Most of you will probably remember the little bit of investigation that I undertook on the subject of the My Football Club take-over of Ebbsfleet United towards the end of last year. Well, I thought that it was time for a quick update on how things were progressing for this peculiar little exercise in "fan" ownership. At the time of my last piece on the subject, the take-over of Ebbsfleet United seemed to be just about imminent. It would appear that the situation now is just about the same as it was then. The site has accumulated another 5,000 or so members (thanks, no doubt, to the mass of media interest when the news of which club it would be was made public), but they don't appear to be much closer to having confirmed their take-over.

Now, you may well think that this is not particularly important. After all, it's very important to carry out the due diligence required to ensure that they're not buying a turkey. However, we're now a third of the way through January, and it would appear that any purchase is unlikely to be completed before the end of the January transfer window. The directors of Ebbsfleet have reportedly confirmed that they will put their hands in their pockets themselves to buy any players that the club needs before the end of the transfer window, but there can be little doubt that MyFC members will have no say in the players signed by the club until the summer, at the very least. Arguably more worrying for MyFC members is the lack of communication from the people running the whole venture. The forum is still up and running, but the last "diary" update on the front page of the site is dated the 25th of December and reads as follows:

"I hope you excuse a shorter than usual Diary entry. There’s a limit to how much “nearly there” talk anyone can take.

As you can imagine, much work took place over Christmas. Both last week and this have been extremely busy too.

The good news is, I’m very confident this will be the last-ever pre-takeover Diary. Due Diligence is a whisker away from becoming Done & Dusted."

Turning our attention to matters on the pitch, Ebbsfleet are still having a decent time of it on the pitch. They are currently in eighth place in a very competitive Conference table, and have won both of their last two league matches against Weymouth and Grays Athletic by four goals to one. However, anybody that assumed that they would be cashing in on all of the publicity generated by the MyFC circus would be mistaken. Crowds at Stonebridge Road are down on average this season, from an average of 1,165 last season to an average of 1.016 so far this season. They may have made enough money from extra merchandise sales to have covered this gap (although it's also worth pointing out that the MyFC shop still only stocks MyFC merchandise, and nothing relating to Ebbsfleet United FC) but, in a league in which match day revenue provides the majority of a club's funding, these look like worrying figures. Moreover, it would be worth reminding MyFC members getting excited about the possibility of bringing Kaka to Stonebridge Road that the Conference has a salary cap based on the average two seasons' turn-over, meaning that they will be limited to their current wage bill in terms of any higher wages that they may be hoping to be able to pay.

So, we can surmise that it is highly unlikely that any take-over by Ebbsfleet United by MyFC is unlikely to take place before the end of the January transfer window. Leaving aside any moral considerations on this subject (and I think I've made my opinions on that pretty clear in the past), the question that remains is this: If I was a member of MyFC and had faithfully forked out my £35 in the summer, what exactly have I got for my money, so far?

There is almost certainly a book to be written about the recent travails of Luton Town, which took yet another turn for the strange when they held Liverpool to a draw in the FA Cup Third Round on Sunday afternoon. Luton, once most famous as being the team that occasionally found their name being mentioned on national television thanks to the patronage of Eric Morecambe and more lately became one of the more hated clubs in the league, thanks to the ill-starred membership scheme introduced by Tory MP and Thatcherite David Evans in the 1980s, have had an eventful time of it over the last few weeks or so, but their biggest concern at the moment is whether they will actually be able to field a team for their cup replay at Anfield next week.

Those of us with long memories will remember when Luton were, for almost a full decade, mainstays in the top division of English football. Promoted alongside local rivals Watford in 1982, they were perennial strugglers against relegation in the old First Division, most famously in their first season there, when a late goal from Raddy Antic gave them a 1-0 win at Maine Road against Manchester City which sent City down and kept Luton up. They won the League Cup in 1988 and were runners-up in the same competition the following year, but missed out on a place in Europe because of the post-Heysel ban on English clubs in Europe. Arguably their most costly defeat, however, came on the last day of the 1991-92 season, when a 2-1 defeat by Notts County relegated them just before the formation of the Premier League.

Under the managership of Mike Newell, it looked as if they might just make it back to the Premier League. In their first season back in the Championship in 2005, they featured in the play-off positions for much of the season before tailing off, and (as many of you may remember) led Liverpool 3-1 in a live televised FA Cup Third Round match at Kenilworth Road before losing 5-3. However, all was not well behind the scenes - the club had already been in administration twice since 1999, so it's perfectly valid to argue that they were, if anything, somewhat fortunate to be granted a third spell in administration by the courts. In that respect, a ten point deduction by the Football League was the least of their problems. More significantly, the collapse into administration had followed the FA charging Luton with 55 offences relating to their investigation into corruption in football. The charges related to Luton using unregistered agents and a holding company, Jayten, to make payments rather than the club itself. The charges are a mixture of the serious and the relatively frivolous, but many inside the game have asked the question of why Luton have been singled out for such special attention when other, bigger clubs have been found to have been doing the same thing but have not been charged by the FA.

With Newell having been sacked in March 2007 for "gross misconduct", Luton fell into League One, and the former chairman Tomlins resigned, leaving many questions unanswered. Rumours are rife that Luton have a wage bill running into millions of pounds, and new chairman David Pinkney had no option but to take the club into administration in November, though he has had to renege on his promise to fund the club until the end of the season, leaving them staring down the barrel of a gun in terms of even being able to fulfil their fixtures for this season. They have been forced to take a scythe to their first team squad, returning all of their loan players and cutting the number of players from twenty-nine to not much over the sixteen, which is their bare minimum.

Against this background, a live, televised FA Cup match against Liverpool was little short of a godsend. Two years ago, they made £650,000 as a result of their home match against the same team in the same round. With the players having only been paid about one-third of their wages over the last three months, last Sunday's match entitled the administrators to pay out a little more to the players in terms of wages, and it might just have given them the liquidity to keep them going for a couple more weeks. However, the deadline for potential new buyers to reveal themselves was yesterday at 5pm, and as yet there has been no news on whether anyone has stepped in. An announcement is expected today. With the FA Cup replay at Anfield also to be shown live on the television, the hope is that such exposure will persuade potential buyers that Luton Town FC are worth taking a gamble upon. The alternative is oblivion for Luton Town, and a bye to the Fourth Round for Liverpool. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for a positive outcome to this because, as ever, it will be the supporters that really suffer if Luton Town goes to the wall.

It was the strangest thing, but Salomon Kalou's clearly offside goal was so far offside that it kept Sam Allardyce in a job for the next few days or so. The press had been predicting for the last few days that defeat at Stamford Bridge would probably cost Allardyce his job, but Kalou's goal was so far offside that the press focussed on that for a few days, allowing him to postpone his date with the hangman's noose for a few more days. Unless anything enormously disastrous happens tonight against Manchester City, he'll probably still there for this weekend's FA Cup match against Stoke, and it's difficult (even considering their recent form) to see them losing that match. I'd be surprised it Allardyce goes before the end of the season. He's too stubborn to go voluntarily and, if the details of his financial package are correct, he might be too expensive to sack.

I'm not, as you may be aware, a fan of Allardyce by any stretch of the imagination. I think that the much of the praise that he won at Bolton was overstated. His Bolton team was utterly joyless to watch and, whilst I understand that small clubs will always go down the route of making themselves difficult to beat, there will always be a low boiling point in the Premier League - a boiling point at which supporters expect entertainment. Twenty years ago, Wimbledon had perfected their party piece of hitting it long and hard, playing a physical game and scaring the hell out of "better" opponents. Their supporters didn't much like it, but it got them into the top division of English football for more than a decade. These days, though, in an era of £40 match tickets and the constant hubris about the Premier League being "The Biggest And Best League In The World", it might not be enough on its own. For Sam Allardyce, the line between success and failure is a very thin one, and there is no room for error when you're at a big club and not playing exciting, attacking football. Newcastle's supporters may have a long tradition of having been "entertained" (although there is, I think a considerable amount of myth to this - Keegan's 1996 team that blew the Premier League notwithstanding, I don't think that Newcastle United have consistently played "better football" than anyone else in the country over the last forty years or so), but in the realpolitik of the modern game, realising your limitations and maximising them early on can be one of the keys to building success over a period of time.

The problem is that time is the one thing that no Premier League manager has. Unlike further down the ladder, every Premier League match counts. There's no room for error. Newcastle haven't actually been that bad this season (they're eleventh at the time of writing, above such luminaries as Tottenham Hotspur and Middlesbrough), but we already know that Allardyce won't get the two or three years that he needs to lay down his authority at St James Park and set the seal on the way that he wants things to be done. He's costing them millions and millions of pounds, and they won't tolerate two more seasons in mid-table. Fortunately, though, some of the madder elements of the Newcastle support already have a replacement for him already lined up. Alan Shearer.

It's campaigns like this which lead me to the inevitable conclusion that some football supporters deserve anything they get. Shearer is, at the time of writing, taking his coaching badges, but anyone that saw his witless half-time performance on the BBC team during the England vs Croatia match (when his contribution to the attack on McClaren's tactics seemed to be limited to complaining that the players didn't have enough - you've guessed it - "passion") will already know that, however bad Allardyce turns out to be, Shearer will be twenty times worse. Also, Shearer, who has made it more than clear that he wants the Newcastle job, hasn't made any effort to get any coaching experience over the last couple of years. So, replacing Allardyce would be ridiculously expensive and Newcastle fans would be getting someone with no managerial experience that has already demonstrated only that he has the tactical acumen of a water biscuit.

In the harsh glare of the modern football world, even the likes of Newcastle United are now light years away from the top four, and the fact of the matter is that the best that Newcastle can recently hope for in the next three to five years would be to emulate Bolton, Everton or Spurs. Regular UEFA Cup football might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it must be better than whatever the vast majority of the alternatives are. Common sense, though, doesn't often intrude into the rampant egotism and unrealistic pipe dreams of the Premier League - a world in which a club with weekly 52,000 sell-out crowds and an estimated 1,000,000 supporters needs a multi-millionaire in order to secure a regular place in the top ten.

It had been a great afternoon, even to be at home with a bunged up, well, everything, watching the latest goals coming in on BBC Score. Spurs and Reading were involved in yet another extraordinary match at White Hart Lane (and my, hasn't there been a lot of those in the Premier League this season?), whilst West Ham United performed their annual stunt of upsetting Manchester United at Upton Park. Then, however, the news came in from Fir Park and everything took a horribly unexpected turn.

It's always upsetting when a footballer dies, and this is magnified all the more when it comes during the course of a match. Towards the end of this afternoon's SPL match between Motherwell and Dundee United, the Motherwell captain Phil O'Donnell collapsed on the pitch with a seizure. He was treated on the pitch for five minutes, but died on the way to hospital. O'Donnell was not merely the journeyman footballer of the modern era. He had started his career at Fir Park as an eighteen year-old in 1990, and didn't take long to write his name into the club's folklore when he scored in their 4-3 win against Dundee United at Hampden Park. He was transferred to Celtic in 1994 for £1.75m but much of the rest of his career, including a four year spell at Sheffield Wednesday, was interrupted by injuries. He returned to Motherwell in 2004 and was the club captain at the time of his death.

It's difficult to know what else there could be to say, so I won't say anything, and leave you to take a look at Motherwell FC's official statement on today's sad events and this two page report of Well's 1991 win.