MyFC – a case study for misleading naive customers
I don’t want to obsess about MyFootballClub. I really don’t. So, for once and for all, I’ll just put my thoughts about the whole thing into words and hope that I can just link back to this post in the future as opposed to repeating this rant again.
The MyFC team are incredibly marketing-savvy – they took a passion common to all football fans – the desire to control your team’s fortunes – and made it into an affordable theme-park ride. As all theme-park rides, there are going to be some hiccups at the start and that’s acceptable and understood.
However, MyFC is also a business and as they become more established, they have a reputation to maintain and defend. Their marketing message is perfected and quite strong, so if they can do a passable job at delivering on the ‘promises’ their marketing makes, they should be raking in the moolah with enough to spare for a new car for each team member each year.
But as you might know, MyFC has had it’s critics, mainly focusing on the ‘unworkable’ nature of the promises they’ve made. I think those are completely valid concerns and have been discussed previously several times by myself and others.
My current concern is the attitude taken by the MyFC team (the people behind the venture) towards the MyFC members (otherwise known as shareholders in Ebbsfleet United FC).
So when the marketing promises that ‘owners’ will get to ‘pick teams and formations’ and ‘vote on major decisions’ and operations tells you that a) manager will pick the team as the owners are qualified to do it and b) selecting the CEO / Chairman is not the mandate of the owners but of the ‘MyFC team’ (it’s in the ‘terms and conditions’ actually), I’m not surprised. These decisions aren’t meant to be taken democratically – the divide between what’s promised and what’s offered is to be expected and doesn’t bother me too much any more.
They’re tagline? Own the club and pick the team. They’re primary selling points? Pick the team and vote on major decisions and get to watch games for free online. It’s all on their website folks.
But when the real owners – the people running the show, pulling the strings – the MyFC team – steadfastly refuse to deal with any concerns of the shareholders either in a public forum or in a private forum – and continue to push their year-old marketing spiel without updating it to advice future ‘buyers’ that they’re not going to find what they’re being promised (it’s called being honest and transparent as opposed to knowingly misleading your customers) – that just makes me wonder their original motives.
Perhaps they really did believe in the idea of a fan-owned club. Or as the cynics would say, they just wanted to own a club and thought they would use other people’s money and get rich in the process. Whatever the case, this much is for sure – the customer service for MyFC is not only unacceptable, it is virtually non-existent. The lack of respect shown towards the average shareholder (and the members as a whole) by the MyFC team borders on idiotic incompetence.
Sure, football fans are idiots and can be strung along by any variety of promises, and the MyFC team are under no (legal) obligation to clarify their position / be truthful, but at this point it feels like just any other scam where this time innocent and naive football fans are being taken for a ride, and mainstream media is just helping them along the way.
Even if their motives are pure and good, there certainly is no excuse for the way a certain segment of the membership is treated by those in charge.
There is a great deal of duplicity in the argument from the top people when they say “We are members too”, and yet they clearly hold more power in implementing things like “Pick the Team” mechanisms.
The whole thing has been extremely frustrating for sure, but “caveat emptor” I suppose.
Excelent article i must say. You must have signed up just like i did and foolishly thought you would get what it says on the tin.
Honest football fans who care for the game in general lapped up the media like spin “own the club pick the team” But once you part with your £35 and get access it soon becomes clear that the selling point was indeed spin.
Within hours of parting with my cash i knew i had made a big mistake, not something you would admitt to your mates for fear of endless abuse. So you knuckle down and try and put your point across.
Anyone who has used a football forum would have noticed a few insults flying about, but this place tops them all. Split in to two groups pro and anti “pick the team” Are in a constant battle with each other. All the locals original fans are anti PTT.Thats understandable they didn’t sign up for that. But i would bet my last pound that not one of them signed up before they knew it was Ebbsfleet who would be the benifactor of a large injection of cash.
The Club and the manager knew before they agreed to this buyout that Pick the team was part of the deal. They were only to happy to sign on the dotted line for a deal that cleared there debts and prevented the club going part time professional.
Here’s the real crux of the matter. The MYFC team have no leadership or communication with the members other than its early days we are getting there. A board loaded with locals with their own vested interests at heart, the wording on every vote loaded in favour of what the MYFC team want. Question this and your labled a complainer and the tag follows you around.
The manager and club don’t fancy PTT now, and the MYFC team meakly give in, with no thought for the members who saved the club.
How hard is it to pick a team and 3 subs from 15 players? the team nigh on picks itself.
The numbers voting on matters are getting lower all the time 10% at best. The silent majority know the score alright.
People really did believe in the idea of a fan owned club i know i did. But not to worry the fans have been sold out and used yet again. Someone will make money out of this. Expect a nice book deal for the man who brought this idea up, once it all goes belly up and it will.
Thank you for writing this article as your are spot on in what you say.
If football fans want to help and have a say in how a football club is run, my advice would be look into AFC Wimbledon, FC United or the newly formed AFC Liiverpool.
Honest truthfull and you will get exactly what it says on the tin.
Fair comments.
I should add that MyFC are now allowing members to pick the team – although the real test for that will come during the season, it’s a welcome and very positive step towards getting to what they initially promised.
A little strong maybe, but in essence the truth. There’s a strog feeling that 30,000 people have paid £35 to have an ex-advertising copywriter run a football club – but then thats advertising, sell the dream, not a product. Who says you can’t shine a turd?
If their intentions were good and honerable from the start, you would have thought they would have changed the advertising to match the amended product given to you at the point of sale. Unfortunately I can no longer believe this to be the case.
PTT (Pick the team) is a sham, an absolute sham. Members have been fighting tooth and nail to get a glimpse of what they were promised last year when they forked out £35 and what is being delivered is a completely watered down system which ultimately keeps total control with the manager (oops, I mean head coach – yeah right).
They require 15,000 members to renew, they talk about MYFC as if it’s only just began, yet somewhere along the way, (and in such a short space of time) they have already managed to lose 25,000 members already as the average now using their `power’ to vote, is around 4-5k. Despite this, alarm bells aren’t ringing and they merely dismiss all members complaints out of hand.
The head of the venture (Will Brooks) even claimed that members only complained because they enjoyed it, insinuating that they had no lives and lived to merely complain through the MYFC forums.
Nothing to do with the fact that you’re advertising is completely misleading and as yet, we have got NOTHING for our £35 then, eh Will.
What many people don’t seem to realise is that Radio 1′s Chris Moyles encouraged many (between 10-12,000) Leeds United fans to sign up, thinking they could buy the club via MyFC. How many of these would have remained interested when they found out that the club purchased was Ebbsfleet? I was sceptical of the ‘Own The Club, Pick The Team’ tagline and because of this, am not unhappy that I neither own the club nor do I pick the team. Helping a non-league club grown, become profitable and become successful is why I signed up. Onwards and upwards for the Fleet!
This is all simply not rue, people should just sign up, in under a year we have bought a team for the members, we do have Pick the Team, its just that not enough members want to do it anymore, its not our fault they have all left. Its down to the members, its their fault, all they do is moan and criticise. We have offered to let members do much of their own work on the project, but we can’t just allow them unfettered access to the financial figures, they might see something they shouldn’t. We have votes on all sorts of things, how to fund an extra player, how to put your hand further in your pocket. Some members are still mug enough, I mean supportive enough to do it…. You will be hearing from our solicitors young man!
What a joke. Brooks cannot understand that he has simply replaced the management with another management. The difference being that he couldn’t organise a pissup in a brewery. If he being dishonest and stuffing the money away he his more stupid than people give him credit. Personally, I think he has fallen into the power trap that inevitably surrounds football.
We have had to resort to banning members who don’t agree with us, I mean Will. I mean, he does it democratically you see, we’ve set up some quasi officials on the Society who basically do what he tells them and they’d better know which side their bread is buttered on. From now on there will be a Zero Tolerance policy on the website. Anyone, new member or old finding out that we don’t carry out our original promise of “Own the Club, Pick the Team and complaining about it, especially without offering to do all our admin for us will be put on blacklist and thrown out. Got it?
Weenie, has the club become profitable?
All I have seen is the playing budget being increased,(still waiting like everyone else for the long promised Financial Report!)without any increase in income, which in turn increases the debt incurred month to month!
Come February, when the renewal numbers will be revealed, will Ebbsfleet in fact become insolvent, allowing one or two people to step in and takeover the club for peanuts?
It was never going to happen, not in the way it was sold. That much became obvious really quickly – and instead of admitting that and simply giving everybody their money back, they trundled on, blindly, pretending to give members control, pretending to make good on their promises. Spin and untruths from those in charge, Mr ‘Im just a member too’ Brooks must be pissing himself laughing at the gullibility of crowds.
With all the postive comments in the mainstream press you’d think that MyFC couldn’t help but be a great success. And ofcourse it should have been! How many other new business ventures have had so much free publicity.
Also. what other businesses have had an army of highly qualified business, marketing, and IT etc professionals offering to work for free. These people, myself included, were given the brush off from day one.
Had MyFC been well managed and this early success capitalised on, I beleive a membership of around 100,000 by now wouldn’t have been impossible.
However, I think the ego driven MyFC Team has just forged ahead, believing they could do no wrong, all the time showing a complete disregard for the membership, who’d got them there in the first place.
The whole thing reminds me of lottery winners who go out and buy new cars, boats, TVs etc and then have nothing to show for it a few years later. Like the MyFC Team, they failed to capitalise on what they had won!
I would like to state categorically that Will Brooks has not gone on holiday whilst his organisation faces the worst crisis in its short history. That members were not privy to a supposed secret forum which showed that he was really running the show and that his web team have not embarked on a campaign of bannings in an attempt to silence the people who really know what he is up to with hundreds of thousands GBP of other peoples money. He is not currently sipping cocktails on a desert island while the ship goes down leaving his henchmen to face the music.
A Fans’ owned club only works in the medium or long-term if the fans concerned are already fans of that club.
£40,000 to fleet leisure as part of the myfc deal, and the club cant use the traing ground. It stinks. The whole deal is sooo naive. Will Brooks at myfc should hang his head in shame. I feel sorry for all involved with Ebbsfleet for their sorry involvement with these myfc characters.