What a failed app tells us about fans, money and football: ‘The time has come for radical solutions’ – The Athletic

Martin Calladine was brutally beaten up on his own doorstep in suburban London in 2019 by Stuart Harvey.

Harvey had launched an app called OWNAFC, which was billed as a way for football fans to co-own and run a non-League football club, but turned out to be a complete disaster.

Calladine recently published Fit and Proper People: The Lies and Fall of OWNAFC with fellow journalist James Cave. The book tells the story of their joint pursuit of the app and its founder, which serves as a cautionary tale for wider issues of money in football.

“The fact that it was anywhere near successful shows that there’s a broad dissatisfaction about how the game itself is being run,” says Cave. “There’s a widespread feeling that something’s not right.”

The two men explain how the app got off the ground when it was the subject of an uncritical piece on the BBC website.

If you run a search for OWNAFC now, many of the top results are articles from around the time of launch and read almost like adverts, asking few of the critical questions to which Calladine and Cave managed to get answers.

The app was supposed to revolutionise the game and the concept of ownership in exchange for a £49.99 subscription, which would facilitate the buying and running of a club. But Harvey delivered little and the app ultimately collapsed, leaving subscribers out of pocket.

As the company crumbled, accounts began sending intimidating messages to Cave and Calladine on social media.

Then Harvey turned up on Calladine’s doorstep and beat him viciously. He pleaded guilty to assault by beating at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court in June 2019 and was given a six-month conditional discharge meaning he did not serve any jail time.

Calladine and Cave are both keen advocates of greater fan involvement in football, which make them both particularly exercised about an app that sold fans a pipe dream that went nowhere.

“There should be a radical redistribution of wealth (in football),” says Calladine. “There’s no reason to reward clubs financially for finishing above other clubs. Things can’t really continue as they are and the time has come for radical solutions.”

Both men support the fan-led review, a government-commissioned report produced by a panel chaired by former sports minister Tracey Crouch that recommends changes such as further redistributing of cash down the footballing pyramid, as well as a new independent regulator to oversee the sport in the UK.

While OWNAFC promised fan ownership in terms of minor club decisions being subject to a democratic vote, neither thinks this is a good thing. Cave has worked as a volunteer for clubs in the sixth tier of English football and has seen close-hand the levels of engagement, much of it very dull, required on a daily basis.

“You have to make so many inane, random decisions that you can’t put to a vote,” says Cave. “It’s trying to find this balance of giving people control while not. A football team makes quick decisions every day.”

All fans dream of glory but not all clubs can achieve it by definition of how the football pyramid works, with promotion and relegation each season.

Ambitions at the top of English football are becoming even more distant to smaller clubs now, as the very richest hoover up huge amounts of money from TV revenue and sponsors and pay players ever higher wages.

Achievements like Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest winning a league title and back-to-back European Cups four decades ago seem a distant memory.

“In a way, unglamorous as it sounds, sometimes keeping the club afloat is a fantastic achievement,” says Cave.

He cites the example of Portsmouth, where fans saved the club from the brink of liquidation in 2013, then four years later sold it to Michael Eisner, a former Disney CEO. AFC Wimbledon, where fans fought against a move to Milton Keynes by establishing a phoenix club, is another example.

But although the concept of fan ownership is lauded and praised for many very good reasons, if a club really wants to climb to the top these days, it is very difficult without a wealthy backer.

The gap between League One and the Championship is particularly significant because the second tier has teams who have just dropped down from the Premier League and still receive parachute payments — additional funding for the first three seasons after relegation from the top flight. Other clubs gamble on the dream of Premier League riches, meaning it is very hard for newcomers to compete.

One exciting example at the moment is Luton Town, a fan-owned club on a tiny budget that recently fell just short of promotion to the Premier League, losing in the play-off semi-finals. But if they were to get promoted, Luton would surely find it incredibly difficult to compete with those clubs that wanted to break off and form a Super League almost a year ago.

“Clubs of all sizes should have the chance to rise through the leagues,” says Calladine. “The reason they can’t is the terrible concentration of power and wealth.”

An argument the Premier League would make in response to this is that it is now clearly the best in the world in terms of quality and viewing figures, and making it more financially equitable could undermine that.

Calladine and Cave, though, believe that would be a worthy trade-off.

Reflecting on the OWNAFC saga, the two men are looking to the future, and the next batch of schemes that overpromise and under-deliver.

They cite Socios fan tokens, a company that has partnership deals with six Premier League clubs and numerous other big names in Europe. An investigation by The Athletic last year revealed how these “digital assets” give fans the right to vote on polls and enter competitions but simultaneously appear to be a vehicle for financial speculation using cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is the new frontier of football speculation, with Bradford City recently subject to an aborted takeover by an American crypto firm (which, again, punctured the mainstream after an uncritical piece in a mainstream publication).

Top clubs are taking vast sums of money in sponsorship from cryptocurrency firms, which appear to be taking the place of the gambling industry following widespread fan disapproval and expected new legislation. Several players have also seen a backlash after promoting NFTs (non-fungible tokens), digital assets that are widely associated with financial speculation.

Another fresh piece of jargon on the scene is “DAOs”. These are decentralised autonomous organisations, a complex new organisational structure with rules underpinned by blockchain technology, which some have proposed as a new prospective model of fan ownership. Calladine and Cave believe DAOs are a cynical scheme for self-enrichment.

To their advocates, these schemes are not just about money but can create new opportunities for fans, not all of which are apparent yet given the fast pace of technology. Several of the biggest clubs are excited about the “metaverse”, the virtual world that many in the technology industry will become increasingly important in the coming years.

In football, Calladine and Cave are sceptical as to whether these new developments will only increase the separation between fans and clubs, deepening the divide between the biggest clubs and the rest, and further “monetising” fans who have already been squeezed for years.

Further down the pyramid, clubs are desperate for investment from any quarter, as the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates the ever-increasing inflationary pressure on clubs wanting to compete.

This desperation for cash, combined with fans’ genuine wishes for deeper involvement, is fertile ground for some.

“The greatest friend of the scam artists are the Big Six,” says Calladine. “A small group of clubs with their feet on the throat of English football are making it completely impossible for everyone else.”

(Top photo: Craig Mercer/MB Media/Getty Images)