Firparka

Absolutely. The WS started life as a 'kind-of' a charity. But recent events have shown that it really needs to think like an owner/majority shareholder and push for its agenda, long-term. We could debate how that happens, and certainly it needs to be more engaged with the full WS membership, but at a minimum it needs to influence the board appointments and, ultimately, the professionals who run the club day to day. It would be reasonable IMHO that the WS sets benchmarks for performance in certain areas, which it looks like they are doing, and then finds the right people to execute.

Relegation is something that North American sports owners find very tough to understand because it flies in the face of guaranteed income for a sports franchise. My business life has taken me to North America and I have spent time with the marketing departments of sports teams, especially the Vancouver Canucks in the NHL and the Atlanta Braves in the MLB. When we were all just chit-chatting about sport, and I mentioned MFC's brushes with disaster, they were mystified. How can you run a business like that? It's true that the ticket marketing, matchday experience, food and beverage, merchandising and other income-generating operations of NHL/MLB/MLS teams is very sophisticated, and maybe there are some tricks of the trade that could apply to MFC. But the cold, hard fact of relegation is one thing a US or Canadian sports team doesn't have to worry about. They also get to trade for players in a controlled pool as well which is another income-security process. So they can borrow more easily to make big changes to stadia and so on, knowing that year to year they are in a pretty stable scenario. For me, the Barmacks' proposal isn't wrong because they are American and clueless. It's wrong because it offers no vision for the club in our current reality. For example, he says he only has 10% of the information he needs to make MFC successful. Fair enough. But the fact is that our stadium needs refurb. So, in general terms, he ought to have a view on the timescale and ballpark (pun intended) costs of those upgrades or a general view on the feasibility of a new stadium, or stadium sharing, or leasing a stadium, or any number of options that a genius-level CEO could conjure up.

Like many folk I joined the Well Society without thinking too much about what it actually meant to the club in general. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. As the years have passed, it feels now as though fans have started to expect too much of it. WS was not designed to run the club — the WS is more like a charity than a business. The cause of this charity is to keep MFC in existence into the next century and beyond. The WS was not set up to run the day-to-day business of the club; it was set up to run the 'charitable' cause of giving money to MFC is it needed it (which seems to have been the case). If you think of the WS as a charity that owns a majority shareholding in the club that it cares about, it makes much more sense of the current situation. We are not voting on whether the WS has great ideas to increase revenue or whether we believe it has suddenly discovered how to refurbish an old stadium on the cheap — that is the function of the professional CEO and CFO appointed by the board. The WS represents the fan ownership cause, pure and simple. It cannot, absolutely cannot, vote in favour of any proposal that does not guarantee fan ownership unless the members of the 'charity' collectively agree beforehand that they want to wipe out the WS and its reason for being (fan ownership of the club) and dissolve back into our individual shareholdings as club owners. It would be like the National Trust deciding it was going to sell of its castles as casinos because it was more profitable. I'm intrigued like everyone else to see what the WS plan is. But all we are being asked to do right now is vote on the Barmack deal. For me, it makes no sense financially, commercially or socially for the community. But most importantly, it does not guarantee fan ownership because there are unaccountable shareholders outside of the Well Society who might side with the Barmacks. (If you read Barmack's comments he also talks about diluting his own shareholding by bringing in other investors. How would he control them?) I'm prompted to post because I see a lot of comments that position the WS as needing to offer leadership for the club. Conventionally, shareholders don't have to formulate marketing or business plans. Shareholders simply reap the rewards or suffer the losses of the professionals they appoint to run the business. That is the function of the WS and perhaps it's a fair criticism to say they didn't have a strong enough voice on the appointments of the board. As I say, if you think of the WS as a charity (Motherwell 2086!) with a long-term agenda to see the club thrive into the next century, it makes sense that they don't focus on strip design or who we buy our pies from. If the board can't do those things well, then the WS needs to be able to appoint people who can. The Barmacks are not applying for the job of CEO — they want to own the club. Different thing. Does the WS need to be the CEO — no. Do we need a management team that is better than the one we have now — again, a different conversation. Sorry this is a bit of a ramble. And folks might see that I am out here in Canada and say who is this geezer? All I can say is that I have supported the club since I was old enough to kick a ball, was a season ticket holder for 10 years and was at THE cup final. It means a lot to me that we don't do anything crazy with this club. The WS was the right thing to do at the time but we need to understand what the WS is and is not. We need to cut them some slack and give them breathing space to navigate this difficult situation.

In my experience of running businesses and working with large businesses, it is typically not the responsibility of the shareholders to come up with the strategy to grow the business. As the owners, the WS should expect the professionals they employed to do that. So, it now seems that those professionals should be replaced if their ideas on growth don't work for the fans.