As you may be aware, our Trust board has been heavily involved in representing our fans in ensuring improvements to the way our club engages with us as supporters. This is to ensure that our fans’ opinions on key strategic matters are taken into account.
It has been a long battle, often with resistance from the club. This will continue going forward and it has now led to very significant recent positive developments.
The initial major step forward was the publication of the Fans Led Review of Football report which was published in November 2021 and contained a number of recommendations to improve the safeguarding of clubs from unscrupulous owners and directors plus greatly improved communication by clubs with their fanbase.
In association with other fangroups we helped the national Football Supporters’ Association (which we have been full Associate members for many years) progress this report with a number of politicians to carry it forward to the stage of a Football Governance Bill. We continued to lobby MPs and members of the House of Lords of all political parties until the Bill finally passed into law as an Act last month.
The biggest benefit to fans is that the Act compels clubs to clearly show that they have carried out proper consultation with their fans on major issues and that they have taken those fans views into account in their decision making.
This will not be allowed to be just a “tick box “exercise but must produce full evidence of proper consultation. If clubs don’t they run the very real risk of the Independent Regulator of English Football taking their licence to operate as a football club away – a power granted underthe Act, and a far stronger deterrent than points deductions and transfer embargos which are powers that will still remain with the EFL and the Premier League.
The Trust will be involved in the above consultations as we are regarded as a key elected fan representative group. To reinforce this view we have been requested by Martyn Henderson, who is the interim Chief Operating Officer of the Football Regulator, to meet with him next month where we will discuss the practical impact of the new law on Cardiff City Football Club.
All of us on the Trust board are long standing fans of the club and would love it to be run so well that we need never criticise it. We will continue to press the club to put in place a proper structure at its senior level with the appointment of both a director of football and a full time director. We are, it would seem, the only club in the top five divisions of professional football in this country who has neither of these, which is a major weakness and we believe to be unacceptable.
Going forward , we hope to be able to report on issues on the field which show the club in a good light but the importance of this new Act is of such importance to fans that we will continue to represent our fans as it develops.
- The Trust has two representatives on the Cardiff City Fan Advisory Board (FAB).
Keith Morgan
Chair
