Earlier this month, an article in the NY Times called blogging for hire the ‘digital-era sweatshop’, and I couldn’t agree more (thanks for the link mate).

In fact, I think they’ve underestimated the problems linked with blogging for money (for starters, $10 / post is a lot better than what many people earn from blogging when English is their second language).

However, personal opinions aside, I want to tackle this in the context of football blogging and football business.

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In late 2006, the Premier League went after YouTube in an attempt to remove the plethora of clips uploading by fans, and the knock-on effect had thousands of user accounts suspended for ‘repeat violations’ and the subsequent springing up of alternative sources of footy videos (no point in publicising them here).

Then in May 2007 the Premier League joined a class action lawsuit filed against YouTube. To quote the Reuters coverage:

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I remember, as a little kid, the anticipation and sheer joy involved in waiting for and finally acquiring a copy of the latest edition of the local cricket rag.

Times have changed - we deal almost exclusively with digital media now - but the tangibility of print media (books, magazines, newspapers) ensures that there’s a certain pleasure to be derived from consuming information in print, however fleeting and temporary that may be.

Recently Hugo wrote about football fanzines and the power they had (and their unfortunate decline). Today I’d like to introduce you to a soccer magazine with a different orientation: the New African Soccer magazine.

NAS are a UK-based publication offering an English-language magazine devoted to the African game.

To quote:

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Yesterday we talked about the gap between what MyFC (My Football Club) initially promised and what the venture actually delivers in terms of value to the users. Today let’s talk about another company that arrived with a big bang but ultimately collapsed when the revenues did not materialise as expected (or rather, as their huge investments demanded).

FanBanta went bust some while back - the official word is that they’ve gone into administration, a euphemism for ‘we bet too much on the wrong horse’ and now one of the properties they owned (footballforums.net) has been bought out by Fast Web Media, the same company that owns 4thegame.com.

Recently over at Hive we talked about the need to operate in an emergency turnaround phase when running your business. To quote:

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Fancy owning a football club? It used to be that you needed millions to buy out a club, but then MyFootballClub broke the barriers between big football and the common man and brought club ownership to the Internet for only £35 per year.

The biggest draw - the biggest selling point - was the level of control offered to members. Few people are interested in buying a share in a football club they don’t support - with all due respect, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Ebbsfleet United FC - but MFC worked around that by offering the illusion of control akin to Football Manager. Owners (us!) were to have a say in tactics, team selection, transfers, kits and what not.

The best part of all this - the best-executed part, that is - was the promotion. Give the fan a chance to select the team for a real game? Real-life football manager - and if you haven’t played the game, grab a copy and waste away a weekend so you can understand the drool-inducing addiction we are talking about.

Many have previously argued (including myself over at Soccerlens and Ian over at 200 percent - links here) that MyFC was unrealistic in what it promised and impractical in that fans, once they got over the initial excitement, would stop caring.

Apparently, that is exactly what is happening at MyFC.

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Disclosure: I’m a registered member of MFC and as such, I guess I’m a single-share-holding member of the Trust that in turn has a 51% share in Ebbsfleet United.

Ian from 200Percent has written in quite some detail about MyFootballClub (thank you for the links, RR) and after going through all of them, I thought this would be a good forum to share them. Ian raises several interesting points in his articles (written in Nov 07 and Jan 08) and if you’re interested in learning more about MFC / Ebbsfleet as well as the issues surrounding them, you must read these articles.

• Fleet Of Foot
• More Questions Than Answers
• My Football Club Re-visited
• Whose Football Club?
• Voting For Christmas

Ian runs the excellent 200Percent blog.

Update: Last week I posted a few questions that I had for MyFootballClub that were never answered. In stepped Simon from “The People’s Club” who was kind enough to answer our questions. The People’s Club is a similar venture to MyFootballClub, and to be honest the only reason I think they’ve paid us attention and MFC haven’t is because MFC are getting tons of publicity and can afford to pick and choose, while TPC are no where in the same league (no offense intended).

Anyway, the post below has been updated with Simon’s answers - have a read, it’s good stuff.

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