Fan Ownership

Apologies for the incoming essay, but here goes.

The reality is that no ownership model, either fan owned or privately owned, guarantees success or failure. For the rose tinted who think that everything would be hunky dory with a Trust run club, you don’t know. For those who say we would be guaranteed to go down to the Conference, you don’t know.

So here’s a bit more context around this whole issue.

At the NTFC Trust AGM last year, James Mathie from Supporters’ Direct, and Don Woodward - the former Wycombe chairman who oversaw the transition to fan ownership at Adams Park - attended the meeting.

James Mathie quoted a Deloitte report that the average loss in League Two in 2015/16 was £500k before player trading. In League One that jumped up to £1.6m. He also mentioned a BDO report that focussed on how reliant clubs are on their owners to fund losses. The most recent stats show that a third of clubs in Leagues One and Two were totally reliant on their owners to make up for losses.

This, James Mathie said, leads to short termism. Although in a fan owned model you obviously don’t get the level of short term cash injection you would with a private owner chasing success, there’s a long term strategy in place for incremental growth.

Wrexham fans took over their club eight years ago and since then they have grown the turnover each year without relying on player sales and posted a profit this year.

A community share is a popular method that was used by Portsmouth. They raised £2.5m from it, and this is a mechanism that the Trust here in Northampton could look at. Admittedly, the Trust at Pompey felt they had taken the club as far as they could and sold onto private owners. How it works out I guess we’ll see, but they’re doing well this year.

Don Woodward then spoke about his time at Wycombe. He said they had one owner who was supporting two sides (Wycombe and Wasps) at the same time. Don said that Wanderers were losing £1.5m - £2m per year.

The Trust at Wycombe stepped up from being a critical friend to running the club. It would have been easier had they prepared for such an eventuality years before, which is what NTFC Trust is currently doing. But they avoided relegation to the Conference, and have subsequently had a promotion to League One.

Don estimated that NTFC Trust would need to raise £1-2m over the next two years to run the club on a break even level. It sounds incredibly difficult, but if everyone gets behind a goal it’s achievable he thinks.

Portsmouth had ten local business owners getting involved. Don is very confident that local businesses in Northampton will get on board if it’s a community ownership model - he reckons they could contribute as much as £100k each.

Of course, there are examples too of when fan ownership hasn’t gone so well. Notts County supporters for example sold the club to Munto Finance without any due diligence on their new owners, and things didn’t go as planned there.

So we have some success stories, and we have some failures as well.

Another important thing to remember is that the current Trust board would not be running the show. They would bring in professionals to run the football club. No supporters owned club is run by the people who used to run the car boot sales or make the coffees on matchdays.

We would also be able to call on the help of Supporters Direct, which was formed by Brian Lomax and knows what to do in ensuring that Trusts can take on the running of a football club.

So my summary from all this information is that I guess in the end it comes down to what you would prefer. Do you prefer a privately run club with the potential for greater success but much higher risks, or the club that tries to make gradual changes, albeit still with some risk attached to it but with those risks being balanced against the best interests of the club rather than the best interests of a private owner?

I can understand why some people would choose the former, we all want to see the Cobblers challenging at the highest level. But the caveat to that is that more than 50 years of private ownership has secured NTFC the grand sum of two seasons in the second tier of the football league, and a solitary season in the first. Compare that to the three times we’ve nearly gone out of business altogether. That too should be taken into consideration.

Also, is making the Championship a fair yardstick to measure a fan owned club against given the facts I’ve just mentioned and club’s history of bouncing between Leagues One and Two? How about measuring it against whether we could ever become a stable League One club that competes to go up to the second tier? Is that not an achievable goal which we could aspire to, and then hopefully build on if the club grows?

Meanwhile, Exeter, Newport County, AFC Wimbledon and Wycombe, all Trust run, are all currently above us in the Football League pyramid and with none of them staring at to the trapdoor to the Conference.

So yes, let’s have a debate. There are pros and cons on both sides, and none of us actually know how it would work out.

So come along to that public meeting when it’s held, absorb some actual facts and be open to the idea of hearing both sides of the argument.

UTC.