Portsmouth faithfuls unveiled as new majority shareholders of Scottish football club as unique ownership explained

Danny and Charlotte Bohannan, Pompey fans and co-owners of the British Online School, have recently been unveiled as the new majority shareholders of Scottish League Two football club Edinburgh City.

The pair, who originate from Gosport, are set to bring a unique ownership style to the club as they implement their award-winning online school to Edinburgh in a bid to develop City’s youth academy, in a bid to generate profits for the whole club.

Edinburgh City have endured a rapid decline down the Scottish Football Leagues in recent years, with the club’s financial difficulties meaning both the women’s and development teams had to be scrapped while several first team stars were released from their contracts.

Now, however, the new majority shareholders are ready to ensure the club prospers once again, but this time building upwards from the youth.

Speaking exclusively to The News, Mr Bohannan said of the venture: “The way we approached them was, instead of having a club that was funded by the top team and that is then spread down, we want to try and reverse that - have a new approach to training that can produce the money that can then fund upwards instead.

“The idea is that the Edinburgh academy will be for attendees to be full-time students and full-time athletes so we will be using the British online School for Education.”

Danny and Charlotte Bohannan conceived the idea for the British Online School back in August 2021. Both highly qualified teachers themselves, the couple wanted to create a new framework that would allow students greater flexibility while breaking down barriers that often interfere with the ‘traditional educational’ approaches.

Now, the co-founders are ready to take their success one step further as they prepare to implement it into the Scottish League Two side.

Former Fratton Park season-ticket holder Mr Bohannan spoke of his passion to improve the current set-up in many Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two clubs, detailing that many children go through the academies dreaming of becoming the next Lionel Messi or Ronaldo, but when it doesn’t work out - as sadly for many it doesn’t - they then have an exceptionally limited education on which to rely.

The self confessed ‘through-and-through’ Pompey fan also added that while Edinburgh City’s current predicament in League Two allows the new majority shareholders the perfect opportunity to showcase their new ownership style, he is confident that funding from the youth system up could work at Fratton Park and beyond one day.

“100% it can work,” the British Online School co-founder affirmed. “I believe what we’re creating can easily work everywhere. It’s not just about being easy - that it’s easy to apply - but it would just be so good for the children who dream of being professional athletes but have a strong education behind them too.”

Gosport to Edinburgh may be nearly 450 miles away from each other, but Mr Bohannan is hopeful his hometown community can rally behind their new ownership and offer up their support to the Scottish football club.

“The number one thing is that we’d love for our local town to really get behind Edinburgh as a football club,” Mr Bohannan has asked.

“We’d love for the local community to get behind (our) small Scottish team and help build the fanbase up. We were supposed to do something very similar with Fareham FC but things didn’t move forward.

“We would love to be able to bring something down to the south coast - build something up in Edinburgh, make it successful like we know it will be, and do something similar down here, whether we become owners of a club or just implement the same system and they use the British Online School.

“I would love to be able to have it nearer - whether that be Gosport, Fareham, Portchester. I know for a fact that Gosport is full of football fans, full of children that are desperate to play football but the education around Gosport - especially secondary - is not delivering as well as it should.

“We know we’ve got a system here that does deliver, so if we can combine those two things in our home town that would be a dream come true.”