Background
MyFC was engineered by former football journalist Will Brooks. Brooks initially estimated MyFC's purchase fund at £1,375,000 if 50,000 people were to sign up as members. All members have voting rights on certain decisions in the club purchased by MyFC and they will collectively manage that club, by making many of the decisions usually made by the manager and others, through a voting system on the MyFootballClub website. However, they do not actually hold any shares. The watershed figure of 50,000 registrations expressing interest in participation was passed on 31 July 2007, with a total of 53,051 registrations completed at that time. At that point, MyFC began collecting payments from those who had registered as well as any new people who signed up subsequently, opening what MyFootballClub described as "phase 2". Paid-up members would participate in a non-binding vote on takeover preference, with Leeds United initially leading the member voting, followed by Cambridge United and Nottingham Forest.
Brooks had said that the club purchased would likely be playing in Football League Two or the Conference National, and MyFootballClub's managers had opened talks with a number of clubs from those leagues. Negotiations between MyFC and various football clubs remained secret during this period due to the confidential nature of the purchase discussions and because of the number of different clubs involved. Also around this time, EA Sports, the sports simulation video games division of Electronic Arts, agreed to a deal with MyFootballClub that "will be supporting us with a significant investment" to boost the group's football club purchasing fund.
On 6 August 2007 it was revealed that four clubs had approached MyFootballClub about the possibility of a sale. Shortly thereafter, The Independent reported that MyFootballClub had raised approximately £500,000 in the first 20 days it had been collecting funds from members to purchase a football club. On 3 September 2007 it was reported that Halifax Town had approached MyFootballClub in an attempt to save the football club from a winding-up order over unpaid taxes. In May 2008, it became public that the other two clubs besides Ebbsfleet United that MyFC had come closest to purchasing were League Two's Mansfield Town and Leigh RMI, then of the Conference North.
Read more about this topic: My Football Club
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