SPORTS BUSINESS DAILY reports through the BBC that soccer fans have united and bought an actual English club by way of the World Wide Web.
Members of MyFootballClub.com approved the $1.24 million purchase of the Ebbsfleet United club in January, and the takeover was made financially official on Tuesday.
The 28,000 members of the website will also get to to vote on acquiring & trading players and “other decisions affecting the club” - all for a $68 membership fee.
It’s believed to be the first time an online community has been able to come together and purchase a pro sports team - or any other business, for that matter.
Isiah Thomas must be feeling pretty lucky that Knicks fans don’t have such an opportunity.
11:11 pm on February 19th, 2008
I really think that this experiment merits attention over a period of time. We usually think of front office operations for sports teams as positions given to people based on their experience in the industry, and not necessarily as a reflection on their actual talent for the job. That is to say, when fans have clear hindsight on their side, GMs and VPFOs come across as a wide range between competitive genius and utter moron.
If sports success is as unpredictable as market trends, this is the expected outcome. Mutual fund managers get paid big bucks on the 20% chance that they’ll outperform the major stock indexes (before even taking into account the money they shave off the profit), and we couldn’t expect team execs to be any better… could we?
Really, this should put to task the idea that the “wisdom of crowds” will encourage consistently good decisions — not necessarly optimal, but not craniorectally inverted either — due to the expectation that good ideas are popular ideas among smart/educated fans. I’m almost interested enough to buy a share for myself, though I’d probably need a proxy voter because I don’t follow the English minors and therefore wouldn’t be an informed contributor.