How Corsicans Fixed Popular Football's Biggest Flaw
A Case For Sporting Club Bastia's SCIC Club Ownership Model
Modern Football is Broken
Football has a huge problem…
Though your mind may have instantly jumped to ever-inflating ticket prices, manipulated kick off times, or century-old clubs quietly ceasing to exist, I’d like to name the true source of these problems:
Greedy, unscrupulous businessmen who care only for balance sheets and profit margins. The executives and owners who would willingly watch the very pyramids they climbed crumble beneath them from the safety of inflated transfer fees and broadcasting deals.
The following quote from one of the greatest popular football club sums things up pretty well.
Professional football condemns what is useless, and what is not profitable is useless.
– CAP Murcia
Their cash-loving reign has led to these kinds of questions becoming the norm:
Why share your power with local, lifelong supporters when those abroad are much more lucrative customers? After all, 100% commercialization with 0% control is by far the most cost-effective situation.
Why reinvest profits into the club when you don’t expect to own it in a few years’ time?
Why not relocate your club if they’ve got a bigger, modern ground that runs on a fraction of your current ground’s yearly upkeep in the next city over?
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of these decisions made by the self-appointed czars of the modern game have created the reality we are currently living in. A reality where the World Cup can be bought, and the fans’ control of their beloved football clubs slips further and further with each passing season.
Yet, there is hope. Popular football is still alive.
Wait, what is Popular Football?
If you’re asking yourself this question, you’re in luck! I wrote this article explaining the popular football movement earlier this year.
But, if you don’t want to click over there, here is a brief summary of what popular football is all about:
The popular football movement stands against modern football’s constant pursuit of further riches at the expense of the very people who built the clubs that have become so profitable for oligarchs, sheikhs, and distant billionaires. We to return the game that billions of people cherish back to its roots; back to providing affordable, supporter-owned, community-focused football for supporters.
Now, before I get too carried away, I’ve got some bad news. Popular football is just as flawed.
But so is Popular Football?!
Yup, you read that correctly.
For all its honesty and principles off the pitch, popular football is missing the validation that on-field success brings to any sports philosophy. For example, Athletic Club’s Basque-only policy would be the laughingstock of Spanish football without the club’s topflight status and historic triumphs to back it up. How long would Real Madrid’s “Galácticos” policy have lasted without any silverware to show for it? The same goes for our movement.
Popular Football needs to beat its greedy, corporate brother at its own game.
To legitimize our community-first, populist beliefs, our clubs need to significantly outperform their traditionally run opponents. Phoenix clubs and those taken over by supporters need to emulate and even surpass the success of their past. Sadly, this just doesn’t seem to be happening.
AFC Wimbledon, whose predecessor once pestered the best teams England had to offer, has never achieved higher than a mid-table League One finish and things are only looking worse. Just last season the Dons were nearly relegated from the Football League.
SD Logroñés and Unionistas both have late 90s La Liga heritage, but after a decade of football for each club neither has managed to return to Spain’s second division.
Even FC United of Manchester, one of the most iconic fan-owned clubs, has seemly stagnated in the English seventh tier. That’s the same level they were competing at in 2008! This is borderline disastrous considering how much larger the club’s fan base and reputation is compared to the typical seventh tier club.
As the movement matures, it is becoming more and more clear that the standard design of fan-owned clubs is unlikely to ever bring elite football or trophies to popular football. Without either of those, the message of community-focused, financially transparent, stable football may become nothing more than history. Nothing more than the last protest of a dying breed of football fans.
Instead, we need an ownership structure that allows for significant financial backing to flow through the club that still gives the fans and local community genuine control of their club. Though it sounds like a fairytale, someone may have found the solution six years ago.
Much Needed Corsican Innovation.
Sporting Club Bastia was founded over 118 years ago and is situated in a small port town of roughly 40,000 people on the French island of Corsica. It might seem like an unlikely group for revolutionary ideas to come from, but not to anyone who knows them. The Blues seem to relish rocking the boat
.
In the 1977-78 UEFA Cup, Bastia defeated a Torino side in Turin that hadn’t lost at home for two seasons straight. The small club made it as far as the final before losing to a mighty PSV Eindhoven. Three years later, they lifted the Coupe de France. It’s the only major silverware a Corsican club has ever won.
Yet, the good times didn’t last. In 2017, following relegation from Ligue 1, Bastia found themselves facing over 21 million Euros of debt and were expelled to the fifth tier of French football. (2) A similar dilemma the year before had led to the liquidation of Evian-Thonon-Gaillard FC. Was this the end of the underdogs?
Pierre-Noël Luiggi and Claude Ferrandi didn’t think so.
Together, the two entrepreneurs from Bastia and long-time supporters of the club took over and introduced a new way of doing things. Their idea originally came from a small company in Lyon that distributed locally grown vegetable baskets to its customers. (I promise this is cooler than it sounds). The farmers called it a “cooperative society of collective interest”. SCIC for short. In simple terms, a SCIC connects a socially-beneficial company with its community by dividing the company’s shares between multiple “colleges” who are invested in the business. (1)
Here's what all of that looks like for SC Bastia, which Johan Luiggi, Board Member and Presidente di l'Associu for the club, shared with me in an interview:
Founders: 38% (4 seats on the Board of Directors).
This consists of the Luiggi and Ferrandi Groups.
Local Businesses: 22% (2 seats on the Board of Directors).
Anyone who invests in the club through their company or business.
Supporters: 20% (2 seats on the Board of Directors).
Any individual who wants to buy a share of the club.
Employees: 10% (1 seat on the Board of Directors).
Bastia employees, past and present. Including players and other staff.
Government: 10% (1 seat on the Board of Directors).
Any government entity (municipalities, counties, regional government, etc.) who wants to hold shares. Roughly 50 municipalities hold shares, spread all over Corsica. The city of Bastia is also an active shareholder of the club.
In classic popular football form, a one share one vote principle is present, but within each college. This means each voting bloc’s overall control doesn’t change. Those percentages were locked by agreement when the SCIC was established. In Johan’s own words, “You could be a rich prince and put 50 million on the table, but you still don’t get more votes than anyone else.”
But, what if that needs to change? Another strength of the SCIC model is its flexibility. Though the current distribution of shares between each college is locked, it is always open for reinterpretation. For example, “The socios specifically asked that the business group be slightly larger in voting rights in order to show that we would be welcoming to business investment”.
Speaking of investment, even yearly dividends are ultimately in the hands of the locals. When asked about it, Johan said, “we can redistribute dividends if the annual meeting so wished, but 50% of annual profit minimum must be reinvested into the club per SCIC law”. This is the definition of setting the example.
Yet, my favorite part of it all may just be the education and awareness it brings to each group. “Supporters better understand what business owners want to get out of a matchday at the club instead of blindly labeling them as champagne sippers, and every group is better aware of supporters wants and needs”, Johan said.
If all of this sounds a little bit too good to be true, I’ve still saved the best for last. Since their conversion to a SCIC model, SC Bastia have won A LOT of football matches. Sixty-eight to be exact, which has been enough to secure three consecutive promotions. The club’s new philosophy seems to be anything but a barrier to success.
In their latest campaign, the Corsicans finished 4th in Ligue 2. Had it been a normal season, the islanders would have gotten the chance to fight for a fourth promotion in five seasons via the playoffs. Unfortunately, Ligue 1 restructuring meant there would be no such luck this season. Performances like this won’t go unnoticed for long.
Sure enough, SC Bastia’s model is already changing minds and winning hearts.
The Sociochaux.
A few weeks ago, the DNCG—the financial police of French football—demoted one of France’s first professional clubs, FC Sochaux-Montbéliard, from Ligue 2 to the third division. Furthermore, if the club’s financial state doesn’t improve rapidly, they’ll find themselves competing in the fifth tier next season. (The same fate Bastia faced six years ago.)
In response, over 300 supporters have joined the “Sociochaux” association whose goal is to apply Bastia’s structure to their own club.
‘The idea is to offer a popular shareholding that brings together socios, local businesses, communities and former players alongside a buyer. On the model of what SC Bastia was able to do", specifies Florian Pasqualini , member of the Association.’ (3)
With some luck, stability will come to FCSM and Bastia will have a brother in arms.
In conclusion…
Everything popular football has done is more than commendable and is football in its purest form. It’s genuinely what I love most about the sport. Yet, I fear it may all be in vain if there is never any significant success on the pitch.
With SC Bastia’s innovative SCIC ownership model, I believe popular football clubs all over the world can take a step toward returning the top without sacrificing the control that defines who they are.
I hope you’ve found this as interesting as I have. I hope the necessity of success isn’t too hot of a take, but I think I’m right.
Long live popular football. Forza Bastia. Thanks for reading.
Many many thanks to Johan Luiggi for answering all of my questions and introducing me to such a wonderful club.
