Fan owned Pompey just got promoted, we won't be playing them next season.
Fan ownership saved Portsmouth from disaster but it can only take a club so far
27 March 2017 • 4:13pm
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Portsmouth fans currently own the club by a Supporters Trust Credit: Getty images
At Portsmouth the fans do not find anything amusing in the idea of a Mickey Mouse owner. Alexandre Gaydamak, Sulaiman al-Fahim, Balram Chainrai: the long succession of cartoon clowns who plunged their club to the very lip of extinction provided neither fun nor japes.
No club has been through it quite to the degree that Pompey did at the beginning of this decade. What a miserable time that was for the supporters. As a procession of owners presided over administration, insolvency and a vertiginous plunge down the football pyramid, ending up in League Two just five seasons
after having won the FA Cup, it appeared only the football authorities could regard them as fit and proper persons. It is hard to believe any cartoon rodent would have made a worse job of things than that shower. All of them were greedy, several were fraudulent and at least one turned out not actually to exist. These were Micky Mice so cack-handed they made Donald Trump look competent.
So you can understand that when a man who actually made his money out of Mickey arrives on the South Coast promising a rocket-fuelled ride back to
the Premier League there might be more than a moment’s hesitation among the supporters before they string out the bunting. Yet the irony is, Michael Eisner, the billionaire former Disney executive who is seeking to take over the club, might just represent a first among putative Portsmouth owners: a man prepared to put his money where his mouth is.
His arrival presents fans with the deepest of dilemmas. As invariably happens when a club reaches the point of destruction, back in 2013 it was left to supporters to keep the place alive. The shyster owners had long ago fled Fratton Park as hundreds of Pompey diehards paid £1,000 each to revivify the object of their obsession. And what a fine job they did. The once comedy finances are now in order; debt has been eradicated, the stadium is safe in club ownership, there is a smart new training ground.
But there is also a sense of restricted ambition. After being resuscitated by the Supporters Trust the club has gone about as far as it can without a serious injection of capital. And no matter how vigorously buckets are shaken outside Fratton Park, the sort of money needed to project Pompey back up the divisions is unlikely to be found in the pockets of regular match-goers. Hence the seriousness with which Eisner’s approach is being taken.
Former Portsmouth chairman Alexandre Gaydamak Credit: Getty Images
With his arrival the supporters have reached a point of profound choice. Are they happy for the club to remain a fan-owned operation, its growth entirely organic? Or, given that understandably he wishes to be in sole charge were he to buy, do they cede control to a wealthy owner in return for the promise of future good times? After all, the latter worked at Bournemouth and at Swansea, where fans rescued the club before handing over to outsiders to underwrite their upward trajectory.
What Portsmouth supporters need to discover is whether Eisner is another Maxim Demin,
the man behind Bournemouth’s stellar rise, or another Vladimir Antonov, the Lithuanian fraudster who briefly held sway at Fratton Park. They have 70 days to find out. Which is roughly the time Antonov was in charge.
That is the period Eisner has been given by the Supporters' Trust to make appropriate due diligence of the business. But – since Eisner will require the backing of 75 per cent of the supporter owners to achieve his takeover - it is him fans should be checking out before they vote on whether to gift him their club. A plebiscite in which the voters have to make a choice between remaining with stark reality or gambling on wild promises of a glorious future: it sounds horribly familiar. For Portsmouth supporters, this is not a Mickey Mouse vote.
