Interesting question. I first got involved when I became a shareholder in 2005 an attended my first AGM. I wasn't impressed at all by the proceedings, at which I thoughts fan shareholders were fobbed off and patronised. I was deeply unimpressed by the then CEO Alastair Mackintosh and wondered how supporters could get involved in their clubs on what you might call a political basis 9e.g. a pressure group). I came across Supporters Direct, who are the group that promote and support supporter ownership. Trusts are legally constituted bodies, where a member has one vote, regardless of how many shares they have.
Via the MEN Online forum, four of us got together to look at forming a trust. Our intention was to try to get enough shareholders together to collect a block of shares that could be used to wield some influence at board level. We started talking to key shareholders and found that many of them were unhappy with the way the club was being run. There was effectively only one executive director, which was Mackintosh.
We realised that we could get enough support from some very influential people (such as David Bernstein & Franny Lee) to force the board to appoint more directors that we would nominate (DB would have been one and we were talking to a couple of others). We had a couple of wealthy backers who were committed to the cause of fan ownership & approached Sky, who had 10% of the shares. They agreed to sell to us which then might have given us control over something like 40% of the shares allowing us to put two or three fan-appointed directors onto the board. We weren't looking for regime change, just more accountability as we were being misled over the true state of the club's finances. However when the club realised we were about 24-48 hours away from purchasing Sky's shares, they announced they were in takeover talks.
This was clearly a load of baloney but it stopped Sky selling to us temporarily. Eventually, after a few months, Ranson and then Shinawatra came in and Wardle agreed to sell to the latter. Once the shares were all in his hands, there seemed little point in carrying on so we dropped the idea. However, a year later we found out that the club were in desperate financial trouble and administration was likely. Bernstein was keen to pick up the pieces so contacted us to see if the funding was still there (which it was) and would we be prepared to get the trust back up and running. Eventually the club got a £30m loan which kept them going, although they probably wouldn't have lasted much beyond December. Fortunately ADUG came in and the rest is history.
In terms of how we were treated, it was very coolly, to put it mildly. They talked about a meeting but never agreed to any of the dates that were suggested. The club (i.e. Mackintosh) realised we were a genuine threat, due to the backing we had, whereas the OSC weren't. We did talk to the OSC to assure them we were no threat to them and I think they accepted that. I'm certainly not criticising the OSC but they have a mutually beneficial relationship with the club and don't get involved in the politics. I understand that fully.
I think they may have put private detectives on us as they seemed to know a lot about us but they made a mistake in trying to tell some of the bigger shareholders that we were of no consequence. We could show the level of support we had and we also proved to one, who was initially sceptical, that the club were lying to him. That turned him into a fervent supporter. It was amazing just how many people at and around the club didn't like Mackintosh and many of my good contacts were made in that period.
It was a stressful but fantastic time and I met some great people. Greg Dyke was chairman of supporter-owned Brentford at the time and he and his board were really helpful, as were the Trusts at Reading & Northampton. We used to hear all the time that Trusts were fine for clubs like that but would never work in the PL. We used to counter that with the fact that being fan-owned didn't seem to have hurt Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and most other Spanish and German clubs. I still firmly believe that fans are the only stakeholders who genuinely have the long term interests of their clubs at heart. Our owners certainly are far better than most in that respect but I don't like the gulf that seems to have grown between the club management and the fans over the last couple of years. Having run a fan-owned club, I'd have thought that Soriano would be a little more empathetic towards us.
Would we have had more clout than the OSC if we'd achieved our objective? Abso-fucking-lutely we would.
