Media Officer. This article originally appeared on www.progressonline.org.uk

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For those of you who don’t know, Sean Hamil is the academic director of the MSc Sport Management and the Business of Football at Birkbeck College, and a Director of the Birkbeck Sport Business Centre. Sean is also a lecturer on the UEFA Certificate in Football Management (CFM) management development programme for executives in UEFA member national associations, focusing on the topic of the organisation and governance of world and European football.

Since joining Birkbeck, Sean has focused on his core interest - the corporate governance and regulation of sport on which he has written and co-edited an extensive range of articles – notably the 2001-2003 editions of the State of the Game corporate governance of English football review - and a number of books including, among others, The Changing Face of the Football Business: Supporters Direct; Football in the Digital Age: Whose Game Is It Anyway?; and A Game of Two Halves? The Business of Football. Sean was invited to give oral evidence to the 2011 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee Enquiry into the Governance of Football and his contribution was quoted extensively in the final report. He has recently been involved in reviewing Corporate Social Responsibility practice in the Scottish Premier League, with subsidiary analysis of CSR practice in English football. Obviously, the main talking points of this first discussion is the emergence of English football in the Premier League era and what seems to be at stake now that the financial crisis has hit the marketplace. If you think that it is all doom and gloom for the sport, there is the potential this may be the case, but how to explain the odd attachment in economic terms that fans and supporters have with their clubs.

At the end of last year Sean (who also studied in Newcastle for a number of years and has a great affinity for both the city and football club) kindly came up to Newcastle and gave a talk at an event organised by NUST, click here to read the presentation his talk was based on.

Sean Hamil is also much in demand by the media and listen here to a very good interview he gave to the website ‘Beyond The Pitch’. Sean really knows his stuff and combines that with a very ‘human’ delivery of what can be quite a dry topic. He is dedicated to the future well being of our favourite sport and is well worth going to see at a future presentation if you have the opportunity.

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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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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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