Listen without prejudice: Practical tips for owners & directors

I’m in my final two months of being on the board of the Dons Trust, owners of League Two AFC Wimbledon, so I’ve been looking back quite a lot, and thinking about the lessons I’ve learned. In many respects, the role hasn’t thrown up that many surprises. It’s not that I don’t have anything to learn. Far from it, but twenty years working in an industry, with twelve plus of those at the sharp-end of football means I’m less surprised about the cycles, much less the specific things that actually happen.

What I have been thinking about is how a lot of owners and directors come into an environment without that experience, not having operated in a field that is anything like it, what that leads to, and particularly when it comes to how you deal with fans and their role in clubs, and how they can actually listen better in a practical sense.

The big problem with football clubs is that they look like one thing, but are in fact many things, and there is is no formal training that helps you to really get to the nitty-gritty of fandom as it really is in all its messy, wonderful, frustrating and irritating complexity.

Clubs are the front-end of elite sport with structures of player development, coaching and sports science, filled with talent and ability, which has thousands of people turning up to stadia every week, buying merchandise and spending their money on food and drink. On the other hand, these are highly regulated/restricted monopolies, operating in cartels (leagues/competitions), and those people turning up are almost exclusively more invested in the club than just the latest result.

“Football is more than a business. Football clubs are cultural and community assets with associated sporting and community objectives”

As leading sports academic Sean Hamil and his colleagues say, “Football is more than a business. Football clubs are cultural and community assets with associated sporting and community objectives” (from the corporate governance of professional football clubs. Corporate Governance: The international journal of business in society’), and there is no getting away from that fact.

As I often put it, they’re part sporting organisation, part museum, part community facility, part iconic brand, part social space, part venue. Football is also something of a hothouse, and the on-pitch action will obviously and frequently drive a lot of the behaviour and reactions, and this can be a big problem.

As a result, the set of pressures are distinct and have to be understood and managed strategically and purposefully. This can be hard given how the communications & news cycle is driven by social media, with the algorithms forcing the most controversial content to the top, leading you to be tempted to focus on the wrong things and consequently make big mistakes. This is to some extent true for every organisation, but the on-pitch action speeds it up still further.

If you’re on the board of Aldi or Sainsbury’s, you’re always going to be insulated from much of the day to day machinations of shop ‘X, Y or Z’. Unless there’s something like a logistical failure, spate of warehouse thefts, pandemic, or mass investor exit, you spend more time looking at the bigger picture: growth, major business development, strategy. But with a football club, so much is being driven from events on the pitch. Even with a club that has a thriving academy, or a well placed women’s team, it’ll very often be the twice weekly men’s team fixture that is making the headlines.

“So what? Don’t we just have to live with it?” That is to some extent true. Acceptance is part of it but not acceptance that full throttle crisis is the normal operating mode. You can’t simply dismiss or ignore the ups and downs. Instead, this is when your listening comes into action. Not just the actual listening, but where you do it, what it’s about, and how seriously you take who is speaking.

…my advice to actual or would be directors or owners, is to listen everywhere

As I said in last week’s piece, ‘Football’s listening problem‘, one of the big problems is that ‘far too many clubs still don’t really know how to incorporate listening into the way they actually operate and make decisions.’ Out of everything from the last twenty years of my time in football, not just two years formally involved at AFC Wimbledon, my advice to actual or would be directors or owners, is to listen everywhere, and when there’s a noise, a complaint, sustained criticism from somewhere, think about and examine from whom, where, what both the issue and the context of the noise is, not just the fact that it’s happening and that therefore means you must respond.

You need to consider where (or who) is the noise coming from? What is the noise about? What’s the context?

These are the three things you need to consider: Where (or who) is the noise coming from? What is the noise about? What is the context?

Where (or who) is the noise coming from?

The most useful way for me to do this is to imagine the fanbase as a room full of people at a meeting. It helps that I’ve spent a lot of time chairing big, open meetings of fans, but you could do this with the analogy of a smaller number, or a more formal environment.

In my analogy, I ask myself who and where in the room the noise is coming from. Whether the general complaint, specific issue, whatever, is coming from one angry, drunk person at the back who left the house after an argument with their other half and has now just decided to take it out on you. Or whether it is actually coming from several engaged people who are asking direct and relevant questions. Translated into the various structures, at Wimbledon that might be the trust membership or bondholders. In your case it might be your Fan Advisory Board, supporters’ trust board or membership, fans parliament, influential fan-media outlets or an absolute racket on social media all complaining about one specific issues. Is your Head of Supporter Services or SLO trying to communicate the issue to you? Is the issue spilling out into the regular post-match survey, are you picking it up as you walk the concourses/stadium? Do you have a hotline to your supporters’ trust chair or similar organisation so you can check-in?

What is the noise about?

Is the issue something you can fix quickly? Is it about the stewards or the behaviour of a particular group of people in a specific part of the stadium, or the cold food, lack of toilet access for certain groups? Or is it something that flags a bigger issue, such as pricing or the absence of an official fans forum for the last six months?

What is the context?

Is this all coinciding with a poor run of form (which might simply be fuelling low-level discontent)? Or is this something that you’re picking up regularly, with the thin veneer of a good result covering things up?

Structures of dialogue and engagement are all well and good, but alone these are mere structures. If you don’t have the right culture and practice, and it’s not happening amongst the leadership as well as with your frontline staff, your ‘dialogue’, ‘listening’ and ‘engagement’ will just be words in your Fan Engagement Plan.

If you’re doing your listening right, and practicing it regularly, you should be able to pick up where and what’s happening, and have the opportunity to work out how to deal with it (more on that another time). And you shouldn’t just be waiting for the crisis, but be doing this all the time. After all, practice makes perfect.