A new direction?
As I begin to gear up for the final semester of thesis, I wanted to dive back into the thought I had at the very end of Rachel Abram’s Thesis course, the removing of the Owners from the stakeholder ecology and what it could mean to teams.
In examining the large stakeholder of the baseball “industry” that I put together, I was drawn to one specific area - that of fans, their teams, and the owners running them. From a conversational model, fans have the goal of “winning”, as do the teams they support. Teams and Fans have the assumption that owners share their goal of winning, but in all actuality, their primary goal is making a profit, sometimes at the expense of winning.
Simultaneously, and in all probability as a result of, fans have found alternative methods of cheering for a “winning” team, most notably through fantasy football. By drafting their own teams, the fans are in direct control of a team’s winning and losing, making decisions on a daily basis that directly impact their teams. However, this comes at a cost, creating a fragmented experience in which many fans are more likely to root for their fantasy teams than their home team, leaving them without a common “tribe” of fellow fans.
But, what if there was an alternative to this model, one that placed fans in direct control of their teams, bypassing the traditional model of singular ownership by a for-profit owner? If fans could own and manage their own teams, what would this do to fan loyalty and support? Would the notion of fantasy football seem trivial to the realities of controlling a real team?
This model is not a new one, as teams like the Packers and Barcelona FC have been run by communities of fans for a century. In this time, these two teams are some of the most successful franchises in their respective leagues during this time. Both are run on a not-for-profit model, with all revenue being invested back into the club or donated to charity, rather than back into the pockets of owners. Beyond winning, these two teams have arguably the most passionate fans in their leagues - the Packers have a waiting list of some 108,000 fans for season tickets.
This is an incredibly complex problem to take on, rooted in a century + of laws, revenue deals, and owners who lose a great sum of money with any disruption to their system. That said, I firmly believe that this is a problem worth solving, as fans are seeing their teams run into the ground by these owners, leaving them little to root for. I believe that the time is right for a model of community ownership to be explored, that in my mind, could potentially transcend sports and be applied to countless other areas.
