When tough calls have to made, ideals may ebb away

Nov 15 2007 by Our Correspondent, Liverpool Daily Post

ARE Ebbsfleet FC on the information superhighway to success or the rocky road to ruin?

The purchase of 51% of the Blue Square Premier side by 20,000 football fans via website MyFootballClub is certainly innovative.

And author James Surowiecki would be a fan of the scheme.

His book, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few’, argued persuasively that a large group of people pooling their knowledge without influencing others will make a better decision more often than an individual or a committee.

As 20,000 people can never get together for a board meeting, their views are going to have to be collated through online polls.

But while Surowiecki’s hypothesis can work when guessing how many marbles are in a jar or the weight of a cow, running a sports club is a far more subjective job.

And the 20,000 chairmen will not be a diverse enough bunch to bring radically different views.

After all, they are all football fans who are happy to pay £35 to own 0.0026% of a non-league club.

And they will all be fans who yearn for the days when fans where involved in making important decisions.

It matters not, of course, that such a time never existed.

The attraction of the Corinthian ideal is strong, although it won’t last.

Very quickly they will realise that it is the winning and not the taking part that counts.

And that’s when the difficult decisions must be made.

Such decisions aren’t about whether the team play 4-4-2 or 4-5-1 – and team selection at Ebbsfleet will now have the input of the 20,000 chairmen.

The difficult decisions are the unpopular ones, like deciding whether to spend money on a striker, on improving the ground, or paying for new stock for the club shop. Which is made even harder if you haven’t scored for four games or won in seven.

Already the move, which was announced on Tuesday, has created problems, as the website has crashed under the weight of the traffic.

A new server is now required, which will cost the club money.

Of course, the biggest problem Ebbsfleet could face is if all 20,000 chairmen decide to come to a home game.

Not only will there not be enough sandwiches in the boardroom, but there won’t be enough room in the ground – their stadium only holds 5,011 people.