Davy Jones Consultancy

Why football

I know football is not everyones cup of tea, but it is the most popular sport in Europe - literally millions of people follow it in detail every week. For my sins too, I admit I have been an Arsenal supporter for fifty years.

Last week, another major English football club, Manchester City, was bought up by a billionaires consortium (Abu Dhabi United Group). Immediately they smashed the English transfer record on a star player and threatened to buy the two best players in the English Premiership, saying that money was not an issue.

Previously, Chelsea had been top of every football supporters hate list for having bottomless pits of money from a dodgy Russian billionaire (Roman Abramovich), earning their Chelski nickname. Suddenly, almost all the top English clubs are owned by billionaires, each trying to outdo the others in spending vast amounts of money on players.

What has this got to do with community involvement

Well, quite a lot actually. Because as football increasingly symbolises the obscenity of monopoly capitalism gone mad, there is another trend developing. Football supporters are increasingly demanding to have some say over the clubs they support.

Barcelona is a top international football club. Unlike most of them though, it is part of a growing band of clubs that are owned by their fans - 150,000 club members/owners in the case of Barcelona. While the shirts of other top clubs around the world advertise multinational corporations, Barcelona chose in 2006 to advertise UNICEF for five years. Recently, premiership club Aston Villa decided to forego big name sponsors and now proudly advertises a local childrens hospice (Acorns) on its shirts.

And even more radically, Kent-based team Ebbsfleet in the Football Conference has been owned since February this year by the web-based venture MyFootballClub, whose 30,000 members vote on team selection and player transfers, instead of those decisions being made exclusively by the club's management and staff.

And my point is

The idea that people should not be dictated to on things that matter to them by the unbelievably wealthy, powerful, unaccountable and often corrupt is gaining ground in the most unlikely places. And a good thing too. The fact that Arsenal remains the only one of the big English clubs not to succumb to the billionaire takeover is a source of some comfort to me too.