Football united (From The Northern Echo)

Football united

5:57pm Friday 3rd February 2012 in Leader By Andy Walker

With each passing day, the future of Darlington FC looks more and more as though it rests in the hands of its own supporters. Andy Walker spoke to those with first-hand experience of rebuilding a football club from the ground up.

JUST as there is more than one way to skin a black cat, or a white elephant, there is more than one way to re-model the ownership of a football club.

Get it right and you can unite the community, capture the imaginations of hardcore, lapsed and new supporters and have the whole town behind you. Get it wrong and you are back where you started – or worse.

That’s the crossroads Darlington FC finds itself at, with the announcement this week that a community group was being formed to take over the club.

So many variables affect the transfer of a football club from private ownership to community hands that it is hardly an exact science.

However, there are two main options that members of the Darlington Football Club Rescue Group – and other interested parties, not least the supporters – will be debating over the coming weeks, both at the inevitable slew of meetings and in the town’s pubs and clubs.

Either the community group takes over the club in its current guise, or Darlington FC as we know folds and a “phoenix club” is formed – financially unencumbered, but several rungs down the footballing ladder than its previous incarnation.

The latter path is one advocated by Ryan McKnight, editor of fcbusiness, a trade magazine for the football industry, who offered some tough love for Quakers fans understandably reluctant to see their team relegated.

He said: “Fan ownership is becoming a more popular model for owning a football club. The usual way they come into existence is on the back of of the club getting into financial trouble.

“What usually happens is that the business is liquidated and a trust-owned phoenix club is formed.”

Supporters have taken over existing business at Notts County and Stockport County in recent years – with what Mr McKnight described as “disastrous” results. Both clubs are now back in private ownership.

Mr McKnight added: “The debt transfers to whoever takes it on. The idea that everything will be okay because it is trust-based business is pure fantasy.

“A phoenix club would give Darlington a clean page, full supporter ownership and that, in my mind, is far more sensible than risk spending all the money that has been fundraised so far, and more, on debt.

“People get emotional about it and they stop thinking rationally, and I understand that.

“The utopia would be to keep the club going in its current guise, but there will not be the revenues to support it in the long-term.

“You cannot keep asking people to fundraise full-time.”

Tom Hall, head of planning and development for Supporters Direct, an independent organisation set up to help communities run their own sports clubs, spoke to The Northern Echo yesterday while en route to Darlington to meet members of the rescue group.

He said a decision on how to go to community ownership was “a judgement that needs to be made”, adding that the process of due diligence would be followed just as it would if the club was being taken over by a wealthy consortium.

THERE are dozens of clubs that currently have or have had some degree of supporter ownership – League One Exeter City, whose fans own 65 per cent of the club, being the highest-placed example.

Eastbourne Borough FC, of the Blue Square South, the level beneath Darlington, is one of the first examples of a community interest company.

Chairman Len Smith, whose involvement with the club stretches back more than four decades, said he hoped Quakers find a solution to their latest woes.

He explained: “Previously, we were just a bunch of blokes who met in the pub and ran a football team – a members’ club, really.

“We decided a community approach was the way forward, as it protects the club.

“Our model means we do not have a major share holder, so nobody can sweep in and start selling things off.”

With Quakers’ future likely to become more clear in the weeks ahead, the initial pain of demotion imposed on any phoenix club would surely be quickly eased if the team performed well on the pitch.

Mr McKnight said: “If the trust raised £500,000 and took it into a phoenix club, it would all but guarantee a quick return up the leagues. They would have a huge playing budget, comparatively speaking.

“The FA has taken a sympathetic stance in the past when deciding where in the football pyramid to place phoenix sides. They do not want unfair competition. I think Darlington could get away with, at worst, a relegation of three divisions.

“Couple that sound financial basis with the fact that, in all likelihood, the team would be winning games and winning promotions back up the ladder.

“There would be a build-up of momentum and all the negativity that surrounded the old club would be gone.”