Scunthorpe United has ended talks with a group seeking to buy a football club through online subscriptions after “24 hours of absolute carnage” from angry fans.
The cash-strapped National League North giants had been negotiating for “some months” with start-up FC 100,000 – a mass ownership platform where members pay £5 per month for a stake.
But chair Michelle Harness this week confirmed the deal had been quashed following feedback from online vitriol, including death threats.
FC 100,000 is co-founded by Will Brooks, the man behind the similar MyFootballClub venture that owned Ebbsfleet United only for the club to run into difficulty after annual subscriptions plummeted.
Backlash
This time, a bigger team is looking to tap into the power of social media to deliver behind-the-scenes content from the dressing room to the boardroom, having a say on board decisions rather than taking them outright.
A huge backlash followed, although both parties have stressed that any buy-in was subject to 40,000 subscribers coming forward first and 100,000 members being required to trigger a majority shareholding.
Harness told BBC Humberside there were “good and bad bits” in the proposal and said it was “a shame we haven’t run with it”.
“If it had grown legs, we would have had so much in every month relieving a situation, the payroll situation and the whole thing,” she said.
“It had to be looked into, we couldn’t just ignore it.”
Harness says spending at Scunthorpe was outstripping cash by around £10,000 per week, a situation that is being managed in the short term while the board seeks a fifth owner to avoid unwanted cutbacks to next season’s budget with one eye on a return to the National League.
FC 100,000’s Michael Brady says talks are ongoing with other clubs but that the group would not seek to invest anywhere that it was not wanted by fans.
