When the first Gooner of the season came through the letterbox the thing that really took my eye was the Fanshare advert. Yesterday I saw that it was up and running so like a number of supporters I thought that it would be a nice way to officially own a part of the club.

As I started looking through the FAQs on the Fanshare website it hit me that it is obviously lost the good intentions that the Arsenal Supporters Trust had intended. In order to take part in the programme you first have to pay a joining fee of £20. I accept that this is fair and totally reasonable because there is a fair bit of paperwork involved and there is a private company (Equiniti) running it. The thing that troubled me was that in order to leave the scheme you have to pay £50. So if there was an imminent takeover by one of the main players in six months’ time (which is actually fairly likely) you would have to pay £70 admin cost and then say the £10 a month, that means you are paying £130 to get £60 back. This does not include the commission Equiniti will charge. Dividing a share into 100 means they can charge through the nose for commission.

My next problem is that the figure of £9,500 per full share is being thrown about. Red and White Holdings and Silent Stan would take your hand off if you were selling shares for that price. They have paid up to £15,000 per share on occasions so you might be paying £150 per hundredth of a share. How is it decided whether you get a cheap one or an expensive one?

Has anyone ever tried to buy an Arsenal share? It’s not like buying a pint of milk, they are rare. You can ask Mr Usmanov about that one.

There are 62,000 Arsenal shares on the market which would mean £591,080,500 would have to be raised. Say there are 150,000 Arsenal fans willing to be involved in the scheme they would each have to stump up £4,000. This would force the club even more into the hands of wealthy members and almost remove any working class roots from the club. If you do get a single share it is 0.0016% of the club which effectively means nothing.

Hypothetically speaking say the club was owned by 150,000 fans, how does that work in terms of logic? I don’t think everyone would be going to a shareholders meeting given that it is twice the capacity of Wembley. The examples of plural ownership are Ebbsfleet United (who haven’t exactly climbed the ladder since their venture), Barca, the team with no moral principles and a £450m overdraft and Real Madrid who are pretty well in the same boat. Not a resounding success level for this type of ownership.

The principle of the system is also flawed. It is like some sort of Socialist Ideal that everyone has a say and it is all very democratic. It isn’t at all, there will be a board elected and the fans will maybe be asked one question a year. It will be like saying the population run the UK because they vote in the General Election.

The romantic notion that a club can be run by the fans is unrealistic, impractical and ultimately a waste of money as the only person to benefit from it is the owner of Equiniti. The biggest loser would effectively be Arsenal FC and the supporters.

(Ed’s note – We run an open church here at onlinegooner, providing a platform for the full range of wide and often contradictory views held by Arsenal supporters. We run what is submitted to us, and pieces don’t always concur with our own views. We cannot vouch for the accuracy of the author’s statements about the Fanshare scheme, and I am sure those behind the scheme will respond if there are any inaccuracies. It should be noted that the reaction to the scheme has been overwhelmingly positive and that the interest in it so great that the Fanshare website crashed under the weight of hits on its first day. Normal service was resumed the last time I checked.)