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I propose a community takeover bid to acquire STFC from its current owner(s) and install a fan-elected board to oversee the short to long term management and operations of the club.

This would require the production of a share offer prospectus and the issuing of community shares based on 'one member one vote' to achieve the required amount  to secure ownership of the club and provide sufficient working capitol for a period of time.  The prospectus would include the appointment of an interim board to run the club pending the election of a full-time board.

I have no idea what the running costs are, but 10k community shares at £250 each would generate £2.5m, and I reckon the same amount could be generated in donations and grants. Would £5m be enough to secure the ownership of the club and buy some time to install some much needed stability?  Clearly these are back of a fag packet projections and required detailed study.

I know many will point to the examples of where community ownership hasn't worked or has reverted back to private ownership.  But in the absence of any other credible alternative I reckon it's worth a shot, even if for a short period of time, and has the potential to really galvanise the club, the fans and the wider community - and perhaps most crucially reset some of the embedded decision making processes which have gone so wrong for so long and are a genuine threat to our survival.

Who's in?

We could call it the supporters trust of Swindon town

Splitters!

A lot of work has gone into this in the past through the actual Trust. The finances are very, very difficult, which is probably why the Trust has concentrated more recently on owning the ground.

In theory fan ownership would be great and I'd happily pony up the money, but many couldn't or wouldn't. Football clubs are not, whatever people might think about Power, gold mines - they require almost constant investment even in good times, let alone now when income is near zero.

Yep it's a lot of hard work for sure.  But to quote King Eric (who supported the Bath City FC takeover) - "to surprise others you must surprise yourself first" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg1mQ1SmFLo&feature=emb_logo

The Bath City story is great, but that took an incredible amount of hard work and they're a semi-professional non-league club in an exceptionally wealthy area of the country. The numbers involved just aren't in the same ballpark.

Agreed, but they're also a small football club in a heavily rugby dominated city.  The catchment area of Swindon is massive by comparison.  We sold shares in Bath City to football fans across the globe, who bought into the story.  I think "the UKs biggest community owned football club" is quite an exciting opportunity, and to be blunt I don't see many credible alternatives at the moment. 

Assuming you're Steve Mytton, I'm all ears.

Power reckons he can get £7.5m for the club, so that's 30,000 of these community shares, plus the ground is £2.2m so that's another 8,800 shares needed.

Even without day to day costs, paying any staff/players, doing any much needed maintenance to the ground that's c.40,000 community shares that need shifting just to remove Power.

You're right, and at that price I don't think it could work.  But arguably it's a buyers market at the moment and I wonder if LP would walk away for a lot less than that, just to be free of the ongoing financial headaches.

Which begs the question, what is the current market value of STFC? 

I think that while it might be one of the least risky options out there, it is also one of the least exciting. Most clubs do well to break even at best and fan ownership won't change that.

To counter the Bath argument both Portsmouth, Wrexham and even Swansea to an extent abandoned the fan ownership as all it does is maintain the status quo and provides very little in the way of excitement or the ability to move the club forward.

Other than AFC Wimbledon there are no examples of full fan ownership really improving a club in this country, Exeter and Newport for example just seems to muddle around in league 2 with very little in the way of success. In the case of Exeter if they hadn’t sold a couple of players for a decent whack over the past few years they’d probably be struggling now.

A fan on the board seems sensible, supporter ownership no.

These are fair comments, and I agree there is probably no solution better than having a benevolent owner with deep pockets and a strong sense of community spirit.

But these are few and far between at the moment... a mate works at Oakwell Sports Advisory (a business that specialises in buying and selling football clubs) and when I asked him what the chances of finding a buyer for STFC he replied "nobody wants to catch a falling knife at the moment.... all the buyers are waiting for the storm to pass".  But how long can Swindon afford to wait... even Clem seems to have gone quiet.

Community ownership could be an interim measure, to avoid the worst case scenario of us going out of business, and pave the way for a new owner with some protection measures in place with regards the ground, a fan on the board etc. 

I think you are right and wrong in equal measure.

Does it provide a long term framework to push a club on, it seems the evidence suggests not.  Most clubs eventually sell up t private investors.  The clubs abroad who do this at scale tend to also have huge sponsorship deals to provide the real finance.

Does it mean it is not a viable option for a defined purpose, no.

What could work well is a project designed to take control of the club, buy the ground and create a stable and viable asset that private investment can then be sought for.  At the moment we have a chancer who would likely sell to anyone, and the only people interested will be looking at a distressed business like vultures.

So maybe frame this as a short to medium term salvage operation with an ultimate goal to sell the business in a few years and everyone then gets the opportunity to decide whether to take the proceeds at sale or re-invest and won a smaller share in the club or donate to a fund held in Trust to finance community aspects/the ground in the future.

Even with that you are talking in the region of £5-10m to get the assets in hand. Not saying that the club is remotely worth the £7.5m suggested by Power, but ultimately he is going to want some cash and as it stands he owes a small fortune to Standing, Clem and possibly others we don't know about.

I seem to recall the Trust suggesting that some sort of Statement would appear from them this week, interested to see what that says. 

There'd be zero chance of our fan base getting remotely near £5-£10m IMO, fan ownership is only going to be viable if the club can be picked up on the cheap in Admin or a phoenix club scenario.

I wasn't commenting on the cost to do so, just that you could make a case for a middle ground.  That you don't have to assume it's a case of buying it and then forever being stuck with no money.

Get the buggers to sell their GameStop shares and buys ours instead.

You don't need to finance the entire price.  Much of what would be needed to buy the club is paying off Director Loans.  You could negotiate those over time, but even if Power et al want it paid off to get out, you can finance the deal through long term loans yourself.  If the fans stump up a % of the total value, you might have a path to financing elsewhere.

If you could short sell Swindon Town there'd be some serious money to be made!

Black wrote everything off when he sold to Jed, no? Hence the debenture.

That sale, in hindsight, was the best possible moment to take control of the club, but the transaction was done quickly and therefore we ended up with Chancers Inc.

Fans ownership is the last resort to prevent a sinking ship IMO. You're talking about numbers just to buy the club without any wriggle room to handle day to day costs.. Not mentioning the EFL requires a certain amount of working capital before they give the nod to any new owners these days.

Realistically, it will cost £5-7.5mil to get rid of Power.
£2.5mil to deal with all the hidden skeletons and legal fees.
£2.2mil for the stadium.
£30mil to improve the stadium, facilities and start other business ventures because football on it's own makes fuck all profit.
How much for a proper training ground? £2.5mil all said and done?
Then working capital..

Realistically to do it properly, the club needs a good £40mil pumped in to set up the foundations for a sustainable future.

Invest your £250 a share for now into Bitcoin and Etherum and one day, hopefully, we'll have enough when the time comes to act!

I think you could isolate the stadium project and create a working group with relevant expertise to tackle this, working alongside the Trust and the Council.  

At the moment the club is a closed shop and there is no opportunity for willing volunteers to get involved.  But add some new energy and expertise into the mix, along with a good dose of goodwill and a common goal and I think we could make speedy progress on many fronts.

If you sideline the stadium into a separate project... Speedy progress to what though? The vision you are proposing cannot be purely to stay stagnant and go sideways? Whoever owns the club next needed to have a strong and strong strategy to kick it on. I honestly don't see how fans scrambling a couple of million together just to keep the club alive is a viable option that will bring any form of success.

This is one of the main reasons why I vote no.

Rightly or wrongly, some rich people pick up a club to invest in the hope of reaping in the rewards when the club sees some success. It works for some. But, of course, where is this investment money going to come from if the club is going to be owned by the community? Even if we managed to whip around 1/2 mil to buy a player who turns out to be a dud, what are we going to do, have another whip around every time it happens?

With private owners, there is the risk of getting shysters who will tear a club apart (and Power's a relative saint in that regard), but you're also more likely to get stagnation. Why would fans be happy with that? I'd rather take the risk of having some shit times balanced with some great times than to just remain static year after year.

I don't think fans would buy into a vision to stay stagnant and sideways - I certainly wouldn't.  Whether the club is community owned or privately owned it should have a clearly laid out business strategy for growth off the field, which could include improving the matchday experience, a plan to build the attendances, better engagement with corporates, stadium development, better commercial use of club assets, community engagement and so on.  These things should happen regardless of who owns the club, and would give us an stronger infrastructure to support on the field success (eg getting to the championship) and make the club a more desirable prospect to a potential buyer.

Apologies for wanging on about Bath City again but under community ownership attendances have gone up from 600 to 1100, and annual losses are down from £139k to £20k.  OK it's a much smaller operation but these improvements are purely down to better business management.  And as someone else has said here, there are other routes to financing growth which may have better terms than those currently being made available to the present owner.

I guess it comes down to how ambitious we are as fans, and how accepting we are of the status quo.  As I said before I would love a wealthy new owner to come and save the club and pump 20 mill into it... but where are they?

You keep using Bath as an example but they are 17th in the National League South, they may have balanced their finances a bit but on the pitch they are going backwards. Ultimately we all support a football club, not a business and a lot of Town fans have absolutely no interest in the financial side so celebrating minimal losses whilst at risk of getting relegated to the Southern League doesn't seem a great advertisement!

We should have the ambition of a side struggling at the bottom of the national league south

I think there’s plenty of case studies which show fan ownership doesn’t really work long term, unless one of the fans has more money than sense (e.g. lansdown)

Perhaps, but a few years ago they were bankrupt and about to go out of business.  Sound familiar?  Whereas now they have a better balance sheet and the foundations to grow.  That's the point I'm trying to make.

On the pitch is a totally different matter, managers get hired and fired all the time regardless of the ownership model. 

Like I said before I think it comes down to how ambitious STFC fans are, or if we're happy to keep bleating on about how bad things are without actually doing anything other than hoping for the best. 

Working pretty well at Exeter, and that's been in Trust ownership a while. AFC Wimbledon had their club stolen out from under them and not only fought their way back up into the League but are now just about to pick up the keys to their new ground. You might not like their way of doing things, but it's working and it's a shit load more stable than we are. Not to mention most of the Bundesliga.

There are, of course, also some disastrous counter-examples, such as Stockport and Notts County.

Bath City became a community club 3 1/2 years ago and are in the same league they were then. And near the bottom.

There might be good examples to get people on-board, but Bath City is not one of them. Quite why you want to keep on going there I just don't know.

Exeter have no football club around them for miles and are the definition of a league two club. Wimbledon have peaked at mid table league one. I think both show the limitations of the approach

I’m not denying that fan ownership can steady the ship, but it can’t push that ship forward

The main problem with fan ownership is not the fan ownership itself, but the dire state of English football finances outside of the Premier League. And they have become dramatically dire-r over the past 12 months.

Possibly so, but I was responding to your post saying "case studies" show it can't work long term, I think these are two examples where it has. Whether they are models we would wish to adopt is another matter, as I said.

Precisely this. Fan ownership has been the default model in German football for 60 years and has worked well there, but finances in English football are, in the main, a basket case. No ownership model "works" in this environment, most clubs outside the super wealthy top 6 are just lurching from one crisis to the next.

The model here doesn’t work because unscrupulous owners are in it primarily for what they can get out of it.

High interest loans, taking slices of any lucrative transfer fees, squeeze what they can for as long as they can and then fuck off and bollocks to the consequences.

If clubs actually retained the majority of what income they generated most would trundle along just fine.

I don't think there's anyone amongst our fanbase that has the financial capability or experience to make our club competitive at a decent level. We've been shit for years, and that's fine, but I cling on to the hope that one day someone will come in and realise the massive potential a town the size of Swindon has and have a bit of ambition to drive us upwards. I can't see a supporter run club being that vehicle, but I would happily be wrong on this front.

It's strange as well but when the Trust (I think?) said about putting a roof on the bank a few years ago, for me that was a backwards step (and I say this as a fan of the Trust and the work they do). The Stratton Bank doesn't need polish, it needs to be ripped down and rebuilt. Like most of the club!

I think we had that opportunity with Black, but in traditional Swindon style it went to shite.

The problem is that many clubs also offer massive potential

A case in point being Burnley - until recently a bit of an outlier as a well-run lower Premiership club that was sustainable on the income it generated, in fact even regularly generated a reasonable profit that was reinvested in the club and had cash in the bank. Then new "investors" come along with a highly leveraged takeover, use the club's own money to finance that takeover and take it from having £50m in the bank to being £90m in debt, purely to finance their takeover. While this kind of shit is allowed by the authorities, clubs are always going to be tempting targets for speculators and asset strippers

Owning a football club is very much like owning a boat.

True. But Swindon is in a good location, in a town with a huge population that has brought out decent numbers when doing well.

But the problem is it's allowed in general business. I'm not sure legally where the powers that be stand legally in restricting that.

There are other constraints on trade that don't apply in general business e.g. transfer windows, Owners and Directors Test, Salary Cost Management Protocol etc etc. Include it as part of Onwers and Directors' Test - "Have you got proof of funding?" "Can you put down a deposit for two years worth of funding?" "Is that your own/external money?". Easy enough if they want to. But they don't because both the Premier League and the Football League are owners' clubs, the owners make the rules so they consider the best interests of owners, not clubs.