Quote Originally Posted by surge View Post
It's highly unlikely UK football can go down the 50+1 route because it would mean undoing so much of past three decades in football and fans accepting their clubs becoming less able to purchase best players from Europe for £100million plus.

While there are football fans desperate for game to improve ticket prices, representation for women's game, fair compensation for buying young players and not hoarding talent etc. there are also a huge number of fans who don't like the Super League but also don't like that their owners haven't spent as Man City and Chelsea have: seemingly never ending cheque-books and almost always leading to success.

There is also a detained Russian politician who has asked UK to impose sanctions on Roman Abramovich due to close ties to Putin's faux democracy government and yet Roman is one of the most popular owners in UK football. No conversation about the Super League, as far as I can tell, has included talk about how UK football is currently funded.
Fans can't afford to buy the major stake in the big clubs. The interesting thing about the 51% fan ownership in the Bundesliga is that it was introduced in 1998 more as a liberalisation rather than as a restriction - as clubs were not permitted to be privately owned before then.

The model of club ownership in the UK will always involve a tension between fans and wealthy owners - and the drive towards exploiting revenue from other countries where TV viewers attach themselves to clubs merely as a brand seems unstoppable in the long term.