The members of MyFootballClub.co.uk bought the club for £600,000 in February 2008 and just three months later Ebbsfleet United won the FA Trophy at Wembley, the club’s greatest achievement so far in a history that dates back to 1890.

There are many benefits to this modest investment, far less than the price of a ticket to most Premiership games. I get to actually help pick the team, decide on transfers in and out, get a free match day programme sent to me via email and vote on everything from marketing/promotional strategies to the performance of the manager and the board.

There is also a dedicated forum where I can chat with other football fans about any and all football matters, either about Ebbsfleet or more general issues affecting the game.

Ebbsfleet United are currently mid-table in the Blue Square Premier League, only 4 promotions away from the Premier League, and on something of a high right now. Not only is former Ebbsfleet (then called Gravesend & Northfleet) player Jimmy Bullard, now with Fulham, called up to the latest full England squad for the imminent 2010 World Cup qualifying matches against Andorra and Croatia but the team also has 3 players, goalkeeper Lance Cronin, central defender James Smith and striker Luke Moore in the England C squad.

The club is handily located close to the high speed Eurostar hub Ebbsfleet International, making it easy for the club’s international fanbase to get to the games.

Here is a list of some of the key milestones in the history of the world’s first and only internet community owned football club:-

2007

26 April – My Football Club launches.

31 July – 53,000 register their names and email addresses on the website.

1 August – £250,000 is collected on the first day membership fees are accepted.

10 August – £500,000 is collected in 10 days and MyFootballClub has over 12,000 members.

August to November – Nine football clubs approach MyFootballClub, asking to be purchased.

13 November – A deal in principle is reached to buy Ebbsfleet United (EUFC), from the Blue Square Premier division.

2008

12 February – Members vote to accept Nike’s offer to become the club’s kit and merchandise supplier.

21 February – MyFootballClub members vote to complete the purchase of EUFC for around £600,000. Over 21,000 members from 70 different countries own 75% of the club.

14 March – Members elect seven members onto the My Football Club Society Limited Board.

15 March – EUFC reach Wembley for the first time in their history, beating Aldershot 4-2 over two legs in the FA Trophy Semi Final.

8 April – Members vote to freeze season ticket prices at the club.

9 May – Members travel from over 20 countries to watch the Final, including Australia, America, Canada, Turkey, Croatia, Italy and Sweden.

10 May – EUFC lift the FA Trophy at Wembley after beating Torquay 1-0. Up to 5,000 overseas members watch an online feed provided by the FA and Sky, and over 26,000 Fleet fans at Wembley – old and new – witness the historic victory.

June/July – Ebbsfleet United enjoy record season ticket sales for the 08/09 campaign.

9 June – Members vote to set the weekly playing budget at £10,000.

August – Members and supporters raise £20,000 among themselves to buy striker Michael Gash from Cambridge City.

Most recently the members voted to allow the transfer of star striker John Akinde to Championship side Bristol City for a club record transfer fee of £150,000.

Obviously it remains to be seen if this kind of transfer of power from faceless corporations to grassroots fans can be sustained if and when Ebbsfleet United progress up the league ladder but it is a great feeling to be so intimately involved in the day to day running of a real (as opposed to fantasy) football club.

Due to a whole ton of reasons which will one day be chronicled elsewhere, I haven’t been keeping About Manchester United (™) up to date, but it features match reviews and news stories about the World’s Greatest Football Team (© 2008 Christopher Rose), nothing totally original, just one guy’s small tribute to his home town team.

About two years ago, at the start of the 2006-2007 season, I published an article looking forward to the coming season and detailing United’s fixtures for the season ahead.

It was no big deal, just a list of fixtures that I compiled myself from a variety of sources such as the online BBC Football section and from the Red Devils’ own site. I even went so far as to incorporate links back to all the other clubs’ home pages in the fixture list. Hey, even though I support the Greatest Football Team in the World (™), I’m not above giving the little guys a break.

Some time after posting the fixtures, I received an email from some overly excited law firm demanding that I remove the fixtures from the article as it breached the Premier League and/or the FA‘s copyright. What? My tiny blog, which has a combined readership well into the dozens, was a threat to these mighty organisations or was somehow going to put these mighty organisations out of business? Surely this is the law gone mad? Or at least with too much time on its hands.

I was actually very busy struggling to survive at the time (some things never change) and never actually got around to removing the list. My bad!

Fortunately, the legal eagles somehow overlooked my terrible crime of loving a football club and never followed up on their threats to throw me out on the streets, seize all my vast possessions and curse my entire gene line until the end of time. Lucky me.

This was a salutary lesson on the power of big business gone mad and, to show my respect for the great powers that be and the wonderful corporations that now control the World’s Greatest Game (™), I present you the latest list of league fixtures facing the Red Devils in the coming season.

AIG v Northern Rock Sunday 17 August 2008, 16:00

Oki Printers v AIG Monday 25 August 2008, 20:00

Carlsberg Lager v AIG Saturday 13 September 2008, 12:45

Samsung v AIG Sunday 21 September 2008, 14:00

AIG v Reebok Saturday 27 September 2008, 15:00

Crown Paints v AIG Saturday 4 October 2008, 17:30

AIG v T Mobile Saturday 18 October 2008, 17:30

Chang Beer v AIG Saturday 25 October 2008, 12:00

AIG v XL Holidays Wednesday 29 October 2008, 20:00

AIG v Karoo Saturday 1 November 2008, 15:00

Emirates v AIG Saturday 8 November 2008, 12:45

AIG v Britannia Building Society Saturday 15 November 2008, 15:00

Acorns v AIG Saturday 22 November 2008, 17:30

Thomas Cook v AIG Sunday 30 November 2008, 13:30

AIG v Boylesports Saturday 6 December 2008, 15:00

Mansion v AIG Saturday 13 December 2008, 15:00

AIG v JJB Sports Saturday 20 December 2008, 15:00

Britannia Building Society v AIG Friday 26 December 2008, 15:00

AIG v Garmin Sunday 28 December 2008, 14:00

AIG v Samsung Saturday 10 January 2009, 15:00

Reebok v AIG Saturday 17 January 2009, 15:00

T Mobile v AIG Tuesday 27 January 2009, 19:45

AIG v Chang Beer Saturday 31 January 2009, 15:00

XL Holidays v AIG Saturday 7 February 2009, 15:00

AIG v Crown Paints Saturday 21 February 2009, 15:00

AIG v Oki Printers Saturday 28 February 2009, 15:00

Northern Rock v AIG Wednesday 4 March 2009, 19:45

AIG v Carlsberg Lager Saturday 14 March 2009,15:00

LG v AIG Saturday 21 March 2009, 15:00

AIG v Acorns Saturday 4 April 2009, 15:00

Boylesports v AIG Saturday 11 April 2009, 15:00

JJB Sports v AIG Saturday 18 April 2009, 15:00

AIG v Mansion Saturday 25 April 2009, 15:00

Garmin v AIG Saturday 2 May 2009, 15:00

AIG v Thomas Cook Saturday 9 May 2009, 15:00

AIG v Emirates Saturday 16 May 2009, 15:00

Karoo v AIG Sunday 24 May 2009, 16:00

Welcome to the future, sports fans.

I note that AIG have a particularly difficult start to the new season with the opening fixture against Northern Rock followed by three consecutive away games against Oki Printers, Carlsberg Lager and Samsung. Typical!

The author would like to convey his personal appreciation to the unnamed company that designed the almost identical web sites of a large proportion of the Premier League clubs. I especially like the obligatory two pages of adverts one has to view before actually accessing the web site content. What a great idea! It doesn’t make the football clubs seem somewhat of an afterthought at all…

Fresno State Bulldogs win College World Series

The Bulldogs’ amazing run to the title – winning their local league, then regional and super-regional championships, brushing aside the challenges of national powerhouse schools Arizona State, Rice and North Carolina before defeating 8th-ranked Georgia in the championship series – has rightly been called a Cinderella story. The team from a modest university in rural California was rated 89th in the country going into the tournament, and ended up as the lowest-ranked school ever to win a national college championship in any sport.

Fresno State Bulldogs welcome home

To put their achievement into perspective, it is as if the current world number 89 tennis player, Galina Voskoboeva (yes, that’s right… who?) were to win the women’s singles at Wimbledon, or as if Notts County – the team that finished 89th in English senior football last season – were to lift the FA Cup. As implausible as both those scenarios seem, they go some way to explaining why jaws have been dropping across America and why Fresno is suddenly on the map for more than bad air and being the birthplace of Sam Peckinpah.

The popularity of college sports in the United States is hard for outsiders to fathom. In Britain, the only college sporting event that gets any national attention is, bizarrely, the University Boat Race – in a sport which otherwise inspires total apathy among the general public except when the likes of Redgrave and Pinsent are performing their Olympic heroics. The only reason the Boat Race is watched at all is probably because it takes place on the Thames: back when the river was London’s main artery of commerce, the race would have brought the entire city grinding temporarily to a halt so that there was nothing else to do but watch it.

British universities do play other organised sports, of course, but they tend to be strictly low-key affairs. Stop a passer-by in the streets of Loughborough, for example, and ask him how his local university’s rugby team is doing, and he will probably give you a blank stare. A game between the Uniteds of Oxford and Cambridge, even though both teams are now languishing in the Conference – the fifth tier of English football – will draw a much bigger crowd than a match between their university counterparts.

College teams have occasionally had some measure of success competing against the professionals rather than each other: Oxford University reached the FA Cup Final a couple of times in the 1880s, and more recently an outfit named Team Bath – comprised of students from the university in that city – has actually outstripped the achievements of the local professional club.

But those are rare exceptions. Professional sports in Europe do not look to universities to recruit, preferring to nurture young talent under the auspices of their own youth development programs. The situation in the United States is radically different. Surprisingly perhaps for such a materialistic culture, the concept of professional sports took a long time to catch on. Sport was seen as a gentlemanly pursuit, and prior to the Second World War, although there were professional leagues, being paid to play was regarded as sleazy, if not downright dishonorable. For most ‘athletes’ (as they are generically called here) who wanted to play at the highest level, college therefore offered the best opportunities.

As they tended to be the largest organisations in their communities, the universities were beacons not only of academia but also of athletics, and often became the focus of a city’s identity. In the absence of any press attention for the despised professionals, people followed the fortunes of their collegiate teams and identified closely with them. Fans were as passionate as any Manchester United or Real Madrid supporter. Some colleges became world-famous in large part because of their athletics programs: Notre Dame’s football team – ‘The Fighting Irish’ – is perhaps the best-known example. Even in today’s world of the multi-billion dollar NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball and other sporting circuses this tradition has endured – particularly with football and basketball, which professionalised much later than baseball and ice hockey and are followed as keenly as the pros, often even drawing larger TV audiences for the big end-of-season matches.

The relationship between a community and its college athletes is especially intense in towns like Fresno, which does not have a major league team. Home football games at Bulldog Stadium regularly draw capacity crowds of 45,000 – one-tenth of the city’s population. The university’s new 15,000-seat indoor arena, the Save Mart Center, is always packed for both men’s and women’s basketball. And although baseball receives somewhat less attention – especially now that Fresno has a minor league professional club with a brand new stadium downtown – the excitement and anticipation that rippled through the town as the ‘Diamond Dogs’ disposed of opponent after superior opponent was palpable. What had been unthinkable only a few weeks ago suddenly seemed like more than a dream.

Still, the town braced itself for disappointment. Fresno State’s first and only national championship in any sport had been ten years before, in women’s softball. That team had gone on to make up the bulk of the American gold medal-winning squad at the Sydney Olympics. Since then, nothing. The football and basketball teams often promised much but failed to deliver, beset by scandals involving cheating, unethical coaching practices, sexual harassment and payment for playing (college sports are still strictly amateur). The baseball program had avoided being tainted by most of this but even so, the team was so lowly-ranked that they surely could not go on causing upsets.

But they could.

As thousands of well-wishers lined the streets around the university and filed into the baseball stadium the next day to welcome them home, the reality and magnitude of the Bulldogs’ achievement was still sinking in – for the players as well as the townsfolk. Though they clearly enjoyed soaking up the adulation as they rolled slowly past the cheering masses of red-shirted fans atop two borrowed city fire trucks, they also seemed genuinely touched by their reception, not to mention a little bewildered. Some of the players had already been drafted by major league clubs before the team’s victory, and several more now most assuredly will be offered pro contracts. Only a very small number of them will go on to a successful career in baseball, but for all 25 members of the squad, life will never be the same.

In one sense these are regular college men, showing up to classes and sitting in rows just like any other student. The majority of them are not due to complete their degrees for a year or more. But their phones are undoubtedly ringing off the hook already, and for some the pressure to forego the rest of their education and sign a pro contract will be relentless. Already they are household names.

For an outsider – even a semi-outsider like me – it’s hard to grasp. I know which boat crossed the finish line at Chiswick Bridge first this spring, but I could not name a single member of the victorious Oxford eight or their cox – and neither, I suspect, could 99% of people. Matthew Pinsent rowed in the event three times, but it was his Olympic exploits which brought him fame. For the general public, the Boat Race is a straight shootout: the only thing of importance is which crew won. But a tickertape parade through the streets of Oxford? Probably not.

It doesn’t take much to feel the lift this national championship has wrought over the town. Fresno is something of a national joke – a kind of Californian Croydon – struggling as it does with its remote and ugly location, high unemployment, poverty and rampant pollution. Everywhere you go you see the university’s red and blue colors in store windows, in front yards and on the local buses. People have been queueing around the block outside the Bulldog Shop to buy commemorative T-shirts, flags, bumper stickers and other merchandise. Young people are going online to say that the College World Series triumph has made them proud for the first time to be a Fresno State student. A city starved of success – sporting or otherwise – can finally say it is the best in something. And at least for a short time, until the fall and yet another football season of promise and disappointment brings us back to reality, perhaps that will prove to be an even greater achievement for Steve Detwiler and his teammates than any victory on the baseball diamond.

At last, the game of games is here. Forgive the bias but today’s the day the Soviet Cyborgs face off against the Euro-Latino Allstars from the Theatre of Dreams. Yes, it’s Chelsea v Manchester United for the right to be known as the champions of Europe for the next twelve months. It’s as much a clash of footballing philosophy: the best two teams in England – and history – will be made tonight.

At a distance of 1,500 miles the pitch looks okay but the English head groundsman says it is pretty bumpy. With the amount of rain there’s been in Moscow today this two week old turf is going to cut up badly, which favours Chelsea’s power over United’s art.

It’s game on and United get things going, playing 4-4-2 against Chelsea’s 4-5-1. Just for the record: Manchester United line up with Van der Sar; Brown, Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra; Hargreaves, Carrick, Scholes, Ronaldo; Rooney, Tevez plus Kuszczak, Anderson, Giggs, Nani, O’Shea, Fletcher and Silvestre on the bench. Chelsea start with Cech; Essien, Terry, Carvalho, Ashley Cole; Malouda, Makelele, Ballack, Lampard, Joe Cole; Drogba and have Cudicini, Shevchenko, Mikel, Kalou, Alex, Belletti and Anelka as their substitutes.

Both teams make a fast start and there’s action at both ends right away. They’re both going for it full on tonight, no hedging the bets here. Both teams have scoring chances inside the first 7 minutes and anything could happen tonight scorewise. 0-0 just doesn’t look like an option.

Possibly in an attempt to blind United, Chelsea keeper Peter Cech is wearing a vicious fluorescent dayglow orange strip and looks like he’s been tangoed!

After 17 minutes a little flurry of handbags on the edge of the Chelsea penalty area leads to an even bigger spat between Scholes and Makelele which leaves both players getting a yellow card and, as we learn later, Scholes with a broken nose. The heat is on!

Chelsea may have been the first to draw blood but on 26 minutes United cause some serious damage to Chelsea’s dream of winning their first Champions League crown. A Wes Brown cross from the right flies into the the penalty area and who else but Ronaldo soars majestically above Chelsea’s defence and powers a beautifully judged and unstoppable header into the corner of Chelsea’s goal. 1-0 to the Red Devils!

Seven minutes later Chelsea almost equalise when a Drogba cross into the danger zone is headed goalwards by the normally reliable United captain Rio Ferdinand, but a stunning instinctive save from Van der Sar keeps the ball out.

United immediately break into Chelsea’s penalty area and have two great chances, from Tevez and Carrick, saved by Cech, who is proving beyond all doubt that he is the best goalie in the world right now.

Chelsea respond with repeated attempts to get the equaliser and with just seconds remaining of the first 45 minutes get a lucky break. Essien strikes a hit and hope shot into the United box which rebounds wildly off both Vidic and Ferdinand and lands at the feet of Lampard. His instinctive shot wrong foots Van der Sar who slips and the ball is in United’s net. It’s 1-1 and, going in to the break, the momentum has clearly swung Chelsea’s way.

United have had the best of the first half but that last minute Chelsea goal means they’ve ended up worst off. Sir Alex Ferguson has to restore confidence and get United to play to their own strengths again in the second half. Chelsea manager Avram Grant just has to keep the resurgent Blues doing what they have been doing since the kick off – try to contain United’s attacks and catch them on the break.

Fifteen minutes later Chelsea get the second half started but it’s United that start to play first, pressing Chelsea back and looking for a second goal. They can’t keep it going however and Chelsea gradually start to overwhelm the physically smaller United team.

For most of the next 40 minutes, Chelsea actually lay siege to the United goal and the Reds can barely get out of their own half. Try as they might though, Chelsea can’t get a goal, the closest they come being a 78th minute shot from nowhere by Drogba which beats Van der Sar but slams into the goalpost and away.

With 4 minutes left a new United appearances record was made when the already legendary Ryan Giggs came on for the broken-nosed Paul Scholes. It’s his 759th game for United and the previous record holder, Munich ’58 disaster survivor Sir Bobby Charlton, is the first to lead the applause.

Surprisingly, that was the first substitution of the entire match but was followed rapidly by the second with Chelsea replacing Malouda with Kalou. Then the whistle blows and it’s extra time in the pouring rain in Moscow.

The pace of the game has noticeably slowed as extra time gets started and Chelsea’s territorial dominance has gone, with chances coming at both ends. Chelsea’s best is Lampard hitting the bar with Van der Sar slipping again whilst United have a certain goal from Ryan Giggs blocked by an elastic necked header from John Terry.

After 8 minutes Chelsea make their second change, bringing on Anelka for Joe Cole, followed three minutes later by United replacing Wayne Rooney, who had had a relatively subdued match, with young Portuguese rising star Nani and that was about the last significant action of the first period of extra time.

With six minutes left in the match and penalties looming, a sudden bout of mystery handbags exploded which culminated in the ever temperamental Drogba slapping Vidic and getting sent off, which is pretty much the end of the game. Both managers made last minute substitutions with the penalty shootout in mind; Chelsea bringing on Belletti for Makelele and United swapping Anderson for Brown.

So it’s all over and now there’s the exquisite torture of the penalty shootout. Anything can happen and does!

It’s Tevez and Ballack in the first round and neither makes a mistake, followed by the equally successful Carrick and Belletti. Then comes the first error as Ronaldo tries his usual trick of pausing in the runup, hoping to induce Cech to dive. The world’s best goalie holds his ground and Ronaldo makes a weak shot which Cech easily saves. Is it all over for the Red Devils?

Hargreaves and Ashley Cole both score as does Nani for United and then John Terry strides purposefully forward. If the Chelsea captain scores it’s all over for United and I for one was sure the dream was over. Amazingly, Terry slips and, with Van der Sar going the wrong way, shoots wide onto the post. It’s 4-4 after the obligatory set of 5 penalties and now we’re into sudden death!

The dreadlocked Brazilian Anderson steps forward for United and makes no mistake, as does Kalou for Chelsea. Then it is the turn of the record breaking Ryan Giggs to score and the pressure lands on Chelsea striker Anelka. He strikes the ball well enough but it is at a comfortable height and Van der Sar saves it!

It’s all over and United are champions of Europe again. Awesome stuff as United celebrate wildly and Ronaldo collapses in tears.

The veteran striker pounced after Cardiff goalkeeper Peter Enckelman could only flap at a John Utaka cross.

The two unlikely finalists contested a spirited if unspectacular game in front of a sell-out crowd for the second Final at the new Wembley. With Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool having all fallen by the wayside by the sixth-round stage, many have seen this season’s competition as the ‘everyfan’ Cup – a chance for some of the less powerful clubs to shine. So dominant have the Premier League’s ruling elite become that the FA Cup is seen as one of the few opportunities for other clubs to win some silverware; even so, this was to be only the third time in the last 20 years that a team other than one of the Big Four would be taking home the famous old trophy.

Cardiff, bidding to become the first winners from outside the top flight since West Ham in 1980, started looking the more purposeful and Pompey keeper David James was called into action early on to deny Paul Parry. But although they enjoyed plenty of possession, they rarely posed a serious threat and the Portsmouth back line, bossed by captain Sol Campbell and England international Glen Johnson, comfortably absorbed most of the pressure.

Harry Redknapp’s side soon began to stamp their authority on the game and spotted opportunities to test Enckelman, who looked uncomfortable in the slippery conditions and did not make a single held save in the entire game, preferring to punch or parry whatever came his way. Still they failed to create a serious chance until the 21st minute, when Kanu inexplicably pushed his shot against the post after comfortably rounding the keeper.

Sixteen minutes later he made up for his blunder when Utaka’s cross wrong-footed Enckelman, who could only palm the ball out to the waiting Nigerian, and Kanu made no mistake this time with a simple tap-in.

Cardiff almost came up with an immediate response when Parry’s cross picked out Kevin McNaughton at the right post but the Scot, at full stretch, sliced well wide. The Welsh side did get the ball in the net just before the interval, but Glen Loovens was correctly adjudged to have controlled it with his arm before sending his lobbed shot over James.

Pompey made their superior strength and fitness tell in the second half, a series of bruising physical challenges in midfield breaking up numerous Cardiff attacks and forcing referee Mike Dean to show several yellow cards. For all their possession, the Bluebirds seemed out of ideas and it was no surprise when Dave Jones withdrew the tiring Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink – appearing in possibly his last game for the club – and Peter Whittingham, replacing them with Steve Thompson and 17-year-old Aaron Ramsey. The two substitutes succeeded in making the Portsmouth defence work harder but an equaliser looked as far off as ever.

And Cardiff might have fallen further behind when Sylvain Distin embarked on a mazy run which was only stopped by a well-timed tackle from Roger Johnson.

But in the end, a single goal was enough and Sol Campbell led his team’s victorious climb to the Royal Box to collect the Cup from Sir Bobby Robson. Portsmouth held the trophy for seven years the last time they won it, when the competition was suspended during the Second World War. They, and many others, will savour this triumph for at least as long, both as a glorious day for Portsmouth Football Club and a rare moment in the sun for one of English football’s second string.