The last time out I looked at fan advisory boards and why they’ve been misunderstood. One of the things I talked about extensively was about the fact that fan advisory boards are not independent.
It’s not the intention of a fan advisory board to be independent. That matters and the reason it matters is that it is sometimes unable to step outside of its role as a non-independent club organ.
For example, some advisory boards have club representation on them, which is not something our research demonstrates is the best route. It should really just be fans on there and that clubs come to the fan advisory board to be held to account. However even in the situations where you have a very independent minded fan advisory board like that at Everton, it is still a body that is there because the club wishes it to be there.
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When it comes to independence of mind, it’s always been clear to me that the only way that this position can be held effectively is through an independent body, established under its own aegis, usually through the desire of fans to be represented in some way and to hold the club to account.
That inevitably means, in our modern game in the last 20-25 years, a Supporters Trust. This matters because there are times when it gets to a point where the club and their fans will diverge on an issue.
The problem with a Fan advisory board is that it its structure and relationship with the club means it is incapable, institutionally incapable, of being able to, if you like, pull away, to oppose.
The question from some people will be: do you want a frictional, factional relationship between a club and representation? That is not the case. In all the work I’ve done, over 20 odd years in fan engagement, I have done precisely the opposite, frequently advising supporters’ trusts to think very carefully before ‘administering’ the press release or these days the tweet or the social media message, slamming the club or criticising it first.
I’ve always encouraged the building of bridges. What sometimes happens however – and we have to be very clear about this and very honest with ourselves – is that there are occasions where a supporters’ trust (or other fan representation) and a football club will diverge and they will do so sometimes spectacularly. It can be for all sorts of reasons. I have advised and am advising clubs and supporters’ trusts where that relationship has broken down almost completely and even got to the point of legal threats and difficulties and issues.
But that doesn’t mean that opposition is a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that disagreement and sometimes divergence is a bad thing. (It is necessary) to make that relationship possible so that disagreement can happen and organisations the football club and the supporters can reconvene when those disagreements are resolved, or hopefully continue to convene even when there is a disagreement. The most effective way of doing it is where the supporters’ trust or the organisation representing fans independently is structured itself independently, separate from the football club, not reliant on the patronage of the club.
The point is that owners come and go, administrators, chief executives, fan engagement officers, supporter services departments, staff come, but the relationship should always be maintained and that the most effective way is to have some form of representation outside of the club. I think in football clubs where they do this well it doesn’t prevent friction from occurring.
Indeed, even with fan-owned clubs, the membership, which is the sovereign body of the supporters’ trust in this case, might take a different view from even the board of the trust.
That is itself a demonstration of the importance of independence of mind because it allows fans – who we know are super-interested, hyper-interested, hyper-connected stakeholders in their clubs – to express different views, sometimes opposition.
It allows a better interrogation of plans and thoughts and ideas and proposals. Yes, sometimes that democratic process might yield a result that we don’t like, but there may be occasions where the result shouldn’t be what the board want or what the football club wants. Sometimes we need to have that disagreement and we need it to play out in an effective and structured manner.
Ultimately I think we try to contain dissent to prevent it from happening by sitting everyone around in a room with as much of a representative group of people as possible, trying to find ways to prevent the disagreements from happening.
That is not good fan engagement. In the end, good fan engagement is allowing the different voices, the different views and opinions to be aired, for issues to be discussed, for disagreement to happen, for agreements to be reached, and for positions to be respected.
And I think that if we pursued that line, the game would be healthier and we would find that relationships at all clubs and at all levels would be better between the fans, their representatives and the club.