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FC United was created in 2005 in the direct response to the Glazer family
taking over at Old Trafford. Many of us have been campaigning for greater fan involvement,
not just at Manchester United but also in the wider game of football, and have been
responsible for setting up different networks of football fans coming together, fans notoriously,
rivals off the field who can come together and also try and achieve change within the
game and get the fans to have a greater say. Anybody who knows anything about football
will know that football isn't exactly in the greatest of financial health, that there are
clubs going bump all the time despite the amount of money that's in the game. Over 3
billion pounds a year generated within the game, and most of that concentrated within the top
division, yet we have football clubs going bump regularly. Out of the 92 professional
clubs there's been in excess of 50 insolvency events in football since the establishment
of Premier League in the early nineties. That's not a successful rate to run football. So
as a group of supporters, we wanted to see an alternative, and we felt that for far too
long, fans as the customers of the game have just been largely ignored and marginalised
and exploited. Every single season we see increasing prices of getting into the game
and merchandise etc, and the fans themselves are just treated in quite a despicable way
by most of the football clubs because they see that their ultimate loyalty is something
to exploit, not something to actually bring in and use effectively with developing the
club. In 2005 when we decided we were going to take action against the Glazers and withdraw
our custom if you like, rather than withdrawing our support for the club, we looked around
as to how we might establish a different kind of model. There are a lot of successful fan
owned football models, not just in this country but also on the continent, in particular Barcelona,
current European champions, are a fan-owned football club. Completely different model
to ourselves. In Germany, you can't actually be registered as a football league club in
Germany unless you have fan-ownership as part of your constitution, the clubs must be at
least 50% owned by the supporters or by the community. So there's lots of different models
to draw on, and in this country we took our lead, really, from Supporters Direct, which
is a body established in the wake of the football task force to look at how fans could get more
involved with their football clubs. And in particular AFC Wimbledon and AFC Telford who
are two football clubs that were established on a fan ownership model, gave us great assistance
and talked to us about the different models that were available. We established ourselves
as an industrial and province society, which basically means we're a community benefit
co-op. The centre of our constitution is that we must be of community benefit, even before
any success on the field, we've got to demonstrate that we're of community benefit. Without success
on the field then we wouldn't be a very successful fan-owned football club so obviously there's
got to be a balance. But it's working very well, this year we've put on another thousand
members on what we had last year, we've now got over 3,500 members. Our community work
has grown year on year, to this year we've got a turnover just on our community work,
of close on a quarter million pounds, which includes apprenticeship schemes for young
people, future jobs funds, a scheme that we've been operating, as well as what you would
expect in terms of coaching schemes and other community activities in many of the deprived
estates in parts of Manchester. Giving young people opportunities, but also trying to use
football as a way of engaging with many young people who have otherwise become disengaged
from, not just from education or from work, but also some of them actually completely
disengaged from any adult role models and disengaged from their own families. Football
is not a panacea, but it is a way of engaging with people and then being able to deliver
other educational and lifestyle messages, and we do that not just with young people
but also with older people as well, getting adults active, physically active, and leading
to healthier lifestyles. And one project we've just recently been involved in in Newton Heath
and Miles Platting was dealing with isolation largely amongst people of pensioner age, people
over 60. Mostly men who were becoming isolated in their own homes, and we use football as
a way of engaging with those people with led to them becoming more re-engaged within their
own community, but also bringing them to one of our games and hopefully they enjoy the
experience. Our community work is a large part of what we do, but as I said at the beginning,
football is very important. We're doing this because we're football fans, we're doing this
because we believe the game of football should be better governed, and in a week when we've
seen the multi-million pound accusations of fraud and corruption within FIFA and the higher
levels of the game, then really it couldn't be a sharper contrast of talking about how
fans should have a greater say in the way that the game is run. We were told at the
beginning that we didn't know what we were doing, and that football could only exist
in its current model and current form, well six years on we've had the most successful
season on the field, we've had the most successful season in terms of our commitment and turnover
on the community side, we've got more members than we've ever had, we've got over a thousand
season ticket holders, we attract crowds in excess of two thousand, about a quarter of
our crowd to a third of our crowd is under the age of 18, we've got a large number of
women all ages coming to our games, completely different demographic profile than what you
would see in the professional game. The average age of somebody attending Old Trafford for
example, is in the excess of 50, so you have to be earning quite a bit of money to be able
to afford a ticket to go and watch a top price Premier League fixture. We've not abandoned
Manchester United, we're all still, well many of us are still passionate Manchester United
fans, we believe there should be a change in the way Manchester United operates. But
that isn't going to happen unless examples are shown about how things can go that way.
So we're part of that change, a very small part, small football club, passionate about
football, passionate about Manchester United, and believe there should be a different way
of running that football club and a different way of running football for the benefit not
just of the community around the club, but the benefit of the wider community. We've
demonstrated successfully what an economic impact we can have, not just by spend at the
gate, but also when we travel around as supporters visiting other clubs, we will take 500 to
1500 different people who are then putting money back into other clubs, putting money
into the local economies of the areas that we visit, generating in excess of a million
pounds a year, just on that match day operational activity alone. So football can be for the
benefit of the wider community, rather than just the small group of people who might own
one individual football club, we've done that as a community benefit co-op, and we're proud
to be a community benefit co-op, and it's something we're looking to take to other clubs
and get other clubs established in a similar form. Just recently in the last couple of
years we've assisted clubs such as Scarborough Athletic, Chester, we've been involved in
discussions with football fans at Wrexham FC who are looking to take over their football
club, after they are suffering again under the insolvency events. So that's it, that's
FC United and Manchester. I've brought some material here. One thing I wanted to just
finish on is, we've been operating as nomads really, we share our ground at Gigg Lane in
Bury, we play our league games at Gigg Lane in Bury, and we're looking to establish our
own ground here in Manchester and we've had great help from Manchester City Council in
trying to do that, and we're currently looking at a site in North Manchester in Moston. To
build that ground is going to cost a considerable amount of money. We're targeting a budget
of three and a half million, two million of which we're raising ourselves. So not only
have our fans put money in to keep the club going for the last five or six years, but
we're also looking to raise two million, and we're almost there, we've raised something
like four hundred thousand pounds cash from donations. We've also developed an innovative
capital fundraising scheme with Co-ops UK called community shares, and we've issued
a prospectus with a target of raising one and a half million to go with a half a million
cash. So far we've raised 1.3 million of that, with further pledges of about one hundred
and twenty thousand pounds. To develop a community facility in North Manchester for the benefit
not just of FC United, of course we're going to play our games there, but we will cite
our community facilities and our community work there, but also that facility as a community
owned facility will be open to the wider community in that area, to use and gain the benefit of.