Supporter Buyout

[CarewsEyebrowDesigner]

Instead of a supporter buyout you could sell it as a community investment, i.e. not only the fans but the businesses of Brum buy up shares and in return the club invests in the region with a percentage of the profits raised during the year.

 

The only way I can see the money needed being raised is with some corporate backing, not just supporters. Even then it would only be enough for a one time purchase, the money needed to sustain the club will require what would essentially be a tax, unless the club cuts its cloth accordingly and lives within its means, which would mean relegation, less profits and a lot of angry shareholders!

 

I don't see it happening.

Edited January 23, 2013 by CarewsEyebrowDesigner

[lexicon]

Wouldn't happen and would be a terrible idea.

[cheltenham_villa]

How would it be better. Lerner wants the club to support himself, were all screaming for him to invest. How could we possibly generate the funds required for year on year investment. Villa talk is also testemant to the fact that fans don't agree on anything.

[MikeMcKenna]

Undoubtedly it would be nigh on impossible now for the fans to take over the club given Lerners investment. But even during Ellis's time when the money involved was still huge but a lot less, the real problem was the negative attitude of the "can't do's" amongst us. But some dream of making the impossible happen.

In today's age there are many ways that capital/funds could be raised but given the negativity whenever this issue is raised, few fans who could lead such an attempt would stick their head above the parapet. Should any premier league club's fans manage to pull it off they would be an advertisers dream and could generate massive support. Who knows maybe even Randy Lerner, would want to help history happen and leave a legacy?

I believe millions of football fans would love to help a club break the stranglehold that foreign billionaires have on the English game. But hey, I am just an old romantic and can already hear the cynics spewing at the mouth as they start hammering out their

negative responses.

[ChrisVillan]

Two major stumbling blocks in my opinion, both have been mentioned. I think the numbers are far too big, and we'd all have to accept that in exchange for ownership we'd likely have to drop down a few divisions. (Or decide who to sell it on to...)

Having said that, I'd be broadly in favour.

[MikeMcKenna]

Two major stumbling blocks in my opinion, both have been mentioned. I think the numbers are far too big, and we'd all have to accept that in exchange for ownership we'd likely have to drop down a few divisions. (Or decide who to sell it on to...)

Having said that, I'd be broadly in favour.

Chris, Bear with me if you will in a flight of fancy;

Despite the towards anger towards our owner at the moment, I am sure there are still many who would accept that we believed he was "different" and valued the club as much for history as it's future potential. An interview with www.clevescene.com In February 2012, albeit in the context of Cleveland Browns gives us some idea of how he viewed his ownership of sports clubs.

I quote:

"He recently passed among his front-office staff an article from Business Week called "The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football." The piece chronicles the wild and sustained success of the only team in the NFL owned by the city in which it plays. It's an arrangement now forbidden by league rules. But that idea of public ownership — the team as city property, a civic institution never to be taken away — sticks with Lerner. "I think it should belong to the city," he says in a hypothetical reverie.

In 1899, England's Football Association created a rule, later to be known as Rule 34, that restricted the profits of member clubs. Shareholders could take only a 5 percent dividend, and directors were not allowed to be paid. The idea was to legislate the protection of clubs as nonprofits, to ensure they were not run out of greed. Directors, history notes, should be "custodians" — that word sound familiar? — and running the team was a public service, all in pursuit of keeping the heart and soul of the sport pure and ticket prices affordable.

Lerner likes to talk about Rule 34, which obviously isn't in effect any longer. He gave a speech on the arcane, now almost-unthinkable idea at Clare College in Cambridge, where he studied for a year before graduating from Columbia.

"It really just gets to the heart of the idea of ownership," Lerner says while miming like he's twisting a screw. He often talks with his hands — pointing, gesticulating, demonstrating. "What does it mean to own one of these teams? Are they just playthings? Toys for the super rich? Are they public service? Civic institutions?" "

It maybe bullshit, but I don't think so - Lerner thinks differently. Therefore what IF it was possible to persuade Lerner over a number of years to allow the fans to take over the club - obviously he would want his investment back but could it be done with Lerner?

Before the naysayers dive in, I am not talking about an Ebbsfleet or other type of co-operative, but something more along the lines of Bayern Munich or even Barcelona whereby the key people are elected by the fans for a period of years.

As I said it's a flight of fancy!!

[ChrisVillan]

Nice, Mike. We can dream.

 

IF Lerner could be persuaded to work with rather than against something like this it would obviously have a better chance of succeeding. Who knows, maybe he could even retain a stake in some sort of hybrid model along the lines of what Brentford had (and maybe still do) after their supporters welcomed on board a benefactor after their own takeover. Another flight of fancy, but it is what it is. I've little faith that Lerner would write off debt or welcome supporter power or ownership in any way. Seems like a 100% or nothing kind of owner to me.

 

Funnily enough, I'd settle for a 25% stake and a couple of fans on a reconstituted board. Well, it's a start.

[Woodytom]

No need to get snarky, Woodytom. I fully understand how the chips stack on this issue, but it could be interesting talking about it without being insulting.

 

 

Insulting? 

 

I think its quite insulting and naive to even think that people have got that kind of cash. Id be amazed if 5% of the crowd has that kind of money just lying around. If you have, fair play and good luck to you, but your in an extreme minority imo. So on that note, I think its a ridiculous idea.

 

In addition, lets say you get all of yesterdays supporters to buy it. Wheres the money for further investment in players/wages coming from. Ticket sales? Who in the right mind pays to get in to a gaff that they own? 

 

As I said, ridiculous.

[MikeMcKenna]

Insulting? 

 

I think its quite insulting and naive to even think that people have got that kind of cash. Id be amazed if 5% of the crowd has that kind of money just lying around. If you have, fair play and good luck to you, but your in an extreme minority imo. So on that note, I think its a ridiculous idea.

 

In addition, lets say you get all of yesterdays supporters to buy it. Wheres the money for further investment in players/wages coming from. Ticket sales? Who in the right mind pays to get in to a gaff that they own? 

 

As I said, ridiculous.

The club that has just beaten one of the richest clubs in the world to reach the League Cup Final and who are 8 places above us in the Premier League are 20% owned by their supporters. http://www.swanstrust.co.uk/

[Harry]

Chris, Bear with me if you will in a flight of fancy;

Despite the towards anger towards our owner at the moment, I am sure there are still many who would accept that we believed he was "different" and valued the club as much for history as it's future potential. An interview with www.clevescene.com In February 2012, albeit in the context of Cleveland Browns gives us some idea of how he viewed his ownership of sports clubs.

I quote:

"He recently passed among his front-office staff an article from Business Week called "The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football." The piece chronicles the wild and sustained success of the only team in the NFL owned by the city in which it plays. It's an arrangement now forbidden by league rules. But that idea of public ownership — the team as city property, a civic institution never to be taken away — sticks with Lerner. "I think it should belong to the city," he says in a hypothetical reverie.

In 1899, England's Football Association created a rule, later to be known as Rule 34, that restricted the profits of member clubs. Shareholders could take only a 5 percent dividend, and directors were not allowed to be paid. The idea was to legislate the protection of clubs as nonprofits, to ensure they were not run out of greed. Directors, history notes, should be "custodians" — that word sound familiar? — and running the team was a public service, all in pursuit of keeping the heart and soul of the sport pure and ticket prices affordable.

Lerner likes to talk about Rule 34, which obviously isn't in effect any longer. He gave a speech on the arcane, now almost-unthinkable idea at Clare College in Cambridge, where he studied for a year before graduating from Columbia.

"It really just gets to the heart of the idea of ownership," Lerner says while miming like he's twisting a screw. He often talks with his hands — pointing, gesticulating, demonstrating. "What does it mean to own one of these teams? Are they just playthings? Toys for the super rich? Are they public service? Civic institutions?" "

It maybe bullshit, but I don't think so - Lerner thinks differently. Therefore what IF it was possible to persuade Lerner over a number of years to allow the fans to take over the club - obviously he would want his investment back but could it be done with Lerner?

Before the naysayers dive in, I am not talking about an Ebbsfleet or other type of co-operative, but something more along the lines of Bayern Munich or even Barcelona whereby the key people are elected by the fans for a period of years.

As I said it's a flight of fancy!!

Barcelona and alike are members sporting clubs, just on a massively larger scale, I should know I'm a member at Barcelona. It works for them on a number of levels; they negotiate their own TV deals, they have a worldwide membership and the club does not just play football. Added to the its utterly ingrained into the Catalonians.

 

I'm not saying we can't do that at Villa but it would take years and we would still need the raise the cash to buy RL out. He might be persuaded to leave some debt in the club which could be refinanced at a later date which would reduce the initial outlay.

 

But, and its a huge but. the club would have to have a good positive cash-flow. I'm no apologist for RL, I think he has a piss poor job, but that is what he is trying to do at the moment and the fans hate it. We either increase income or reduce costs or both.

 

I'm happy to try and help (I have got some experience to bring to the party) if we were serious but I do think its next to impossible to achieve. The biggest problem of the last few years has not been the lack of funds in total but far more the mismanagement of the club from day one under RL.

Edited January 23, 2013 by Harry

[MikeMcKenna]

Barcelona and alike are members sporting clubs, just on a massively larger scale, I should know I'm a member at Barcelona. It works for them on a number of levels; they negotiate their own TV deals, they have a worldwide membership and the club does not just play football. Added to the its utterly ingrained into the Catalonians.

I'm not saying we can't do that at Villa but it would take years and we would still need the raise the cash to buy RL out. He might be persuaded to leave some debt in the club which could be refinanced at a later date which would reduce the initial outlay.

But, and its a huge but. the club would have to have a good positive cash-flow. I'm no apologist for RL, I think he has a piss poor job, but that is what he is trying to do at the moment and the fans hate it. We either increase income or reduce costs or both.

I'm happy to try and help (I have got some experience to bring to the party) if we were serious but I do think its next to impossible to achieve. The biggest problem of the last few years has not been the lack of funds in total but far more the mismanagement of the club from day one under RL.

Harry I do not dispute that it would be a massive challenge and in fairness I am simply continuing the debate and challenging the absolute notion that it cannot be done. There really isn't an existing model that could be copied but there are some clever people out there who may have ideas. Even IF Randy Lerner would entertain a long term plan it would obviously still take years to come to fruition. Unlike the very small clubs, AVFC has a truly massive following - maybe not so much on match by match basis but there are hundreds of thousands out there who follow us in some way. Who knows?

As they say from little acorns......

Edited January 23, 2013 by MikeMcKenna

[leviramsey]

Wait until we are a Championship Club and see theclubs value tumble. However, the only way fan ownerships really work is if we adopt the model used in places like Germany.

The market value is irrelevant until Lerner either decides he's tired of Villa and wants to sell or gets to the point where the club has bled him dry (dry meaning probably something like $10m... any lower and Lerner might have to work at some point in the future).

We could be a non-league club, but not making excessive demands on Lerner's wallet and as long as there's some hazy distant hope of getting 150m, I don't see him selling.

[DelboyVilla]

Let's wait till May then it doesn't matter what Lerner has invested the club will be worth half it's current value when we are in the Championship!!!

[maqroll]

I think its quite insulting and naive to even think that people have got that kind of cash. Id be amazed if 5% of the crowd has that kind of money just lying around.

 

How much is the average cost of one season ticket at Villa Park? Do you think 5% of a full stadium are season ticket holders? I think it's naive to think that some people don't have that kind of cash when they clearly do. 

[leviramsey]

In addition, lets say you get all of yesterdays supporters to buy it. Wheres the money for further investment in players/wages coming from. Ticket sales? Who in the right mind pays to get in to a gaff that they own?

I suppose that's the real question. To everyone who's willing to put money in for a supporters' buyout, are you willing to:

* substantially raise ticket prices at VP (call it double for the sake of argument)?

* accept a club that's happy with a top half finish every few years (maybe one year in five)? [the likely scenario is that we buy a whole lot of lower league/foreign prospects on the cheap for low wages, hope they can get us top half and watch helplessly as other clubs buy them off us to start the process again... so the question then becomes whether, if you had a vote a few years back, would you have voted to sell Barry? Milner? Young? Downing? with the knowledge that the replacement would likely be a youth team player or somebody bought in from a far less prominent league (either a lower domestic league or a foreign league)?]

Sound familiar?

[P3te]

If you managed to get 50,000 people to poney up £3,000 a pop, you might get Lerner to take the £150m and run, but where would that leave the club? After buying it, suddenly there's less money than there was under Lerner. While it's easy to look at transfer fees and say Lerner has put **** all in, that's not true. There's the massive financial deficits we've been running up for the last 5 years - they'd need to be covered too. A £20m shortfall that season would see everyone need to pay over another £400 a pop, just to keep the club afloat. If we wanted to have any kind of money to spend on players, say £30m net, that's another £600 each - bringing it up to £4,000 per person. You wouldn't be getting a season ticket or anything like that for your money either, because that would cost the club more money, since they wouldn't be selling season tickets at all. Let's say the average price is £450 in the ground, and there's 35,000 season tickets, that's another £15,750,000 that the new owners have to make up (if they all got STs as part of the deal), which brings the figure up to £4,315 per person.

 

We don't have anything close to 50,000 supporters who would be willing to spend that kind of money on the club, it'd be closer to 10,000 if even that. That'd bump the price per person up to £21,575 per person, which would mean there'd be even less able to spend that kind of money... you'd probably be down to about 500 people if you were lucky, which would bump the price up again, this time to £431,500 per person. How many Villa fans could afford that? 25-50? Let's say it's 50. Because of the further reduction in people able to pay that kind of money, it then becomes £4,315,000 per person, and so on and so forth.

 

So, assuming then that you don't give a season ticket to any fans investing, the total money needed (if Lerner was feeling generous) to make a fan takeover happen, shore up any deficit and offer the manager money to spend, would be in the region of about £200m. If we used my incredibly flawed calculations and worked backwards, you'd have something like this

 

Willing and able to pay £4,315,000 as part of fan takeover - Approx 2 fans

Willing and able to pay £431,500 as part of fan takeover - Approx 50 fans

Willing and able to pay £21,575 as part of fan takeover - Approx 500 fans

Willing and able to pay £4,000 as part of fan takeover - Approx 10,000 fans

 

Total fans so far: 10,552

Total money so far: £80,992,500 - £119,001,500 short of what it'd take for this to work

 

If you put a price tag of £1,000 for anyone else willing to help out, you'd need another 119,002 people to be involved. We don't have that many supporters.

 

Lovely idea, but crippled by the harsh reality of the figures

[1974Centenary]

So if the Villa went bankrupt would all the investees lose their houses?

[DelboyVilla]

If you managed to get 50,000 people to poney up £3,000 a pop, you might get Lerner to take the £150m and run, but where would that leave the club? After buying it, suddenly there's less money than there was under Lerner. While it's easy to look at transfer fees and say Lerner has put **** all in, that's not true. There's the massive financial deficits we've been running up for the last 5 years - they'd need to be covered too. A £20m shortfall that season would see everyone need to pay over another £400 a pop, just to keep the club afloat. If we wanted to have any kind of money to spend on players, say £30m net, that's another £600 each - bringing it up to £4,000 per person. You wouldn't be getting a season ticket or anything like that for your money either, because that would cost the club more money, since they wouldn't be selling season tickets at all. Let's say the average price is £450 in the ground, and there's 35,000 season tickets, that's another £15,750,000 that the new owners have to make up (if they all got STs as part of the deal), which brings the figure up to £4,315 per person.

 

We don't have anything close to 50,000 supporters who would be willing to spend that kind of money on the club, it'd be closer to 10,000 if even that. That'd bump the price per person up to £21,575 per person, which would mean there'd be even less able to spend that kind of money... you'd probably be down to about 500 people if you were lucky, which would bump the price up again, this time to £431,500 per person. How many Villa fans could afford that? 25-50? Let's say it's 50. Because of the further reduction in people able to pay that kind of money, it then becomes £4,315,000 per person, and so on and so forth.

 

So, assuming then that you don't give a season ticket to any fans investing, the total money needed (if Lerner was feeling generous) to make a fan takeover happen, shore up any deficit and offer the manager money to spend, would be in the region of about £200m. If we used my incredibly flawed calculations and worked backwards, you'd have something like this

 

Willing and able to pay £4,315,000 as part of fan takeover - Approx 2 fans

Willing and able to pay £431,500 as part of fan takeover - Approx 50 fans

Willing and able to pay £21,575 as part of fan takeover - Approx 500 fans

Willing and able to pay £4,000 as part of fan takeover - Approx 10,000 fans

 

Total fans so far: 10,552

Total money so far: £80,992,500 - £119,001,500 short of what it'd take for this to work

 

If you put a price tag of £1,000 for anyone else willing to help out, you'd need another 119,002 people to be involved. We don't have that many supporters.

 

Lovely idea, but crippled by the harsh reality of the figures

There is no way on this earth that any club in the Championship is worth 150m. Lerner would have to take a hit and be lucky to get 60m for the club and that's from a fan buyout, an oil sheik or dodgy chicken farmer. That makes the figures a little more realisitic?

[P3te]

There is no way on this earth that any club in the Championship is worth 150m. Lerner would have to take a hit and be lucky to get 60m for the club and that's from a fan buyout, an oil sheik or dodgy chicken farmer. That makes the figures a little more realisitic?

if we go down lerner's not going anywhere til he see's if we can get back up. minimum of another season or 2 while he tries to get value back into his investment

[DelboyVilla]

if we go down lerner's not going anywhere til he see's if we can get back up. minimum of another season or 2 while he tries to get value back into his investment

Well there's not enough time for anyone to buy from Lerner and invest in this window so unless there's a miracle Lerners going to have an investment worth far less than he has paid in to it come the end of the season because his investment so far has brought him the worst team in the Premier League. Look at how difficult it is to bounce straight back up now? And it get's more difficult as the parachute payments increase after next year?