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Ebbsfleet United Win the FA Trophy

The richest football clubs in the world might well be contesting the Champions League in May, but this weekend marked my own first trophy as a proud Football Club owner! Ebbsfleet United have won the FA Trophy.

Ebbsfleet, you might recall, were the club from the Football Conference who were bought by a consortium put together over the Internet, the result of 28,500 people chipping in £35 to pick up a 75% stake. I was one of those 28,500, and though I wasn't there to see them pick up the Trophy, I am very pleased to have played a (very small) part in their success.

MyFootballClub Reaches 53,000 Members

Back in May, I wrote about My Football Club, an attempt to gather 53,000 people via the Internet to buy a British football club. Well, the 53,000 people have been gathered, and it's time to come good on our promise to pay out £35 for our membership of the Trust.

I paid mine this morning, quite proudly. And I nominated Halifax Town as the team I'd like us to purchase, if they are willing to be bought. I went for a non-League team because they would be cheap to buy and easy to build and they used to be a League team so among the people of the town there is ambition to re-attain League status. Added to which, with a smaller club, it's easier to set benchmarks for how the concept is working - 53,000 new attendees (or a sizeable proportion there-of) will be noticed on the terraces, 2 or 3 promotions in quick succession are manageable in the lower leagues for a team with focus and drive, and the cheaper we can buy the club, the more money we have for transfers, therefore the more impact the Trust can have.

It was funny to see on the MyFootballClub forum someone suggest we should all get free t-shirts for signing up: somehow in that suggestion there shone a microcosm of why some clubs under-achieve, go into debt and go out of business - the people in charge want to own the club for the benefits that will come their way, one of which is to be able to say they own a football club. For me, that's a nice fun bonus - I'm much more interested in how this project brings people together for a common purpose and how well the infrastructure of the Trust can manage a team.

I want this venture to work and to blossom. I don't think we'll get another shot at it - to some extent, MyFootballClub works because of its novelty value, which won't be an option for the next group of people who try to buy a club like this. (I'm not saying that MyFootballClub is a novelty - the people in charge and the vast majority of people on the forum are very serious about making this work - it's just that much of the publicity that has helped them reach the 53,000 sign-up mark so quickly has emphasised the project's wacky side). It's up there with the Million Dollar Homepage and OneRedPaperClip as a charming one-off that will get tired very quickly if someone else tries it. So it's now or never.

Let's Club Together and Buy a Football Team!

Ah, the Internet, is there nothing you can't democratise!
Owning a football club was always the preserve of remote and arrogant self-made millionaires who built a winning side or leached a club dry, depending on their whim. Ordinary fans with dreams for their team could do little but voice their opinions in song on the terraces - hardly an efficient way to be heard.

But over on MyFootballClub, Will Brooks is gathering eager supporters to chip in £35 each in order to buy a professional British side. He aims to set up a Supporter's Trust of 50,000 fans to raise a healthy £1,750,000 - which may not be enough to buy the moneybag likes of Chelsea or Manchester United, but I'm sure there are other clubs way down the pecking order who could be bought for that kind of money. Each signatory can suggest a team to buy, and the club with the most votes will be the first club to be approached. Cambridge United is currently top of the poll, with my team, Huddersfield Town, in as fourth choice. Once acquired, the Supporters' Trust will run the whole club as a business, with input into tactics, transfers and allocation of finances.

Cricket Animation on Cricinfo

Cricinfo has built an animation feature around the text feed from its online commentary. The ball-by-ball, blog-like game updates are provided by Cricinfo reporters at the match, and then represented on a video game-like pitch using Shockwave:

Sky Sports claim that this eats into their rights as exclusive broadcasters of live action from the World Cup. I can't see it myself. No one with a choice would choose to watch this animation rather than watch the real video footage. I think the animation is fantastic, and I've enjoyed having it playing in the background while I've been working, with commentary from BBC Radio streamed in online to fill out the picture, but there is so much missing - the fielders for a start, expressions, gestures, the crowd - that to claim it detracts from Sky's offering is a joke. Sky are clearly getting their objections in early before the quality of the animation improves, and the action on the real pitch can be mapped to online avatars who mimic their real life counterparts nuance for nuance. At present, the animation is still up there, and I hope it continues to be, unlike the BBC's football equivalent, which was intended to echo Premiership matches but which disappeared within days of going live.

Cricket is well served by the Internet. It's a slow game played over a long period of time, which means it's a game that you can can keep an eye on as it plays in the background, allowing you to get on with other things - much like I've got a tab open in Firefox right now updating me of the score between South Africa and Ireland. Cricket matches take place seemingly randomly through the week, and it's been much easier to keep track of what's going on through websites like Cricinfo than it ever was through newspapers. It's also a sport that thrives on statistics - cricket scorers are the archivists of the sports world, logging every ball in the time-honoured tradition of the Victorian academic lineage that cricket spins out of. But as good a job as they've done categorising the modes of play and the wonderfully colourful terms they've used to describe the positions of players and the vagaries of the action, (the arcane insider jargon that rewards sustained involvement in the game, such as silly mid-on, slips, gully, point, backward square leg, length, short of a length, line and length, yorker, third man, sweep, pull and hook) the essence of the game cannot be captured in a scorer's scorebook. Cricket in its pomp is a bewilderingly varied drama that works best either close-up on-screen where you can dissect the players' technique, character and courage, or from afar, with the song of the radio commentator lulling the imagination out of hiding, singing the game into being in the cauldron of your brain. It's great to go through the game afterward either in the paper or online, picking the stats apart and reconstructing the fall of the wickets to re-enact the battle, but it can never capture the true nature of the tension wrought of a bowler bearing down on the popping crease knowing the batsman 22 yards away at the other end has only his bat and his nerve-ends to keep him in the game. Like the batsman, the crowd is straining its every last sense to get the earliest glimpse of how the delivery will turn out, and while Sky have the rights to this raw footage, they don't have anything to fear from an animation, regardless how good it gets.

(via BoingBoing)

BBC Football - Feeds and Animation

Over the last few years, BBC Sport have offered a live text rendering of every game of professional football in the UK, which looks something like this:

While following the Blackburn - Arsenal FA Cup 5th Round Replay on Wednesday evening, I noticed they had added an animated representation of key moments of the game taken from the feeds:

Continued after the fold...

Can Moneyball be Applied to European Sport?

David Runciman writes about Moneyball in The Observer:

"In Moneyball (2003), perhaps the greatest and almost certainly the most influential sports book ever written, Lewis describes how Beane, a failed-player-turned-generalmanager, transformed the fortunes of Oakland's cash-strapped baseball franchise by sacking the scouts and replacing them with Harvard business graduates, who may not have known how to hold a baseball bat but certainly knew how to read a spreadsheet. What Beane discovered is that statistical analysis in baseball was rocksolid if done the right way: it told you who to buy, who to pick and who to sell. What's more, the names that data analysis threw up often didn't tally with the folk wisdom of the game, because they just didn't look right - the most productive run-getters were often on the tubby side, or slow around the bases, or lousy fielders. This meant the other teams, who still relied on heart and gut and feel, weren't just getting it wrong, they were ripe for the taking, because they would sell the fat run-machines too cheap, and buy the chiselled showboats too dear. Beane took the cash-rich East Coast teams to the cleaners in the transfer market and he took his unfancied club to the play-offs five seasons in six."
Read more.