Free business idea: Become an owner of the Blue Bulls
by Jon Cherry on 14/11/07 at 12:34 pm
2 comments
Just imagine if you were the owner of the Vodacom Blue Bulls rugby team.
You could drop Bryan Habana if he irritated you, buy Butch James back from his French club just to mix things up a bit and if you’re really good at it, make a few bucks on the side.
The closest most of us will ever get to having this much fun managing a sports team, comes neatly packaged in a Playstation 3 console and a plastic box with words like EA Games Rugby 08 printed on it.
But perhaps there is another route to sports club ownership glory.
News out of the UK is that MyFootballClub.co.uk, a fan Web site, has agreed to buy Ebbsfleet United, a non-league team currently ninth in the Blue Square Premier division of the Football Conference, five levels below England’s top-flight Premier League.
According to the Web site, which began in April, MyFootballClub members who pay £35 (about R400) will get “an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.”
What a wicked idea!
And one that can work equally well for many different business ventures. Get together 50 000 people online and buy a Cape wine farm or start a small business with 50 000 instant owners, each with equal voting and decision making power to inject instant capital and management skill.
The theory of crowd-sourcing is an exciting one, and the myfootball.co.uk success proves that it can work on a large public scale. It’ll be interesting to see whether the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will improve the clubs performance over time and it’s profitablity.
Give your customers a personal attachment to your business success by making them a part owner with equal powers and you’ve got a reality fantasy game with an instant army of raving brand ambassadors passionate about the success of the venture.
Makes a whole lot of cents sense to us.
See: myfootballclub.co.uk
Read further: You, Too, Can own a professional soccer club – NYTimes
Jon Cherry is the founder of Cherryflava Media, a Trends & Innovation company. Jon is also the brains behind Cherryflava.com one of the most influential websites in Africa. Jon likes to pick out the business needles in South Africa's haystack. View more articles by Jon Cherry.
Darren
Nov 14th, 2007
Love it! Thanks for the story Jon… will make an interesting case study when we look at how things pan out in time to come. But hopefully someone here in SA will be crazy enough to try something like that before then!?
Paul A
Nov 15th, 2007
Yip, I dropped 35 pounds into it – we will see what happens. Its a bit of a gamble I guess, but hey – for the money its fun. It def. sparks your interest in a particular team
Lets hope it works out for the best.