Supporters Direct In Crisis

An article in the Belfast Telegraph (http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/cashstrapped-fans-group-supporters-direct-faces-merger-threat-35065109.html) says Supporters Direct (SD) is facing a funding crisis and is facing a potential at least partial merger with other groups funded by the Premier League.

The Premier League puts £3.5million a year into fans groups - a paltry sum for the financial behemoth - with less than 10% of it offered to SD in the current funding round.

There is no doubt that Supporters Direct has done good work in its time. In the last 16 years it has been instrumental in helping to save or restart clubs across the country. However it seemed to lose focus, key staff, and ultimately appears to have over-reached itself putting its own future in peril.

Moving on from football clubs, it encompassed Rugby League and other sports - even branching out into Europe. The more it tried to do, the more it got stretched with a small staff and limited resources. It probably reached breaking point when a key member of staff was shuffled out of the door in an 'internal restructure' 18 months ago, having been apparently slowly pushed aside in the months beforehand, and SD has struggled to be quite the same force since.

Clubs that have struggled since have found a less proactive SD that hasn't quite had the bite to get the job done in many cases. It still had the same funding, but with a far less effective staff member in place that did little in inspire people to get involved in their Trust.

By staff member, I do mean one person. For all of SD's profile, their departments have often been single people. The "Head of xxxxx" is usually the only person doing that job, at least on a full time basis. That they've done the work they have over the years on the resources they've had is often remarkable - but their small size is a massive weakness as a single key appointment botched can lead to the organisation floundering as a whole.

I watched one SD presentation to the fans of a struggling club live on Youtube. The Trust in question had been going for the best part of 10 years but had a small membership and needed a thrust to make itself a viable bidder for the deeply troubled club in a time of crisis. Thrust was sadly lacking in the presentation, a potential fundraising drive failed miserably, and the club continues to teeter on the brink some 18 months later with the Trust a little larger in terms of membership but nowhere near the entity it needs to be to become a viable bidder.

That lack of thrust, and a rather inept presentation by a SD representative to the then Hereford United Supporters Trust (HUST) Board, was one of the reasons the new Hereford FC (HFC) never followed the SD model for a club. Despite having a potential 50% fan ownership - more than Portsmouth's much publicised fan takeover now holds - you won't see the HFC crest on SD's list of achievements, even if they were massively instrumental in the process. Yet Portsmouth, whose fan ownership eroded from the initial 51% in less than two years due to the financial demands of a football club, remains a 'case study' for SD's achievements on their website and is front and centre when any media article appears on fan ownership.

The newspaper article touches on news that SD has been 'unable to meet its financial obligations to a seriously ill member of staff'. Jacqui Forster was one of two people at Supporters Direct that assisted the rebirth of Hereford FC that I truly rated, and she has been ill for some time but continued working.

I first had contact with her over the writing of the constitution of what became HUST. She spent hours poring over the various drafts in her role as Head of Casework & Constitutional Affairs. She's worked for SD for 13 years but now appears to have been abandoned by the organisation. While SD deny the claims, refusing to comment further, friends of Jacqui have opened a crowdfunding page to raise money for her at https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/justice4jac

SD's money troubles have been there ever since I got involved in the embryonic HUST in late 2012. It was clear that SD was there for expert advice, but it didn't do much more beyond that. And once the experts started to leave it became less relevant in the day to day running of a Trust.

I turned up for a Board Member training course on a hot Saturday in June 2013 in Birmingham to find Jacqui, an Altrincham fan who had previously volunteered in their Trust, with limited resources. Pens were handed out and collected at the end of the day 'can't afford to replace them', pamphlets were for display purposes 'please don't take them, we haven't got the money to print more' - everything was downloadable from the website should we need to read something later.

Speaking to her after the event, the money issues at SD had only just started to bite. Budgets had been cut across the board as SD found itself hunting for cash handouts in an increasingly crowded marketplace for fans groups.

Through my time with HUST, SD charged just £100 a year for membership - £83.33 after VAT. For that you got their expertise, and access to their solicitors for any queries. Each year SD would send Trusts a breakdown of the resources they had used, and the costs of each resource, yet the fee remained £100 - with a polite request for an additional donation if a Trust wished to make further contribution.

The idea of a request for contribution is fine in theory - the problem is that a large number of Trusts are formed in times of crisis for their clubs and are more concerned in meeting the demands of their members rather than funding a group that often becomes increasingly irrelevant to them as time passes.

At HUST, we probably used £5,000 of Supporters Direct time and resources while we set up and got through the first year and the ultimate demise of Hereford United. However, rather than paying for that time, those funds we generated went into paying the unpaid staff of the old club and helping to start the new one. It was a matter of priorities, dictated by the membership.

SD have announced the formation of a 'Financial Restructuring Task Force' in it's latest statement - http://www.supporters-direct.org/news-article/message-to-members - while the European arm of the operation is set to be spun off into a separate entity. The leaders of SD will have to made difficult decisions over the coming months to bring the group back into the black and remain relevant for the future.

SD have a funding crisis yet, having set up reportedly 200 Trusts with 350,000 members, it gathers just a small percentage of its financial needs from membership fees. Just about every Trust charges for membership, usually £10 or so, and maybe it's time for SD to charge per member of a Trust rather than the small flat fee.

Maybe, then, in future they will be able to keep the people that excel in their roles, and honour their obligations going forward.