Starting a football (soccer) club

Factual Questions
1

Firstly, apologies if this is a very euro-centric question - I don’t suppose it will be very relevant in the US, but it would be interesting to know any ideas about equivalents in US sports.

I have been thinking about Glasgow Celtic and Rangers wanting to join the English Premiership or First Division. This made me wonder what process you would have to go through to start a new club and join a professional league. Suppose I was a fabulously rich businessman (I’m not) and I gave £1 billion (or whatever, it doesn’t really matter) to starting a new football club. With that sum there should be enough money to build a decent stadium somewhere, build up a fan base and attract a squad of Premiership-quality players.

Would I be able to join the Premiership? Or would I have to start at the Conference and work up, despite the obvious credentials and financial position of the club? Are there any precedents, not just in the UK?

I suppose with a large enough budget you would theoretically be able to challenge for the Champion’s League in the second or third seasons. What do you think?

Matthew Clifford

2

I’ve wondered about the same thing myself, and I suppose you will have to work your way up, no matter how much money your club has. So you start in one of the lower classes, and since your team has money to burn it will have no problems to climb up, until the Premier League is reached.

That said, I can only say something about the procedure in the German Bundesliga. Clubs need a licence issued by the League, and the statutes of the League give the conditions necessary to get that licence. It says that a club is qualified for the first division if it manages to be promoted from the second. The League probably wouldn’t give you a waiver just because your club has full coffers - this would result in public indignation about how much football has been commercialized, etc. A few years ago, there were plans by the big European professional clubs to found a European League independent from UEFA, and it was heavily criticized because it didn’t conatin the promotion thing. Admission the the league would have been granted based on a club’s financial power, not its achievements on the lawn.

Precedence: Didn’t Elton John once buy a club from one of the minor leagues and push it up into Premier?

3

Well, somewhat surprisingly, there is a current and on going case study available:

A little background. Many supporters of the original Wimbledon Football Club have been long disillusioned with the current owners and the possibility of the club moving away from their area (never been done before). They’ve now started a new club with donations and are looking at how to find a league that will have them. Last I heard they were turned down by a league (approx) seven divisions below the Premiership.

http://www.wisa.org.uk/

4

Surely you would just buy or take over an existing club and build that up from it’s existing position. (As Elton John did with Watford - he injected a few million from what I read), you really can’t just enter into The Premiership especially when UEFA want them to reduce the number of clubs in the the league rather than expand it.

5

Starting up a new club is relatively straightforward.

Find your players - usually start by enrolling some folk from a newly constructed sports centre.

Your ground is not a difficult thing to get hold of, you just hire it from your local authority, just for the time you actually play.

You have to have a properly constituted board, and make your decisions in the democratic way.

You then affiliate to your local leagues, this is easy enough, and you have to pay affiliate fees to the central football governing body of your nation(in the UK this is the Football Association)

You have to register your team in plenty of time to be included in the fixture programme of your league, but of course to be included in that league you have to demonstrate a commitment to be able to fully complete the season, and this is done by having your club organised in the recommended way as per the FA handbook(guess that is a bit of a repeat of what I said earlier)

Now comes the fun part…

It will help you enormously if you volunteer your club to carry out things like help organise association dinners, or contribute to stewarding or generally carry out mundane tasks that the FA needs from ordinary members, goodwill is vital to the prospects of a progressive club.

If you have the money and the commitment and earn promotion you can then climb up the various leagues, but as you do this then other requirements come into play, you will need representatives on the area associations, you will need local authority permission to acquire a ground and permission to put up the necessary infrastructure.

Once you start to put in your own money there is of course the requirement to account in the recognised way, and there may be some limitations on just how much money you can put in at particular levels of the sport.

The higher you get, the more organisations you have to affiliate to, such as UEFA, FIFA as well as the FA.

You will need to produce strategies that will satisfy the local police as to your ground and scheduling arrangements, and as you get bigger the local authority will inevitably require you to cough up more and more just to pay for things like local road and carparking facilities, or even a railway connection.

Ultimately it will cost lots of money, there will be other local rivals to your outfit who may have influence on various committees who will resent your newfound success and try to scupper you in meetings at which you need to make your presence felt.

It will get very political, it will help you immensely to have members of your local council, perhaps Members of Parliament, high level police contacts all on your side.

The number of hangers on is huge, and against you will be arraigned not only jealous local rivals, but householders near your ground, there are others among the “powers that be” who feel they deserve more of your “respect”(cash, bribes, considerations, whatever you want to call it) and then the FA itself is often known to have a certain inertia as regards the new kid on the block, it took over 20 years for Scarborough town to get into the Football League even though they were clearly a better team, had better facilities more suupport and more robust finances than many of the struggling clubs in the lowest reaches of the proffessional league.

Its extremely hard to take a club from nothing to the highest levels, each step of the way is an obstical and every obstical is of a magnitude greater than the last, so starting your local sport centre team is easy, but so many vested interests seem to conspire to make progress harder.

The best way is to buy into a club, many of your most vociferous opponents may well be run by extremely dodgy individuals, and their finances are nothing more than smoke and mirrors, sev eral FA clubs have had directors jailed for unrelated matters, some local authorities have had their officials jailed or disqualified from office due to certain irregularites(I’m thinking of Doncaster especially here)

Its easy with lots of cash to buy into such a system, but don’t bother trying to change it with righteousness, the only way to succeed in this company is to do it better than they do.

6

Gretna just gained admission to the Scottish, erm, Second Division I think (having previously been playing in the English Unibond League - insert grumble about another team crossing the England/Scotland border while the FA/ UEFA/ FIFA continue to insist Celtic and Rangers can’t do it), because one of the teams previously playing in that league, the late and thoroughly unlamented Airdrieonians, went out of business. They managed to do it by gaining the most votes from a commission specially put together to decide who would replace Airdrie; obviously this is not an opportunity that’s going to arise very often.