Overview
Community-owned sports teams share manage- ment responsibilities, ownership, and profit with a team’s stakeholding supporters.
To maintain supporter ownership of a successful, financially stable, professional football club playing at the heart of our communities.
— Vision of Dons Trust, organization owning AFC Wimbledon Football club
Around the world, a combination of mismanagement, lack of regulations, and inequitable wealth distribution has driven sports fans to feel increasingly disconnected from the affairs of their favorite teams. In the UK and elsewhere, football clubs and other sports teams have largely transitioned out of local ownership and into the hands of corporate owners with no real connection to the area and few interests beyond turning a profit. These enterprising, wealth-seeking owners or ownership groups buy a team for its business potential, only to sell it off a few years later at a higher price. As clubs have suffered financial losses under this model, their local supporters feel that this practice is unsustainable and that it diverges from the true interests of the fans. In response, supporters around the world have led efforts to collectively buy back their teams.
Community ownership allows teams to be managed by the people who are most invested in their success. Typically, community ownership structures include both a large membership and an elected governing board. Elections take place regularly to keep the board accountable; each member gets one vote, no matter how much money they’ve invested. In some clubs, board members may appoint a non-elected general member to the primary governing body to fill gaps in the skill set. For example, in a board of older supporters, it might be necessary to bring on a younger person to do youth outreach.
Membership fees and costs involved in becoming an owner of a team are kept low to encourage a broad and inclusive membership. The UK football club AFC Wimbledon, for instance, is majority-owned by a supporters’ trust with approximately 3,000 members. All members can access a website where they can share questions and opinions with other community members and the board. The club reinvests all revenue into itself according to an agreed-on code of ethics.
One frequent criticism of supporters’ trusts is that members equate their team’s success with the fulfillment of their own narrow financial self-interest. But in fact, the individual is not the center of a community-owned club model. Rather, many of these trusts are registered as community benefit (CB) societies, requiring them to prove that they primarily serve community interests, not those of their members. In the UK, an officially designated CB can pay a small dividend to its individual members, but it is usually no more than 2 percent above the interest rate.
Any existing assets are protected by an asset-lock clause, which prevents members from voting to privatize the organization or to distribute wealth outside of it.
In Germany, community-owned club regulation is different. All football clubs are majority-owned by their fans, following a 50+1 model, which stops wealthy corporations and individuals from controlling the teams. Greater regulation prevents clubs from filing for bankruptcy, and a strict licensing system weeds out clubs that are not properly tracking their finances. Similar supporters’ trusts have been implemented in Spain, too.
In the United States, there is a single community-owned American football team: the Green Bay Packers. When the team faced financial difficulties in the 1920s and 1930s, it sold stock to the community to keep itself from going bankrupt. That model persists today, and the team is a publicly owned nonprofit corporation with over 360,000 individual shareholders. Shareholders have voting rights and can participate in annual owner meetings, but their stock cannot appreciate in value and there are no season ticket privileges.
Community-owned teams can struggle with marketing and expanding their fan bases, as well as attracting funding. Another challenge is attracting volunteers on match days—but people are more likely to volunteer for a club that they have a stake in than one that is privately owned. This is just one advantage that this model affords in comparison to private ownership. Having a collective of people who are invested in the club long-term allows it to build better relationships with local partners and ensures greater moral and financial accountability in club governance. Successful supporters’ trusts have core governing policies, delegated authority, business knowledge, and fans who elevate the interests of the collective above those of the individual.
Community-owned sports teams, in contrast to their privately-owned and profit-driven counterparts, contribute to people-powered economies.