Sean Kennytalks to former Irish international Liam Daish, the head coach at Ebbsfleet United, where the fans have a big say in team affairs

Back before the revolution, Liam Daish was a football manager. Then, with the sharp sweep of a lawyer's pen, he had a new designation: "head coach."

Following the takeover of his club by the fans' website myfootballclub.com, over 20,000 people at computer screens will pick Ebbsfleet United's team. They will vote on tactics and formation. They will also be polled on transfers in and out of the club.

Ostensibly, the former Republic of Ireland international defender is largely unperturbed by the situation he finds himself in. In a sense, of course, he has no choice. His responses to questions about potentially damaging consequences of the experiment fall within a narrow but subtly shaded range. There is stoic acceptance, mild endorsement. Small bubbles of concern sometimes seep through his answers.

You ask about match days under the new regime. "Match day is mine," he says, a little too quickly, and with a slight excess of vehemence.

The myfootballclub.com takeover of Ebbsfleet was agreed in principle in mid-November and became official this week.

"Naturally there was a bit of shock. I was trying to get my head around how it'd work. But you go away and look at it from a different perspective and you get used to it. We've weighed up the positives and they far outweigh the negatives.

"It's something new, so you're stepping into the unknown and there's always that bit of trepidation."

Ebbsfleet occupy the dank muddy cellar space of English professional football - the Blue Square Premier - one tier below League Two. Money is scant - myfootballclub.com members paid £35 (€47) each for a stake in the club. The mathematics are compelling. Twenty-odd thousand by £35 equals £700,000 (€945,000), equals a measure of security to a club that often counts its home gates in the hundreds.

Daish recognises the hard financial exigencies, the necessary pragmatism of life as a non-league club. "This secures the players' futures. We had to do something because, although we'd done very well last season, the crowds weren't swelling, so it was getting difficult for the club to keep its full-time status."

Trumpet-blast public relations have accompanied the takeover. Will Brooks, myfootballclub.com's creator, is a former football journalist. He has spoken of "turning fantasy football into reality . . . a chance for people who have fallen out of love with football to rekindle their passion and get involved on a whole new level."

His idea has alternately been hailed as a right-on clarion call to reclaim the sport for the people or as an epic folly rooted in hubris.

Ebbsfleet United Football Club has the hopeful gleam of newness. Its management structure is unique in Britain. The club's very name is new. Gravesend and Northfleet FC became Ebbsfleet in May 2007. The decision was commercial, the sound of money talking again.

The club is leaving the soft light of obscurity and stepping into the halogen-bright glare of attention due to the novel situation. Prior to the takeover, the name Liam Daish was most likely unknown to many of the legion of internet supporters now picking his team. He had a playing career at the fraying edges of top-level football, at Cambridge United, Birmingham City and Coventry City, untroubled by the kind of scrutiny he will now face. Eyes are trained on him as they have never been before.

"I'll be answerable to a few more people than before. I've got a bigger board to answer to. There's going to be a lot of interaction with the members and it's going to be a bit surreal, I suppose, not "Big Brotherish", but it's going to be more open to people out there. It won't be so much a closed shop as a lot of clubs are these days.

"I mean, you look at Premier League clubs, fans can spend money on season tickets, but they're never really consulted. They don't get close to the players, they don't know what's going on. At the top end, the players, and the football in general, are so far away from the fan in the street. It's a closed shop. This is going to be a bit more transparent."

For all the talk of fan involvement and transparency, Daish's authority has indisputably been eroded. The change of his title from "manager" to "head coach" has the ring of emasculation by public relations. Ebbsfleet is democracy taken neat, and Daish must swallow.

Nonetheless, the head coach is game. He appears to have carried the gutsy doggedness of his playing career into management. Barry Fry, football's geezer laureate and Daish's manager at Birmingham City, once characterised his centre half's playing style thus: "If a squadron of F-111s attacked our penalty area, Daishy would try to head them away."

He will provide regular updates to Ebbsfleet members via the internet, making recommendations on team selection. The decision ultimately rests with that unseen multitude, however. "I'm trusting that the formula is right and they'll listen to me about what's going on on the pitch.

"I think, if people study what we've been doing over the last three years, we ain't done a bad job. As long as the members take it as seriously as the players themselves do - it is their livelihoods we're talking about - then we'll be all right."

Again a flash of anxiety: "It is their livelihoods."

In the fantasy football world of Ebbsfleet, when does a source of entertainment become a plaything? The dividing lines are hazy. A £35 investment pales next to a weekly wage. Should the experiment go awry, the club's staff will bear the brunt of failure.

For now, promotion to the Football League is Daish's target. Ebbsfleet have a shot at gaining a play-off place this season. Whether the side's recent good form will survive the radical takeover is anyone's guess.

"I don't know how things may change. A lot of it will be a case of suck it and see, see how we go with it. I'm going into unknown territory, but at the end of the day, it's just a football match. It's what I know and it's what I've been in all my life."

Only football, but truth has once again trumped fiction in the strangeness stakes. Life after the revolution awaits.