English football clubs have gone into administration 62 times since 1992

A club can feel permanent and still be one bad owner away from collapse.

Sixty two times. That is how often, since the Premier League began in 1992, an English club has run out of money and been handed to administrators. Some clubs on that list went under more than once. It is easy to assume a football club is a fixture, as permanent as the streets around the ground, because it was there before you were born and you expect it to outlast you. The number says otherwise. A club is a business, and like any business it can be run into the ground, usually by people who treated it as theirs to gamble with.

What makes football different is who pays when it fails. When an ordinary company folds, its customers shrug and shop elsewhere. When a club folds, something closer to a bereavement happens, because you cannot simply switch the team you love. The supporters who kept the turnstiles clicking for decades are the last to be consulted and the first to grieve. That mismatch, between who carries the loyalty and who holds the power, is the thing this figure quietly exposes.

It is also why the number should not only frighten you. A problem this repeated has a shape, and shapes can be changed. The clubs that survived their collapses almost always did so because supporters organised, raised money, and in some cases took ownership so it could never happen again. The fragility is real, but so is the answer, and the answer tends to be people acting together rather than waiting for a rich rescuer who may never come, or who may turn out to be the next one to gamble.

The Tribe is being built around that answer, and we will be plain that we do not own a club yet. The ambition is a team its supporters genuinely own, run openly, and cannot lose to one bad owner. We are not claiming it exists. We are asking the people who have watched their own club wobble, or worse, to help build the version where the fans hold the keys. If that is you, being early is not a consolation prize. It is the whole point of starting now.