Giving power to a bunch of cyber nerds is fatally flawed

Hednesford Town will not, after all, be run by 3,500 anonymous strangers, via an app. But some club will.

some poor souls will be desperate, as Hednesford no doubt were, and eventually an entrepreneurial electrician from Wigan, stuart Harvey, will get to deliver on the promise he has made to allow subscribers to his service to play at being the Glazers, for 49 quid.

oWnA football Club is basically an ebbsfleet United reboot. Between 2008 and 2013, ebbsfleet were run by MyfootballClub, a web-based company that promised its members the immersive experience of running a football club. decide on transfers, pick the team, even make calls on substitutions when it started.

The reality was different, ending in near disaster. Harvey thinks having an app and a membership hierarchy makes his idea different.

What is consistent, though, is that oWnA fC’s targets are real football clubs, with real histories, and real supporters.

not many of them, obviously. And not enough, or the existing owner would not have entered into negotiations with a vague collective of keyboard wizards, but that does not make these clubs any less vital to those who care for them.

Hednesford, who were the subject of oWnA fC’s affections until a sudden curtailment of negotiations on Wednesday, were founded in 1880, meaning they pre-date Manchester United, who were newton Heath until 1902.

Hednesford first played in a local Birmingham league with clubs including Coventry City, shrewsbury Town and Bristol rovers, faced up to the reserve teams of football League founders Aston Villa, Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Bromwich Albion and more than a century later were still viable, coming third in the Conference Premier in 1995-96.

The following season they reached the fourth round of the fA Cup, losing to Middlesbrough, then the Premier League team of Juninho, emerson and fabrizio ravanelli.

As recently as January 2017, Arsenal paid £40,000 for one of Hednesford’s players, Cohen Bramall.

But there has been a decline. Hednesford are now a northern Premier League team and no longer attract crowds of more than 1,000. These days, it is nearer 350. even so, that’s still 350 that are not playing at it, or passing through.

They have a club and a nickname — The Pitmen — and when oWnA fC’s interest was first mooted, many were appalled. Understandably so.

The money generated so far by oWnA fC, is roughly £170,000, which would not even be guaranteed to cover Hednesford’s losses in a year. Harvey has a record of takeover deals for sporting institutions that fail to come off — such as his move for Whitehaven rugby league club last year — and even if he claims to have learned from the failure of MyfootballClub at ebbsfleet, the model is fatally flawed.

‘You can’t sit there and say, “I want to sack the manager” — that’s a fantasy,’ Harvey said at the weekend.

Yes, of course it is — but it’s also the fun. The moment MyfootballClub as good as died was when its members made the most sensible decision of their brief incumbency — and voted to leave match- day decisions to the ebbsfleet United manager, Liam daish. for take the Playstation/

Football Manager element out of this scheme and what is left? A small business, as dull as any other, that is also fiendishly difficult to make successful. ever played the game Zoo Tycoon? It

sounds such a laugh being in charge of lions and tigers and polar bears, but you spend most of your time trying to get a concession stand to turn a profit and repairing fences.

Running a minor football club is like that.

in the sales pitch, as well as promising that subscribers will ‘ make signings… negotiate contracts… hire and fire staff’, OWNa Fc also pledges ‘select the suppliers… set admission prices… manage your staff’.

That sounds like a job; a routine, normal job. This is hednesford Town or equivalent, remember. Your staff isn’t going to be Jose Mourinho.

it’s the bloke who runs the bar at the social club, part-time; it’s the catering contractor.

and how much leeway for brilliant entrepreneurial spirit is there in setting admission prices in conjunction with 3,500 others?

There will be a price at which the place goes skint, a price at which no one turns up, and hednesford will be charging somewhere in the middle already. What are you going to do, Roman abramovich, alter that by 25p?

and let’s say you are a visionary, with bold, brilliant concepts capable of transforming nonLeague football for ever. do your 3,499 fellow members share, or understand, your ideas? The best could go the way of the firm that bakes the pies.

‘You can air concerns and come back to the advisory group,’ harvey explains. ‘it’s discussed and then it goes out to the owners once there has been a rational discussion.’

it all sounds very sensible — which is precisely why the members of MyFootballclub lost interest.

at its peak, MyFootballclub had eight times as many subscriptions as OWNa Fc has now, but by the time Ebbsfleet was sold on the cheap as oblivion loomed in 2013, that number had dwindled to little more than a thousand.

What went wrong? Reality bit. Once you can’t press a button to hook the right back after 15 minutes, running a non-League football club is as far removed from amusement as it is possible to get.

hiring and firing and signing players sounds compelling until it sets in that those you are trading are complete unknowns.

HEdNESFORd are a Northern Premier League club. The average football fan doesn’t even know the teams in the Northern Premier League, let alone the players.

You’ve been offered the left winger at Mickleover Sports. is he better than his equivalent at Marine or Basford United? Who knows? Who cares?

The 350 regulars at hednesford might have a clue — but they’ve been disenfranchised.

it’s the 3,500 others who get their say, the ones who have paid £ 49 imagining Championship

Manager, but for real. Yet instead of trading household names in deals worth millions, they are paying football’s equivalent of loose change for a player who, for all they know, put that new spare on the Mondeo at Kwik-Fit last Tuesday. Not only are these not stars, they’re not even professionals.

The deals will have to be voted for on the back of faceless statistics, because experience and genuine knowledge will be in perilously short supply.

a simple answer would be to go with the preference of the manager but, again, where’s the drama?

‘Make every decision,’ OWNa Fc promise.

Where’s the buzz if the members leave judgment calls to manager Nicky Eaden on the basis he might actually know stuff?

any old ownership model can do that.

When the demise of the hednesford deal became apparent, two members of OWNa Fc posted their disappointment on the club’s fans’ forum.

One even intimated he might have attended Keys Park on occasions had the takeover gone through. Yet there was obvious distance.

There wasn’t the strength of feeling that radiated from other posters, those for whom hednesford Town wasn’t just some new kind of diversionary kick.

Still, this isn’t going away. ‘Potential takeover talks with two more clubs today who love the OWNa concept,’ it was later announced.

and in a week when the Football League were forced to make statements on the stewardship of coventry city, charlton athletic, Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, it is plain that current ownership models are far from perfect.

But this one? We’ve seen it before and we know how it ends. With buckets outside Ebbsfleet and with boredom beyond, because it really isn’t fun running a small, failing football club.

it’s a labour or love that cannot be bought for £49 through an app; well, not one that Stuart harvey is pitching, anyway.