P2P Finance, Richard Branson, Buy Your Own Footie Club

Besides Zopa and Prosper the professional peer-to-peer finance market seems to move fast. As ‘Endless Innovation‘ reports:

Now, as alarm:clock points out, it looks like billionaire British tycoon Richard Branson has stepped up to the plate with an investment in social lending site CircleLending.

Circle Lending specializes on loans in between friends and families.

And if you Sellaband.com with its crowd-investment into music is a crazy(ily sucessfull) idea then check out the idea of ‘crowd-buying’ a football club – and if its only to piss those Russian oligarchs off. O’Reilly GMT reports:

Owning a football club was always the preserve of remote and arrogant self-made millionaires who built a winning side or leached a club dry, depending on their whim. Ordinary fans with dreams for their team could do little but voice their opinions in song on the terraces – hardly an efficient way to be heard.

But over on MyFootballClub, Will Brooks is gathering eager supporters to chip in £35 each in order to buy a professional British side. He aims to set up a Supporter’s Trust of 50,000 fans to raise a healthy £1,750,000 – which may not be enough to buy the moneybag likes of Chelsea or Manchester United, but I’m sure there are other clubs way down the pecking order who could be bought for that kind of money. Each signatory can suggest a team to buy, and the club with the most votes will be the first club to be approached. Cambridge United is currently top of the poll, with my team, Huddersfield Town, in as fourth choice. Once acquired, the Supporters’ Trust will run the whole club as a business, with input into tactics, transfers and allocation of finances.