Liverpool Football Club was once the very model of how a club should be run. It was fierce, secretive and pure - like a cross between the KGB and a nunnery - generous with its friends, implacable with its opponents. It delivered winning teams with a minimum of fuss, and its driving ambition forced it on to become (as it remains) the most successful club in the history of English football.
Now it looks more like an episode of Coronation Street. Those within the club bicker openly like garrulous fishwives on a pavement. With ownership split between two Americans who, we understand, no longer speak to each other except through lawyers, the plot is acted out in a kind of schizoid fantasy land.
All this in the few days following another epic European Championship victory at Anfield, as Liverpool defeated Arsenal to qualify for the semi-final of the most prestigious club competition in the world.
Clubs like Liverpool - and there are many others - feel like family to those who love and support them. The biggest may have 'international brands', which accounts for their attraction to multinational investors; but at heart the 'brand' is their fans and the history of their club. It can never really belong to anyone else.
It was that fundamental recognition of where true ownership lies that drove me to launch the Share Liverpool FC project. It struck me that the 'social sporting' club ownership model, made famous by clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid, would be eminently appropriate for a club like LFC.
Why not encourage the fans to buy the club? It has a huge fan base, sustained by one of the most intense relationships in the game. You only had to witness what happened at Anfield last Tuesday night to realise that this is a truly 'special relationship' between team and crowd. Why not at least ask the question: 'Is anyone out there interested?'
I asked friends at a design company called NavyBlue to put a website together quickly and held a press conference to announce the scheme. The sheer number of hits crashed the shareliverpoolfc.com website in seven minutes, at a thousand hits per second. It became clear very quickly that there is a huge appetite out there for this idea.
It's fairly simple in structure. Become a member/single shareholder of Share Liverpool FC with the purchase of a one-off £5,000 share. We'll all put our money together and buy the club. We probably need around 100,000 members out of the estimated 20 million Liverpool fans at home and abroad. Within a month, over 20,000 fans indicated their enthusiasm for the project. Our aim is to take over the club and elect an executive board to run it for a four-year term.
If they're no good, you vote them out next time. There will also be a 'fan parliament' of 100 representatives, also elected by the members, which will act as a sounding board for the executive - just as a similar assembly does at Barcelona. Then we can get on with running a successful football club with a real 'community' commitment. The fee for this column has gone to the Marie Curie Hospice in Woolton, Liverpool.
Now it looks more like an episode of Coronation Street. Those within the club bicker openly like garrulous fishwives on a pavement. With ownership split between two Americans who, we understand, no longer speak to each other except through lawyers, the plot is acted out in a kind of schizoid fantasy land.
All this in the few days following another epic European Championship victory at Anfield, as Liverpool defeated Arsenal to qualify for the semi-final of the most prestigious club competition in the world.
Clubs like Liverpool - and there are many others - feel like family to those who love and support them. The biggest may have 'international brands', which accounts for their attraction to multinational investors; but at heart the 'brand' is their fans and the history of their club. It can never really belong to anyone else.
It was that fundamental recognition of where true ownership lies that drove me to launch the Share Liverpool FC project. It struck me that the 'social sporting' club ownership model, made famous by clubs like Barcelona and Real Madrid, would be eminently appropriate for a club like LFC.
Why not encourage the fans to buy the club? It has a huge fan base, sustained by one of the most intense relationships in the game. You only had to witness what happened at Anfield last Tuesday night to realise that this is a truly 'special relationship' between team and crowd. Why not at least ask the question: 'Is anyone out there interested?'
I asked friends at a design company called NavyBlue to put a website together quickly and held a press conference to announce the scheme. The sheer number of hits crashed the shareliverpoolfc.com website in seven minutes, at a thousand hits per second. It became clear very quickly that there is a huge appetite out there for this idea.
It's fairly simple in structure. Become a member/single shareholder of Share Liverpool FC with the purchase of a one-off £5,000 share. We'll all put our money together and buy the club. We probably need around 100,000 members out of the estimated 20 million Liverpool fans at home and abroad. Within a month, over 20,000 fans indicated their enthusiasm for the project. Our aim is to take over the club and elect an executive board to run it for a four-year term.
If they're no good, you vote them out next time. There will also be a 'fan parliament' of 100 representatives, also elected by the members, which will act as a sounding board for the executive - just as a similar assembly does at Barcelona. Then we can get on with running a successful football club with a real 'community' commitment. The fee for this column has gone to the Marie Curie Hospice in Woolton, Liverpool.
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