The club is ours in every way but one.
Supporters built it, fill it, fund it and outlast every owner it has ever had. They just do not own any of it.
Nobody needs convincing that something is off. The people who want to make money out of this club have all the say in it. The people who just want it to win have none. That is not an accident or a scandal — it is simply how the ownership of English football is arranged, and it has been arranged that way for a long time.
What has changed is that it is now possible for a very large number of people to put a small amount of money behind the same thing, at the same time, without any of them having to trust an organiser with it. That is new. It is the only reason this is worth attempting now rather than in 1992.
It is not a new idea, just a new method
Fan ownership is ordinary almost everywhere except England.
Most clubs operate under the 50+1 rule, where members hold a majority of voting rights. Bayern Munich has hundreds of thousands of members. Borussia Dortmund is publicly listed and still bound by it.
Barcelona and Real Madrid are owned by their members — tens of thousands of socios who elect the president. Not a minority stake. The whole club.
AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester were both built from nothing by supporters who had lost their clubs. Both are member-owned, one member one vote, and both are still here.
The difference is that those were either protected by national rules or started from scratch after a disaster. Nobody has worked out how supporters buy into an existing Premier League club that nobody is giving away. That is the actual problem.
Be honest: this does not start with control
Let us say that first and plainly, because a movement that oversells itself deserves what it gets.
Liverpool is worth billions, and no supporters' holding bought in its first years is going to carry a veto, a board seat as of right, or the power to overrule an owner. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
How big a holding supporters could actually reach is not a number anybody can honestly put on this page. It depends entirely on how many people turn up, and nobody has ever found out. What we are not going to do is pick a modest figure now and then argue for why it was enough.
What a holding does give supporters is harder to put in a headline and worth more than it sounds:
Not a consultation exercise or a fans' forum that meets twice a year. A registered holder of shares, with the rights that carry, and a published mandate it is obliged to follow.
"Fans are unhappy" is an opinion. "Forty thousand supporters have put real money behind this and here is the proof" is a fact, and it changes what a board can comfortably ignore.
Owners come and go on a ten-year cycle. A supporters' society does not sell, does not take dividends, and is still there for the owner after next.
The first holding is not the goal, it is the proof. The hardest part of any movement is the first stone, and nobody buys a majority of anything as their opening move. What a supporters' society holds in twenty years is not decided by what it can afford today.
Why money in, glory out
Every pound that leaves a football club to pay its owners is a pound that did not sign a player, fix a stand, or hold a ticket price down. Supporters already know this, which is why so many of them resent the arrangement regardless of results.
So this cannot be a way to make money from the club without also becoming part of the problem. Hence the rule that nothing is ever paid out to anybody, written into the declaration and, if we get far enough, written into the society's constitution in a form no vote can remove.
It sounds like a sacrifice. It is actually the only thing that makes the proposition coherent. A supporter who owns part of their club does not want an income from it. They want the club to be stronger, and they want a say in how it is run.
Why it will probably fail
It would be strange to ask for your money and not say this part.
No owner may ever sell to us. Football's regulators may decide a movement shaped like this cannot hold a stake. We may never raise enough to matter. Bitcoin may halve while people's money is committed. Any of those ends it.
What makes it worth attempting anyway is the shape of the downside. If this fails, every supporter's money returns to them on the date they chose, because it never went anywhere else. There is no pot to lose, no company to go bust, no administrator to appoint. The worst case is that a few thousand people tied up some money for a year, got it back, and proved it could be done — which is more than anyone has managed so far.
The risks are set out properly, and less kindly, on the risks page. Read it before committing anything.
What we are asking
Right now, nothing but your signature.
Signing the declaration costs nothing, moves no money, and commits you to no payment ever. It says you want this to exist. That is the only thing being asked for today, and it is the only thing that can turn a document into a movement.
Read the declaration See how it works