Article written by Phil French of Supporters Direct
As another week of European football passes by, attention is once again turning to the ownership of clubs as the media pore over an international Who's Who of wealthy families and individuals rumoured to be circling Europe's elite. Not a week goes by without a club being linked with a buyout or takeover of some sort.
Many sceptics dismiss supporter ownership or control as something for clubs with no ambition in the lower leagues and argue that clubs the size of Chelsea and Manchester United will never succumb to the principles of democratic control. So will we ever see a mutual organisation or a club with democratic membership compete with the big guns?
Well, it may surprise you to learn we already have. Of the clubs in the next round of European competition seven have solid democratic foundations. Perhaps the best known is Barcelona, which belongs to and is run by its 102,000 members. Every four years they choose a president and a board of directors who manage the club; they have the right to speak and to vote.
Nor are they alone in Spain. Athletic Bilbao, Osasuna and Real Madrid are also democratic/mutual organisations, who hold quadrennial elections allowing their members to help determine the future direction of the club.
Most German clubs are structured as members' clubs with a supervisory board elected by members, who are match-going fans. That board generally selects the make-up of the management board that runs the club on a day-to-day basis and is responsible for the football and non-football sides of club activities.
Of the top division in the Bundesliga, six clubs including SV Hamburg and Schalke, now second and fourth in the table, are purely member associations. Interestingly, the one club that has got into debt is Borussia Dortmund, now stock-exchange listed, who plummeted from European champions in 1997 to near-extinction in 2005.
The rest, by and large, have two entities, a company and an association, and even the private limited companies are minimum 51% owned by the members' association. That figure is a rule of the German FA, which requires this minimum to be held by the members' club, keeping the control with fans.
This goes a long way towards promoting good governance and responsible representation, something overlooked by the Burns report, the structural review of the FA, which failed even to recommend supporter representation on the FA Council let alone its main board.
So where does Uefa fit into this picture? The European Council's Nice declaration of 2000 (often used as last line of defence against the unwelcome attention of the European Commission's competition directorate) states that the specificity of sport is only applicable if football is run "on the basis of a democratic and transparent method of operation".
This declaration regrettably has no legal basis, but at a recent meeting of sports ministers in Leipzig, convened by the British minister Richard Caborn, a draft text was produced, with Uefa outlining the key principles of what will form a Europe-wide sports policy. Nestled in the heart of that text - which in part examined the ownership models of clubs - was a fundamental commitment to look at establishing a European-wide Supporters' Trust movement drawing on the expertise and success of Supporters Direct.
So now Europe's key decision makers in both football and politics are combining to take the principles of democracy and good corporate governance seriously. This one meeting could see in one of the most significant policy developments for European football and sport in general.
Our job is to turn the democratic ideal into reality. If the Supporters' Trust movement keeps growing at current rates and more countries follow suit, then Supporters Direct could in the words of Uefa "go a very long way to reclaiming the agenda for football".
Phillip French is the chief executive of Supporters Direct.