Give Fury to the people

It seems The Don, a thoroughly decent and well-meaning man, has done enough bleeding from his wallet, which he says amounted to about $40,000 a week.

He now suggests the Fury should turn towards becoming more of a community based club: "The team will be far better as a community owned side with a broad base of investors," Matheson told The World Game.

"That creates an environment where people have a sense of belonging to the club."

He’s right on the money. Community based clubs have a history of financial stability. As opposed to privately owned clubs, going broke is not a common part of their pattern.

Even the old NSL, not exactly a shining model for professional football management, can be proud of its record in keeping bankruptcies, financial collapses and club closures to a minimum.

In the NSL’s 28-year history between 1977 and 2005, some 42 clubs participated for just six club closures: Canberra Cosmos, Sydney City (which withdrew but went on to exist in lower leagues), Collingwood, Carlton, Morwell Falcons and Northern Spirit.

In the five year history of the A-League five of the ten participating clubs (originally just eight) either went bust or had to be bailed out by the FFA: Perth Glory, New Zealand Knights, Adelaide United, Brisbane Roar and now, it appears, North Queensland Fury.

That’s an attrition rate of 50 per cent versus the NSL’s 14 per cent. It doesn’t make happy reading.

Why is this so?

Well, it’s not because the NSL clubs, or indeed the NSL itself, were better run. Far from it. What has a lot to do with the NSL clubs’ high survival rate is that most of them were community based clubs.

Communities tend not to walk away from clubs when there’s a financial bleed. On the contrary, they often rally and respond, helping to bail their club out of its troubles.

It is instructive that in Spain and Germany, where membership and community based ownership is the norm, clubs almost never go to the wall.

When there is financial trouble the banks tend to prop them up, partly because the banks are part of the very community the club represents.

And community based clubs tend to be more popular, attracting more fans and indeed sponsors because the fans have a tribal sense of ownership of their club.

This does not happen with privately owned clubs where the life of the club is only as long as the depth of the owner’s pocket, and the fans generally hold only resentment for the rich bloke who owns ‘their’ club.

In Spain, Real Madrid will never go to the wall, despite its outrageous spending on player transfers, because no bank would dare foreclose on such an institution.

But this is not guaranteed for example in England where private, often foreign owners are seen by banks as exactly what they are – opportunist speculators who will sell out or simply walk when things turn bad.

So thank you, Don, for hanging in for as long as you have. It’s time now to hand the keys to the people.

Time to spend on marquee power

When is a marquee player a marquee player? When he puts bums on seats, that’s when. Pure and simple.

The business case for having a marquee player is making a large investment in anticipation of getting an even larger return, in spectator support, sponsorship and brand enrichment.

So why is Sydney FC so jittery, or mean-fisted, in its negotiations with Nick Carle?

TWG understands Vitezslav Lavicka dearly wants Carle to replace the retiring Steve Corica and has already rejected four alternatives offered to him.

We also understand Carle is prepared to come, but only as a marquee player on a marquee salary.

My understanding is that $1 million in the first season would do the trick, and that includes the $250,000 loan fee Crystal Palace is asking. That would suggest that Carle would come for a base salary of $750,000, not an astronomical figure for a marquee player.

So the snag can only be that Sydney FC does not see Carle as a good enough risk at that price, valuing him much lower.

Maybe they should pick up the phone to Con Constantine for some advice. When Carle was at the Jets, its average home attendance was around 14,000. Since he left that figure has dropped to around 6,000.

If that’s a guide, it wouldn’t take many home games before Sydney would recoup its investment on Carle and begin to make a handsome profit.