A few years back, I got off a bus in the middle of downtown Memphis Tennessee. I had about an hour to kill before the Greyhound would be refueled and headed off on the next part of my LA to Cincinnati trip, so I decided to give the bus station breakfast a miss and snoop around a little.

As I walked out the doors of the Greyhound terminal, I was met with a vision of the way things should be. A beautiful new ballpark, built in an early 20th century style, that seemed to have been scooped out of the downtown core with a gigantic spoon. As I walked up to the wrought iron gates, the brilliant green of a well-tended outfield jumped out to meet me, and crowds of local folks – some in seats, some with blankets and picnic baskets for use on the grassy bleachers – all of them coming to watch their team.

And when I say ‘their team’, I mean it in a literal sense.

Back in 1997, Dean Jernigan spent $8 million in bringing the Redbirds
to town, and then he gave the team to the city, putting a foundation of 17 civic and business leaders in control, vowing never to take a salary for all his efforts.

Since then, the Memphis Redbirds have blossomed as a community-owned, non-profit Triple-A franchise of the St Louis Cardinals. They earn about $5m a year after expenses, which they then give away to charities in the Memphis area. They’re the only professional sports franchise that is exempt from paying taxes by virtue of their charitable status. The foundation’s bylaws dictate that the leadership of the group must be 50% women, and that the board should be made up of similar ethnic backgrounds as the people of Memphis proper.

In short, it’s baseball fan nirvana; a team of the people, for the people, by the people.

The NFL’s Green Bay Packers have been a community-owned team since 1923; one that wouldn’t exist in its present location if not for the absence of a single ownership group determined to maximize revenues above all else.

But a new form of community ownership has recently arisen – in English soccer, no less – that I think has deep implications for the presently on-life-support Canadian baseball community.

That is the model of ‘crowdsourcing’.

A few weeks back, I spotted a news item on some obscure blog in some obscure corner of the online universe. It seemed that a website called MyFootballClub had appeared on the internet with a novel plea to potential users; become a paid member, and when enough cash is raised, you will be a part owner of an English soccer team.

My first thought was, "Yeah right." After all, the online fundraising concept had been something I’d seen tried many times in the movie industry, and it almost never amounted to anything more than sixteen relatives of the producer spotting him a hundred bucks each to make a terrible short. With the exception of the John Malkovich film, Shadow of the Vampire, which had literally thousands of ‘producers’ who had thrown down $25 a piece, nothing had ever really come from these attempts, because they always seemed to be nothing more than an offer to buy a screen credit.

The concept has been called many things, but the one that sticks seems to be ‘crowdsourcing’. It’s being used in a lot of different ways in a lot of different industries – from people looking to gather a group to colonize a remote island, to buying shares in a rock band, and (as we’ve previously discussed on NFTN) even to investing in minor league ball players.

But the MyFootballClub site seemed to be just a little different. It tapped into the ever-popular passion of sports fans to test their ‘management’ know-how in video games and fantasy leagues, and as a result, people were biting.

The more I read about the website’s plans, the more legit (and fun) it seemed. These guys weren’t looking to take over Chelsea or Arsenal – they only intended to raise enough cash to buy into a struggling non-league semi-pro team (about 750k in all), secure its future in the community, and start the long task of pushing it to promotion to the Premiership… or at least the Football League proper

The idea wasn’t that investors would receive a return on their money if that happened – ultimately, they wouldn’t even get a share certificate to pin to their cubicle wall. Rather, the concept was that one deserving team that needed help to survive would become ‘our’ team, and we as owners would be asked to actually help in the running of the franchise – from voting on team selection, to deciding what jersey design to go with. Games would be streamed online, the coach would cede to the will of the owners on who to transfer out and who to bring in, and folks from around the world would support the side from afar.

"Heck with it," I thought, as I plonked down my 35 pounds. "I want in."

It’s been a few weeks since I took part in the great online community sports ownership experiment, and I have to say I’m hooked. Since I’ve been aboard, the users have voted on which team they’d buy (non-league Ebbsfleet United ultimately got the nod), which supplier would provide their playing kit, whether the coach could trade away a player that they had no room for, and who would play in the team proper.

The purchase was recently confirmed – 28,000 users of the site are now 75% owners of the team – myself included.

Which is all a lot of fun and all, but the important side of all this is the other end – the community end. For the people who have supported Ebbsfleet for years as they struggled with debt and sold prospects to stay alive, this is like manna from heaven. Suddenly their team has UKP 750,000 to play with (possibly more), merchandise sales are through the roof, people are coming to watch their games from all over the UK, and recently, when the team had a pair of away games scheduled a day apart, the members voted to hold an extraordinary fundraising drive to help pay for hotel rooms for the team, thereby ensuring they’d be at their best for the second game, rather than have to make four bus trips in three days. 

In the world of English football, this is unprecedented. Sure, there are plenty of supporters trusts around, but none with the size and involvement of this.

Team needs new boots? Ask the owners for cash, and it floods in from all over the world, with nothing expected in return other than a result on Saturday.

The coach keeps sending out that slow-footed defender while the hot prospect rots on the bench? The owners simply vote the rookie into the lineup.

Granted, not everyone is a fan of this concept. Most naysayers seem to think the idea of mass ownership will end up seeing the team sending out a host of over-the-hill celebrities rather than up-and-comers, or that they’ll ramp up the payroll and leave the team in a deep financial hole when it all inevitably ‘goes pear-shaped’.

But having been involved in the concept for long enough to get a feel for the place, the moron brigade seems to be small, disinterested, and incredibly overwhelmed by passionate football fans who know the game, care about the team, and want it to thrive right where it is. In short, it’s exactly what was promised, and then some.

So how does this apply to Canadian baseball? Well, the way I see it, there’s got to be millions of baseball fans in this country, scattered about like Mark McGwire’s backne, but how many of them have no team to root for? 

Why couldn’t a city like Saskatoon or Winnipeg or Edmonton or Calgary – you know, those cities that saw their minor league teams stolen by other towns, or shut down entirely – set up a similar site, with a view to raising the cash necessary to buy their ball teams back?

The Redbirds raised most of the $80m required to build a state of the art, best in the nation, Triple-A stadium from private money. So let’s say Calgary did similar – there’s surely enough corporate cash looking for a home in that town to make it doable – and then put out the call online for anyone, anywhere, who has ever wanted to own a piece of a baseball team, to throw down $40 and be a part of the team?

Heck, why couldn’t the C’s themselves do something similar? We could call it MyTripleABallteam.com, and sell shares to a future stadium in, say, the False Creek area, to anyone on the internet who’d like a piece of the pie. Become a paid member, and when the money raised gets to $5m, the team breaks ground.

Whether it happens in Thunder Bay, Labrador, Yellowknife, or smack dab on Main Street, I’ve got my $40 right here to the first city that makes it happen.

I wanna be an owner, dammit. 

UPDATE: Looks like other folks have the same idea. MySoccerClubUSA.com has sprung up in the last few weeks, selling memberships for $50 a piece, and looking to raise enough cash to put an NASL soccer team in Scranton Pennsylvania. They’ve raised about $13k so far, which is about 10% of their goal.

Me? I think I’ll wait until they’re a bit closer.