As hard as it is to wade through the doom-mongering and conspiracy theories surrounding all things Newport County, there’s little doubt that the challenges of a Football League club being owned by its supporters are coming to a head. Pre-season has been filled with ominous financial statements, the manager has made no secret of the reduced playing budget, and backroom staff have been leaving in droves with little clarity about how they’re to be replaced.
The current board – what’s left of them – have issued a stark warning that the club cannot continue much longer in its current state, as Argus sportswriter Chris Kirwan summarises:
‘County are in a perilous financial position – they operate with structural losses of around £300,000 and their audited accounts for the year ending June 2022 revealed a loss of £1.2million – and the board have made it clear that they believe the Newport version of the Trust model won’t work in the Football League.’
In recent weeks it’s become apparent we will be steered towards a partial surrender of control of the club in exchange for private investment, lest its survival (at least at this level) becomes untenable.
There’s certainly a lot to worry about, and I don’t blame fans for getting restless, but it’s still worth laying out fully the risks and rewards of each scenario: maintaining a healthy cynicism about any promised change for the better, and staying clearheaded about the risk of sticking with the status quo. There’s a huge amount of pressure now on making a massive decision in a very short period of time, centred around placing the fate of the club in the hands of others. It’s important, then, to get it exactly right, because whatever happens next there can be no going back.
The rewards of fan ownership
Firstly, cards on the table: I’m approaching this with great affection for the idea of fan ownership. It’s something I’d like to cling to as tightly as possible, for as long as possible. To support a fan-owned club at the professional level – an oasis in a desert of dodgy owners, shady business practices and fan exploitation – is a great source of pride, and I’ve a feeling most County fans feel the same way. Before we consider giving that up, let’s remind ourselves of why exactly that is.
Most importantly, it’s a link to the idea of a football club being part of the community that surrounds it. But in our case that’s not just symbolic, it’s real. County isn’t owned by someone looking to get rich off the club’s back or bathe in the reflected glory that football can offer, but by everyday people who truly value the club’s presence in their lives.
Most professional clubs like to call themselves a ‘community club’ – it’s good for their brand – but for us, it’s quite literally the case. Other clubs are private enterprises masquerading as community institutions, County actually is one. In sustaining its existence themselves, supporters have created a social value that transfers from the people to the club, and back out again: a truly common wealth.
This is about far more than what happens on a matchday. The club is a real lifeline for many in Newport and Gwent. In the age of austerity, with council budgets slashed and local services on their knees, it often acts as a saviour that picks up the slack of all our other crumbling public institutions.
The club might not have much compared to most: no training ground, no stadium, precious few assets of any kind. But everything about it is truly ours: created by us, for us. You cannot put a price on this, regardless of the financial pressures placed upon us in attempting to stay competitive with our peers.
The risks of giving this up
To flip this around, it’s also worth considering what we’d lose if we relinquish complete ownership of the club. In a word: control. At present, it’s within our power to solve any problems we face, if only we have the will and the capacity. We can put money into the club ourselves without loading it up with crippling debt that can be recalled at any moment. If there’s disenchantment with those in power, we can elect someone else to have a go, rather than be stuck forever with a despot running the club into the ground. I’m not saying we do either of these things perfectly at the moment – far from it, sometimes – but the possibility is at least there.
I think we may take this for granted sometimes, and forget how awful it must be for fans of other clubs whose private owners have put them in similar positions of financial hardship (in their cases usually through negligence and mismanagement), and are utterly powerless to do anything about it. The fifth tier and below is littered with former Football League clubs whose owners’ actions have doomed them to obscurity or oblivion. Every season in recent memory, the teams that bottom out of League Two invariably do so as a consequence of poor ownership of one kind or another.
Conversely, it’s no coincidence that phoenix clubs tend to begin (and usually remain) as fan-owned endeavours: they’ve learned the hard way what it means to watch on helplessly as your club crumbles before your eyes. In that regard, we’d do well to remember the lessons of our own past, and the reason we’ve needed to ‘rise from the dead’ once in our history already.
In brief: if we hand over the keys to the club to a private investor and don’t like the way things go, it’ll be a case of like it or lump it. In contrast, at present we are at least in control of what decisions can be taken to ensure they remain in the best interest of the club. That’s a big thing to give up.
Romanticism and reality
This may all just come down to a personal preference that others may not share, or even care about all that much when they’re going to games. But for me, to put these thoughts bluntly, I’d rather us be skint due to the limitations of fan ownership than be fleeced by someone else. I’d rather be hoping that enough of my neighbours stump up the membership fees to keep the club afloat than be praying that a millionaire doesn’t get bored with us.
There may come a point when, with a heavy heart, the only viable option will be to give up the club so it can survive. And I can accept that, as Graham Coughlan has said, the fans can’t be expected to keep putting their hands in their pockets to keep pace with our league rivals. It’s probably true that we can only punch above our weight for so long before our luck runs out. But I’m not sure we’re totally at that point yet. I don’t think we’ve yet exhausted the possibilities of fan ownership, and it still feels worth the effort to swim against the tide of the increasingly grim commercialisation of the game. This will likely be mocked as romantic and naive by many, but if we can’t be romantic about football amongst all the troubles of the world, then what hope have we got?
That’s not to say, however, that I’m beyond injecting a dose of reality into these thoughts. Given the worries and the timescale, it doesn’t feel worth dogmatically saying that an element of private ownership will inherently be a bad thing, that it will inevitably go pear-shaped, or that I’d rather the club go to the wall than give up ownership. Nor am I going to bury my head in the sand if it is indeed the case that the club’s financial hole is so deep that we’ve already gone beyond the point of crawling out of it on our own.
Making the ‘hybrid model’ work for us
It’s somewhat reassuring, then, that the proposed change will see us stick to the ‘hybrid model’ preference fans voted for a few years ago, meaning that at least some stake will be retained as a bare minimum. This is essentially a compromise between the two options discussed above – one in which fan ownership and private investment can cooperate in a mutually beneficial relationship.
If this turns out to be the only viable option for us at this point, attention must turn to making this model work for us, so that we maintain the benefits of total fan ownership as much as possible. Though it’s difficult to say for sure due to the NDAs in place, it seems like the board are taking due diligence in ensuring those private parties looking to invest are doing so in the best interests of the club. It’s still slightly concerning though that the fans will be reduced to a minority ownership as a prerequisite: this will very much be a takeover, not a partial investment or benevolent funding with nothing sought in return.
The main worry about this model is that we’ll be left with no real power going forward: that prospective majority owners want our cash, but not our input. We should seek assurance from any would-be investor that our ownership share will give us meaningful influence over the running of the club, rather than us merely acting as cash guarantors who’ll be left footing the bill should things ever go wrong. As an asset-less club, the fans will still for all intents and purposes be the club. The majority-owner should therefore be answerable to us, rather than the other way around.
We must also continue to make demands of ourselves: what do we want our football club to be and how can we shape that in the future? Have we done all we can to maximise the 100% trust-owned model? I don’t think so, but perhaps it’s too late at this point. Whatever happens next, we still need to push to expand trust membership, either to prove to ourselves that we can make it work after all (putting essential funds in the coffers all the while), or to give us extra leverage when any tensions arise between owner and fanbase.
Concluding thoughts
My biggest worry about this season is that the panic of off-the-field peril and the looming threat of relegation will lead to rash decisions. Maybe we ‘must’ sell the club to compete with all the moneybags teams washing up in League Two, but is that a treadmill we want to get on, when the risk of falling off is so very high? There’s a lot to lose, with ramifications that will be felt long after 5pm on a Saturday.
Perhaps we’re a victim of our own success in some sense (going from nothing to a Football League club in 25 years is an astonishing achievement), in that we’ve grown too fast, too soon to put proper measures in place and lay down the adequate foundations a professional club requires. But we must tread really carefully here. Because one thing’s for certain: if we’re giving the club away at this level in the pyramid, we will never get it back again in the current climate.
Maybe the scale of our achievement has made us forget how hard it’s been, and how big the risk of going back there will be. I don’t want to be the next Bury or Macclesfield. I don’t even want us to be the next Salford or Wrexham (you can read my thoughts on the latter’s ownership situation here). I want to be the Newport that stands against all that can go wrong when private investors get their hands on a beloved football club. Whatever happens next, I hope the spirit of that continues for as long as possible. Even if the keys are partially handed over to someone else, we still have the power to ensure we remain a real community club first and foremost.
Disposable Everything 