Sporting Declaration: Can Newcastle Jets ever be owned by the community?

The battling regional club they followed, based in a working-class city with a famous maritime heritage, had just finished seventh on the EPL points table.

If that was not cause for celebration in its own right, Portsmouth also delivered a fairytale triumph in the FA Cup, beating Cardiff City 2-1 in the final, after producing a stunning upset against Manchester United at Old Trafford earlier in the tournament.

Barely two years later, Portsmouth officials released a statement, which read: "It appears likely that the club will now be closed down and liquidated by the administrators."

After a series of dubious foreign owners had come and gone, a club founded in 1898, which had been champions of all England in consecutive seasons between 1948 and 1950, was suddenly on the endangered species list.

To cut a long story short, the team they call "Pompey" were saved by their real "owners" - the fans.

The Pompey Supporters' Trust, initially founded to raise funds for players who were not receiving their wages, soon set their sights on a full-scale rescue mission.

Around 1800 supporters bought shares in the Trust at £100 (about $200) a head, raising £1.8 million. A number of wealthy individuals kicked in between £50,000 and £60,000 apiece.

After a lengthy legal battle, in 2013 Portsmouth were saved from liquidation when the High Court accepted the Trust's £3 million offer to take control.

Portsmouth were now the largest fan-owned football club in England, and so they remained for four years, until a deal was struck to sell to the Tornante Company, headed by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who was already involved in high-profile American sports franchises.

Portsmouth have been something of a yo-yo in the lower divisions for the past decade and currently sit second in League One, England's third division, sparking hopes of promotion to the Championship at the end of the season.

When, or if, they will return to the Premier League is anyone's guess, but for the Pompey faithful, at least their team are still alive and kicking, which is surely better than the alternative.

All of which brings me to a club on the other side of the world facing remarkably similar issues.

Like Portsmouth, Newcastle Jets are a club representing a blue-collar community, competing against far more affluent rivals in a competition that is anything but a level playing field.

Like Portsmouth, the Jets find themselves in a precarious financial position after a number of owners - most recently Chinese businessman Martin Lee - discovered far too late that owning a professional football team is an expensive hobby.

Now Newcastle's future is in the hands of the govening body as Football Australia scrambles desperately to find an owner, or owners, capable of bankrolling the team going forward.

And given FA's track record of handing franchise licences to the likes of Clive Palmer and Nathan Tinkler, Novocastrians are entitled to be nervous, to say the least.

Call me an idealist, but I can't help wondering if potential salvation is right here in our own backyard.

Could the Newcastle community ever own the Jets?

It has certainly been a successful business model for the Green Bay Packers, who have won 13 NFL titles - including four Super Bowls - as a not-for-profit organisation owned by more than 100,000 shareholders.

Despite operating out of the smallest major league professional sports market in North America, the Packers were ranked the world's 27th most valuable sports franchise in 2019, with a price tag of $2.63 billion, by Forbes magazine.

It's a similar story in Germany's thriving Bundesliga, in which the "50 plus one" rule means that no individual can own more than 49 per cent of any club.

A few years ago, a group including former Newcastle Knights chairman Rob Tew launched a concept tagged "Our Knights, One Chance", which aimed to save the city's embattled NRL franchise by selling 40,000 shares at $500 a pop, to raise $20 million. It never progressed past first base.

In part that was because everyone knew the Wests Group were lurking in the background, a tangible, cashed-up alternative, as opposed to a utopian vision.

But also, with the benefit of hindsight, the One Chancers didn't deliver much of a PR campaign after the initial burst of publicity. Within days, it had all but fizzled out.

I'm still a believer in Tew's idea. With the Knights, there would now appear no need, given that Wests are not only a financial juggernaut, but they have more than 100,000 members.

So Wests, and hence the Knights, are effectively owned by the community.

As for the Jets, would community ownership work? It sounds great in theory, but the reality is that it would be a massive project.

Even in the best-case scenario, it would be likely to take months, if not years, to get off the ground.

Unlikely as it may be, the good folk of Portsmouth have shown that where there's a will, there's a way.