Heres an idea. If every Bulls fan in the city paid £15 to a supporters trust could we use the money to buy a position on the board and contribute financially to the team to pay for signings & salary cap etc



If 15000 fans gave £15 a head that would make £225K annually for the club. They would have to let the fans have a say in club matters. Someone wise like Bullseye FA or ME could form a fans council or be spokesperson elect to make sure the club don't just use the money on things like fixing a broken toilet.

I reckon if the fans togetrher bought a stake in the club it would be to everyones benefit. OK the numbers are ambitious but if 8000 hardcore fans made largish donations the club would not ignore it. We would have to stipulate that we would get a place on the board though.

Thoughts

Thoughts?

Good luck getting 1500 fans donating £15 nevermind 15,000!

What percentage stake in the club would 225K buy?

Dunno that's a best case scenario but it would be anough to pay the salary of one of our top earners I reckon.

One thing I learnt from being in BISA way back was that you would have to put in plenty of work to run something like this. It takes hundreds of volunteer hours to run a smallish supporters association and if you're dealing with cash in the region of 100s of thousands there come serious responsibilities. As a result you'd be lucky to find anyone willing to take all that on voluntarily. You'd need at least a team of 10 people to run it and they'd have to be committed enough to meet regularly in their own time.

As for getting 15k fans to put their hands in their pockets I think that's pretty unlikely. Most Bulls fans aren't interested in anything other than turning up and watching a winning side. Persuading them of the benefits of coughing up the cash would be difficult, you'd have to offer them something extra in return and the admin for dealing with all that would be pretty immense.

Nice idea in theory.

Yep I thought that. You'd also have to bring a solicitor in and draw up some sort of legal arrangement to cover the cash. What about a squad builder thing if we could get enough together to pay the salary of a player the club could sign him and wed be named as the players sponsor. For the sort of cash above it could be a class winger and then everytime he scored Steve bailey would announce Try scorer sponsored by the Keith Booaza Squad Builder Israel Folau!!

Substander.com raise enough cash to sponsor a player. Could RAB manage that?

I'd like to think so. That'd be good. Lets sponser Michael Platt or Rikki Sheriffe

Can we get them on the RAB banner asap?

Spot on. What I also remember from those days is apathy amongst 99% of fans. Even those who would be interested in contributing, would probably just want to give a bit of money and then not really hear anything else. One of the biggests problems BISA had was getting members involved and actually coming up with ideas themselves. A lot of people seemed to think that they contributed their membership and then expected the committee to come up with the ideas and do all the work, when in actual fact, that committee were just volunteers too. I think the same apathy would be evident in a scheme like this and it's hard to find more than a handful of people willing to devote some time.

Maybe we should all just put a few quid on the Euromillions every week and cross our fingers

I'm in. So only 14,999 more to go.

That's not as daft as it sounds.

Imagine if a group of us agreed to donate £1 or so, so that we had enough money to have one or two lines per week on the Euro millions and any winnings would be donated to the club. 52 draws a year at £1.50 is only £78 a year we'd need to find.

You could pick the numbers based on players squad numbers - another sure fire way to blame Michael Platt when his number is not drawn from the machine on a weekly basis!!!

But, imagine if we hit a big pay out! We'd have a roof or full development in no-time.

Too right.

What we learned from BISA was that there seem to be large numbers of Bulls supporters with strong opinions that "someone needs to do something about it", but when it comes to getting involved you end up with the same small dedicated numbers. I'm afraid that the majority just do not want to know. Its like how many of those with issues with the club have ever actually bothered to do what Hood and Duffy said, and ask them?

15,000? You'd struggle to get 150.

What he said. Word for word.

Although do keep up...the scapegoat brigade have turned their attention to Worrincy and Sheriffe now...

Worrincy being a scapegoat is an odd one. He's not class but he's not that bad. Other than his dash out of the line against Wigan i cant recall that many try costing/match costing errors.

The one where he let Steve Wild walk right past him, 2nd game of the season is another that springs to mind. He's terrible.

In theory, this is a nice idea and I for one would be very willing to pay some form of annual sub and also get involved in the running of the organisation as there will be very strict rules and regs to follow, both on a financial point of view and from a legal perspective.

I can't see this every materalising into anything but I would be onbaord if it did!

RAB Hospitality box anyone?

Who at the Bulls hasn't missed a tackle that's led to a try that ultimately has contributed to us losing a game?

Plenty, but most contribute more to the game than Worrincy does.

I'd put a couple of hundred into an idea like this.