Recently a BBC reporter rung me up to get a radio interview (which can be found here), and I wanted to make sure I had something that would really resonate with their audience. Like if I could, I don’t know, tie wikinomics together with, say, football or something. And if you’re a football fan, you might already know where I’m going with this:

MyFootballClub has agreed to a deal in principle to purchase a controlling stake in Ebbsfleet United FC. The football club is currently 9th in the Blue Square Premier, and one promotion from reaching Football League for the first time in history.

MyFootballClub members will own the club, vote on team selection, decide which players to buy and sell, and guide the club in the leagues.

This quote comes from MyFootballClub.co.uk, where a group of relatively exclusive co-owners are using mass collaboration and web technology to acquire and manage a professional sports team – and by “relatively exclusive”, I mean a bunch of people (about 50,000) that were willing to pony up about 35 pounds each to collectively own, and run, the team.

It’s quite a stunning development that’s recieved pretty good coverage in the “mainstream” press (see quotes from the Economist, BBC Sport, and others on the home page), but I’m sure some of you are thinking something along the line of are they insane? Surely this couldn’t work, could it? Surely a bunch of random strangers that happen to be the first 50,000 to have coughed up the cash can’t be trusted to run a sports team on a “one vote each” structure, can they? Especially when, according to various reports,

 Those members, spread across 73 different countries, have an average age of 27 and a vote in who should start for Ebbsfleet in each match, in what formation, and which players should be bought and sold. The manager, or head coach as he will be known, can disagree with selections via the website but the final say remains with members. Indeed, the current incumbent, Liam Daish, should be careful with his opinions as his job is also subject to a one-member, one-vote poll. 

Well… you’re probably right on some level. As the MyFootballClub is currently set-up, every person gets an equal vote on everything in a huge mass collaboration, which some people think is what wikinomics is all about. But if you look a little closer at the book, you’ll see (for example) the discussion of the hierarchies and organizational structures that have emerged over time in regards to Linux, wikipedia, and a variety of the other leading examples.

I would personally be shocked if MyFootballClub doesn’t head in the same direction, or suffer mightily if they don’t. Have you ever seen how angry fans react after a bad game or loss? It’s not always rational, and things could get really, really messy if the mob was simply allowed to rule and emotions come into play (not like people would get emotional about a football team, right?).

Some structure is almost certainly needed, and there are challenges in regards to sharing information with the ownership community (there will almost certainly be “spies” from other teams) in terms of scouting and planned transactions, among other things that must be dealt with.

This an important distinction that many, many people are not picking up on or understanding yet – as the term wikinomics becomes more well known it is often, and erroneously, boiled down to a situation where you have everything absolutely, positively wide open and managed democratically in a mass collaborating frenzy that all can see (the “good” team), or you are out of touch (the “bad” team).

The truth is far more complex – there’s a lot of strategic choices and decisions that go into making wikinomics, and new organizational structures and competitive strategies (among other things) that come with it, work. MyFootballClub, in my opinion, is a fantastic idea with lots of potential, but it it will also have to evolve and adjust along the way in order to achieve it – just like everything and everyone else.