Ross
As someone for who Hearts was their big team before league football came to Inverness, and still spends some time on the Hearts boards here are a few observations:
The fan supported model is hostage to the massive throwing the toys out o& the pam when results, or a result, goes the wrong way. Imagine a number of pledges being cancelled if the penalty shootout had gone the other way last week. Look on Jambos kickback for the number of people threatening to cancel their pledge after eithe a bad result or an indifferent run to see that that income stream may be hard to predict
For the fan ownership thing to work, I feel it has to be in partnership with some more stable money. As with anything, it really helps if you have an idea of your income. If a large amount of this income can change on a whim, or equally a change in circumstances (we currently live in uncertain times).
Both St Mirren & Motherwelll have tried something similar - to what level of success I genuinely don’t know. It would be worth canvassing both sides of those situations to see how it might work for us.
My ultimste fear is whether we could raise enough from our fans to make this work. Hearts have a much larger fan base, and I don’t know these things scale.
But any and everything is worth exploring in these financially challenging times.