May 07 - The start of MyFootballClub
I first met Will in Paddington Station in early May 2007. I had got a train up from Bath, where I was based at the time. Will had just launched the first incarnation of the site and got over 20,000 people registering their interest. I had found out about the site from the BBC early on, signed up, and then emailed Will to see if he wanted any assistance in building a football/social networking/management site. We met in the Bishops Head over a few pints of Guinness, talked football, talked cricket and spent about 10 minutes talking websites. Will wanted tech assistance, I wanted to help build the site - little did we know that 12 months later 30,000 of us would be basking in the glow of a Wembley win.
June 07
I designed up the photoshop templates for both the phase 2 (remember that!) and phase 3 sites. Will went on holiday to Italy with his long-suffering girlfriend Anna. Max (who did the development), Chris (who helped with the front end coding), Tony (who had done the phase 1 site) and myself raced to build the phase 2 site which would have the ability to collect funds, collate member details and provide a rudimentary forum for members to chat on.
It was immediately obvious from the outset that I needed to devote a lot of my time to the project. Will and I need to be working in the same place and bouncing ideas off each other. I moved down to Chiswick to work full time on the project with Will midway through June.
Will got back from Italy and reviewed the work to date. I took 5 days off for Glastonbury at the end of June which gave Will time to look at sorting out the payment providers which were necessary for us to collect funds from the potential members. Glastonbury was the last real break away from my computer that I have had and Italy was Will’s.
July 07
Everything was going so well - the design was sorted, the development was on track, DLA Piper (legals) offered to advise us, Deloitte and Touche pointed us in the right financial direction, the media was buzzing and the weather was good. Then issues kicked in. Approval was needed from the FSA on our unique Trust structure, just as it was by PayPal’s head office in the US. We also had major issues on allowing overseas members join the proposed new Trust. It had all started to get very hectic and everthing had to be done by the time 50,000 registered to the site.
July was passing very quickly and there were so many aspects that needed to be sorted before our proposed launch on Aug 1st though slowly but surely things were coming together. The FSA approved our Trust structure; we had a method of at least capturing all the foreign members details but not necessarily their payment info; the web servers got all sorted with plenty of extra juice; the site was finished and working well ready for the launch. The final piece of the jigsaw was with the risk analysis to be completed by the payment provider.
Aug 07
August 1 was, and probably still is, the most important day in MyFC history. Max, Will and I woke up early and had the day from hell. Firstly, Will needed to scooter over to Richmond to sign forms at the PayPal head office to allow us to take money (however we still weren’t allowed to take overseas payments). Max and I were at Will’s flat getting prepared to turn everything on and send out an email blast at about 1.00pm. We knew that the BBC wanted to run a MyFC story that day so it was vital for us to be ready because from past experience we knew our servers would take a massive battering from traffic. Then the internet connection went down at the flat - pull out hair time! There followed a mad dash across West London to my flat in Chiswick. It was a boiling hot day and the taxi was stuck in traffic for about half an hour. To say that Will was getting very stressed is putting it mildly.
We got to my flat, set ourselves up, and got the wheels in motion at about 4pm. Then it got very surreal. We started taking immense amounts of money. I had theorised before hand that we would take £100K in a week. We actually took £100K within around 3 hours. We were all stunned. Max, Will and I managed it till around 10pm and then went to the local pub to have some food and a couple of drinks. It was around this point that we all realised that we were on to a winner. We perhaps could already afford a non league club within our criteria.
August was just a blur. Media was everywhere (we had pieces in every country and in every media type), we had made around £750K by the end of the month and we had been contacted by numerous clubs looking for investment. The site was buzzing with excitement (and the start of the undercurrent of dissatisfaction that became a main stay of the year - “Where does our £7.50 go?”, “The Trust is illegal”, “Why don’t we own a team yet?!”). This was probably the point when Will and I stopped being separate entities and started working together. We had gone from me just doing tech stuff and Will just doing the marketing, to both of us becoming wrapped up in every aspect and the multi headed dragon that it had become.
Sept 07
This is the month when we stopped having to solely worry about the website and collecting Trust funds. The whole project had become very complicated. We had tens of thousands of members on the website all wanting information and help; numerous clubs wanting meetings about potential investment; media crews from all over the world wanting interviews; hundreds of daily emails needed to be answered (god bless Julia for all here help on this) and we had to start managing over a million pounds in cash.
We managed to start taking payments from overseas members. This turned out to be an amazing windfall. We soon had thousands of foreign investors, much more than we anticipated, many of who became very intrinsic to the whole set up (Shout out to Josh!). Halifax became the talking point in the press and on the forums as our club for take over (BBC Article). We never really got close any deal finalised with Halifax as they had investors waiting to help them out and we didn’t want to stand on any toes. The reaction of their fans showed us for the first time some of the opposition we could face going forward.
Oct 07
By October we had several teams that we were in serious negotiations with. One was ahead of the others at that point so it was time for us to meet all the directors of the club for the first time in person. They were a lovely bunch of people and had great potential though the club was in a betwixt period with a lot of things changing. Ultimately we didn’t come to an agreement for a number of reasons but we wished the club all the luck in the future.
We had set up a Forum Team in August to help us manage the site and they had done a magnificent job in keeping things ticking over. We took them all out to watch a match at Barnet (Josh came over from Boston, Dom Ireland and others from all over England) and follow it up with a meal and a few drinks in Fulham. It was great to have some people to chat over the whole adventure to date and the first chance for Will and I to put names to faces. That was the start of the social side to MyFootballClub that was to become the main stay of our weekends for the rest of the project.
Max, Duncan and I were working on the Phase 3 site during this month. We knew that we had to get many aspects live and working for the announcement of the chosen club. It was a tough month on the dev front but by the end of October we were nearly there with phase 3 version 1.
Nov 07
Will and the lawyers had been in discussions with Ebbsfleet Utd for a good while. I was yet to meet any of the directors due to site commitments and also due to nothing being finalised with any team. The deal started to come together in early November and that’s when we started sprinting again. Max, Duncan and I were adding extra features to site and changed the design to start the Phase 3 era of the site. We had to sort out two new servers for the announcement of Ebbsfleet being THE team - this in hindsight wasn’t enough.
We announced Ebbsfleet on the morning of the 13th November. Everything went crazy for the second time. Within an hour TV crews from the BBC and Sky were at Stonebridge Rd. Tim (our press face and general press guru) and Liam dealt with it all extremely well. Much better than we could have hoped for. We had thousands of sign ups and huge website traffic. Our email blast to 53,000 (members and non members) plus being on the BBC website put a massive stress on the servers which went down for two hours. When we went live again, we turned off the forums to mitigate the impact. We were running on all cylinders again for the whole day. Will and I were both manic with the volume of work but also the potential reaction from members and indigenous fans.
We weathered the storm and the aftermath was very positive. The members seemed, in the main, to be very happy with the choice. Indigenous fans were less hostile than in the reaction we’d experienced when Halifax Town was linked. The press became more intrigued with the idea rather than default scepticism. We came through it all very well. Liam was a star during the whole day, as where all the incumbent directors. Club Secretary Roly Edwards looked particularly at ease in front of camera. Everyone was enjoying themselves.
The first game after the announcement was away to Oxford. Will, Gary (in his pre-WT days) and I travelled to the Kassam Stadium to watch the game. It was a tense affair when we entered the pub across from the ground to meet other members for the first time. It was a bit like a blind date - no one knowing who was who. The WT got tipsy and it was a bit easier to chat. I met many a face I would see at future games. This was also the first time I met the EUFC board members - Duncan, Brian, Adrian, Mark and Jason. They were all very pleasant and have continued to be ever since. The game ended 0 - 0 which was a decent result at the time. The taxi driver that took us to and from the game was chatting about MyFC continually. We thought it prudent to keep quiet about who we were but it just showed that we were getting talked about in footballing circles. We had started to enter the mainstream.
The end of November was very much about the potential acquisition of Ebbsfleet - the positives, the negatives and the potential issues. We communicated everything we could to the members but we had entered the due diligence stage. This was a very difficult period for us as the communication was very limited due to legal reasons and pressing time constraints.
Dec 07
Will had mentioned to one reporter that best case he hoped that due diligence would be completed by Christmas and that was what we were all aiming for. It was all down to the lawyers on both sides now. The minutiae of the deal was getting ground out between two teams of 4 both looking for the best deal. One side had 25K odd members the other thousands of shareholders and fans.
On a more personal note, both Will and I had been working on the project for 6 months (Will even longer) with out getting paid a bean. We were both running up to Christmas having to borrow off friends, family and the bank to keep it all going. We knew that once due diligence was completed we could at last take a wage to pay off our debts - we were just as keen for everything to be finalised as all the members were. Christmas was probably the most difficult time for us both. We had family commitments, money issues, due diligence hanging over us, website scuffles to manage, we had cash flows to create for both the club and the website, demands on our time from every possible angle.
Will and I attended all matches over this period and met many members. It was a real release from the busy week to get down to Stonebridge Rd and socialise on the weekend. If any of you met us at the point, you may have noticed how much we both moaned all the time. I like to think that has lessened slightly now. It was also the first round proper of the FA Trophy. Ebbsfleet played Carlshalton on the 15th Dec and won 4-1 after an early scare. It was a lovely sunny day. This was to be the first step on the road to Wembley.
On the Thursday before 25 December, Will and I went out for Christmas food and drinks in the local Thai restaurant and got very drunk on Guinness. I think we were both at the end of our respective tethers and Christmas came at exactly right time. I went back home to Liverpool with the girlfriend and spent a week with family and friends. My Birthday was on the 28th Dec so I had a big blow out before coming back to London and starting on the site again on the 30th. When Will and I met up again we both had recharged the batteries and got straight back in to it with renewed gusto.
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