Newcastle United Supporters Trust

After the national team's failure at the World Cup, we must focus again on the domestic game's lack of financial sense

Football didn't come home this summer. At least not in the way many of us watching the World Cup might have hoped. After England's dismal performance on the pitch there should be a renewed focus on the health and governance of our national game.

The Premier League is a fantastic global export, giving towns like Wigan, Bolton and now Blackpool worldwide fame. On the pitch we have some of the world's best players competing in a fast and dynamic Premier League, backed up by a highly competitive Football League that is far in advance of any second-tier competition anywhere in the world.

Yet it is too simplistic to take that success at face value. The football industry is at risk of making the same mistake our banks did. They became too powerful and unwilling to fix internal problems at a time when it would have been relatively easy financially to do so.

Here’s something to cheer Cristiano Ronaldo up: he is now one of the owners of a soccer team. A landmark agreement has been reached in Scotland: according to the BBC, Stirling Albion, who play in the Scottish First Division, have become the first senior Scottish side owned by its fans through the Supporters’ Trust, one of whose members is, odd as it seems, Ronaldo.

The Stirling Albion Supporters Trust has agreed a £300,000 deal to clear debts and make a one-off payment to Peter McKenzie, chairman for 26 years.

McKenzie, 84, has agreed to write off the £1.2m loan that was due to him.

This marks a successful end to an imaginative and successful campaign by the Stirling Albion Supporters’ Trust to buy the club: they have used new tools such as a community website that would put most official clubs’ efforts to shame, traditional local fund-raising and even media stunts to attract attention: the Trust’s two most famous of its 2,000 members are Cristiano Ronaldo and Andy Murray (from nearby Dunblane).

One should be wary of generalising too much from a sample of five games, but Germany’s tremendously successful World Cup so far and the quality of its young players, with its youngest-ever team at the tournament averaging out at 24.7 years-old, has sparked plenty of understandable interest in its youth development system.

That system seems to be the product of far-sighted planning based on disappointment with the quality of players the country was producing at the turn of the millennium, coupled with the priorities of the elite professional structure reflecting a recognition of the benefit of development for the national team along with a strong economic incentive to prioritise young domestic talent.

We can draw these conclusions from two articles in the past few days, by Jamie Jackson today in the Observer and by long-time translator of the German game for an English-language audience, Raphael Honigstein at Sports Illustrated.