MyFC.co.uk – The New Hampsterdance?

Things aren’t looking good at Ebbsfleet United, the MyFootballClub.co.uk team. In case you’ve forgotten, this is where members paid £35 to be part of the online community that owns the team and votes on key decisions.

MyFC bought the club in February of last year for £635,000, and membership eventually rose to around 32,000. But 12 months later, there’s a lack of enthusiasm for membership renewal.

Which shouldn’t really be a huge surprise, because MyFC.co.uk was basically an online fad.

It’s not that things have gone badly. Ebbsfleet delivered silverware to it’s members last season by winning the FA Trophy. Not a bad return for £35.

But voter turn out – a pretty accurate measure of interest – is down, down, down. A recent vote over whether to allow manager Liam Daish to continue to pick the team or to have members pick the first XI via online voting (a pretty major decision) drew just 492 voters. Daish retained control of the team by just 265 votes to 227, which means that – as SoccerLens point out in their very detailed post – just 0.8% of the 32,000 members decided the issue.

So what we could be looking at here is a failed experiment in online community ownership of a football team. All the attention MyFC.co.uk received in late 2007/early 2008 made it basically a fad, attracting members interested in the latest internet phenomenon as opposed to running a successful football team.

And we all know internet fads don’t last forever. Remember Hampsterdance? I’m ashamed (or is that proud?) to say I don’t, but apparently it was huge.

Thus will be the fate of MyFC.co.uk., at least in its phenomenon form. And maybe that’s a good thing. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible idea, but if it survives at all then it should survive the way most football teams survive: Through committed supporters with a long-term interest in the club, not through media hype and owners with a passing curiosity and a spare £35.

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Category: World Football