We need a conflab over FABs

Why clarity over the purpose of Fan Advisory Boards is needed, and why the way we talk about football fans is important.

Fans protest over the axing of senior concessions at Spurs after FAB objections were ignored.

There is some confusion about what a Fan Advisory Board is. Not least among supporters and supporters’ organisations. It is important to establish some clarity on this, especially as there is evidence of football clubs already using FABs as a means of avoiding proper consultation. The FABs offer a real opportunity to give fans a genuine voice in decision-making at their clubs, but if fans don’t get their thinking straight, the opportunity will be lost for another generation at least.

The corporate capture of fan engagement in itself is not a new pattern in English football. When clubs across Europe moved to appoint Supporter Liaison Officers to improve relations between clubs and fans in the 1990s, they invariably appointed people to the role who had been regular fans, people who had lived the experience of the people they would be liaising with and who could approach issues with a genuinely grass roots perspective. Those SLOs were allowed a degree of independence.

In England, particularly at the top levels of the game, clubs made sure the SLOs were fully on the payroll, answerable only to their employers, and recruited not from the supporter base but by fishing in the pool of customer service and marketing professionalism. That is not to say there are not some excellent SLOs, but even the best had their hands tied by clubs that saw engagement primarily as getting fans to do what they wanted and getting them to spend more money.

The SLO role was itself a response to, and a product of, independent fan organisation. Bodies such as the Football Supporters Association and Supporters Direct had begun to focus collective expertise and develop a voice for fans who had for too long been placid in the face of demonisation and marginalisation. Heysel and Hillsborough brought a generation of fans determined that we would no longer be spoken about but spoken with to the fore, and the establishment of Supporters Trusts in the wake of Labour’s election victory in 1997 moved things on a step.

Where the original FSA had effectively been a supporters union rooted in opposition, Supporters Direct and the establishment of Trusts at club level established the idea that fan organisations could be part of the structure of the club itself – or even be the vehicle for supporter ownership. Of course, as money poured into the game at the top levels, the chances of fan ownership receded. So there needed to be a way to get fans a place at the top table.

Trusts fought hard to establish a pragmatic relationship in partnership with clubs – a tough task when most of those involved knew the clubs were not genuinely committed to partnership at all. But the victory was achieving a situation in which clubs felt they had to look like they wanted partnership. All that was blown apart when it was revealed that the self-appointed top six clubs in the Premier League had been secretly plotting to break away and form a European Super League.

That prompted one of the biggest spontaneous fan revolts in years, and led to the government announcing a review of the way football was run. One of the review’s first conclusions was that clubs needed to consult better with their fans.

Fans had come to the same conclusion. Many of us who had argued for the pragmatic approach recognised that the clubs’ dishonesty had fatally undermined the structures we had built up, exposing the fact that channels of communication only existed because of the club’s grace and favour. Something more solid was needed, something that addressed the imbalance of power.

It was from this place that the idea of shadow boards merged. It was a concept that had been tried and tested in other businesses successfully. The Corporate Governance Institute has a very good and concise explanation of the purpose of shadow boards. One oft-cited example of the kind of model needed was the Scott Trust at the Guardian Media Group. The Trust’s role is to preserve the liberal values of the media group, while leaving the day-to-day commercial running of the business to a more conventional executive board.

The shadow boards model also recognised the phrase I keep returning to in this newsletter, football is a business like no other. It was a way, even in the era of global conglomerate and state ownership of our clubs, to retain that connection with community and tradition that sets football businesses apart, to give the people that made the business what it is a voice. Shadow boards could, as non-executive directors do in many businesses, provide a vital check and balance on the board that strengthened the business in the long run.

Sadly, a combination of the Tory government’s aversion to the idea that power be more evenly distributed between the many and the few, a lack of confidence by fans who nonetheless had genuine worries about the responsibilities of board membership, and sustained pushback from the football industry – aka the club owners – meant this idea was sidelined.

In its place emerged a watered-down idea, but one that could still offer the chance to build something progressive. The Fan Advisory Board. The key word here, of course, is advisory. For the first few months in which, during my time as co-chair of the Supporters’ Trust at Tottenham Hotspur, we attempted to build a new relationship out of the ashes of the one the club’s board had burned down by denying it was secretly plotting to break away from the whole of English football, a dance was conducted in which we sent proposals under the heading of Supporter Board and the club returned them under the heading Fan Advisory Board.

But semantics don’t make a rallying cry, and for most people the use of this word or that was unimportant. It was only those of us that knew how football worked that understood why the clubs – and there is little doubt they discussed this collectively – insisted on the term advisory. Because advice is something you can acknowledge but not take on board. And that is exactly the relationship the clubs want with fans – one in which they are free to do exactly what they like.

As those were the days when the Premier League had a relatively smart PR operation – as opposed to the current tactic which consists of putting its fingers in its ears and shouting “I’m not listening” – the organisation attempted to pre-empt legislation by proposing that FABs were established at every club. Work began, albeit very slowly, but it was clear the requirement would be part of the Football Governance Bill. So the choice for clubs was to get something in place or get something imposed.

This was a pivotal moment, one in which fans had more power than they thought. In short, they could hold out against attempts to neuter these new bodies because what was required needed to be agreed by both the clubs and the fans. Sadly, too many fans thought they were still in the position where they had no real power and so they took what they were offered, rather than what they could get.

That was because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what a FAB is and can be. And that misunderstanding is starting to cause real problems. Because if we allow FABs to be captured as a PR cover for club boards to do exactly what they want, we risk undermining faith in the ability of supporters to organise effectively for change.

FABs are not independent fan groups and were never intended to be. FABS are a bridge between independent supporter organisations and club boards. A way for fans to have direct input into decision making. They are part of the club, and so members are subject to the same confidentiality requirements as other board members, and their ultimate objective is the best interests of the club.

For this to work most effectively, there would also need to be strong, independent fan organisations able to operate primarily in the interests of their members. Enabling those organisations to nominate members to the FAB, alongside giving fans the opportunity to elect representatives, would cement faith in the process, and ensure that the principles of transparency and democratic accountability were present. Because they would be executive board members primarily, the fan reps would not be directly accountable to the people who elected them. But the process of needing to be elected plus the presence of strong independent fan groups would ensure they acted in the interests of fans while continuing to operate effectively as members of the club board.

This is not how it has panned out at most clubs. Instead, the FAB is seen as the forum through which the club speaks to fans. With all other forums relegated to the sidelines, previously active and effective Trusts and Independent Supporters Associations have been marginalised. The knowledge they have built up over years of dealing with the club conveniently – for club owners – has been lost as professional clubs press home their advantage over volunteers. Official supporters club reps have been given seats to ensure there is an inbuilt majority of people who depend on the patronage of the club for their position – shades of the capture of SLOs. And, most importantly and despite making great show of “consultation”, clubs are not obliged to take an iota of notice of anything the FAB says. They operate, as the FSA has said, as “PR shields”, a pretence that fans have been consulted when really they have been informed.

There are only two clubs I know of, Liverpool and Manchester United, where fans on the FAB think the clubs might be genuinely buying in to the idea of supporter boards – Liverpool have even used that term. But even here there is a suspicion that the commitment is to be seen to be doing something rather than to cede any decision-making control.

To compound the problems, many fans appear to think FABs are independent fan organisations. This is, possibly, understandable where there is no genuinely independent fan organisation and the focus is on establishing that channel into the club. But even in these cases, the FAB cannot be a substitute or a replacement for independent fan organisation if it is to do its job properly.

FABs are internal bodies of private companies. Yet at least one FAB has already been granted associate membership of the FSA. The idea that an internal body of a private business can be a member of a democratic members organisation in any capacity makes no sense and cannot work.  Follow the logic through at FABs where club executives – again, wrongly in my opinion – hold posts or are even co-chairs, and the end result is the possibility of a club director being elected to the national council of the fans’ organisation.

We need to get our thinking straight about FABs if we are to seize the opportunity to strengthen the voice of fans within the game. We need to work out how to provide training for ordinary fans who will effectively be non-executive directors. We need to work out the proper balance between responsibility and accountability, and to be realistic about what fans could and should influence.

We need to realise the power we have. For all that clubs have successfully undermined the initial stages of the FAB era, they still know that the model has to be seen to work. And that matters.

Improving the quality of fan engagement is a key area in which the Football Governance Bill can be improved, and making FABs what they should be is an essential element of that. It’s not a radical proposal, it’s classic third-way stuff. But we need to get our thinking straight.

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Language matters. The events of recent weeks have shown us what the normalisation of prejudice can lead to and have underlined the need for cool heads and the careful choice of words in debate.

So I worried slightly when, as he correctly issued a strong warning to those involved in the wave of racist riots, Prime Minister Kier Starmer said rioters would be treated “like football hooligans”. Why mention football? Why restart the casual – no wordplay intended – linkage of hooliganism with football?

It would be wrong to deny there is some overlap between football hooliganism and the organised far right. But that link has tended to be overplayed and the far-right have never really gained a foothold. The current wave of violence has seen the involvement of some people who want a tear up and who are also influenced by the mainstreaming of prejudice and misinformation. They have been drawn in to violence planned and sparked by a far smaller number of dedicated fascists.

Some of the people described above are probably football fans. They probably like darts and horse racing too. And they probably drive cars, go to pubs and eat in cafes. So, again, why emphasise football?

It’s true that instances of disorder around football have a higher profile than those that occur elsewhere. But that is because of the sheer numbers who actively follow our national sport, and because of the media’s willingness to amplify trouble at the match far more than trouble at the racecourse or the rugby. The truth is there is too much antisocial behaviour at too many events.

In the last week we’ve seen a familiar pattern emerging. The careless running together of fascist street violence and football disorder, the appearance of alarmist stories in the press that appear to be based on little more than off-the-record chats, heavy-handed posturing and finger wagging at football generally, and attempts to revive dormant agendas.

The Daily Mail, a paper whose front pages have done much to contribute to the current poisonous atmosphere, reported that “rioters could be banned from football matches” in an article littered with references to bulking up powers, football banning orders and extending the reach of the Football Offences Act. My friend Tony Evans wrote about tension between the football authorities and parts of government over some of the ideas being floated. 

In The Times, we read that “officers believe there is a crossover” between “far-right extremists and football hooligans”. But then, after a week in which the police themselves rightly emphasised the value of deploying good intelligence to head off a wave of far-right terror, we also read “there is no intelligence to suggest violence is likely”. And, sure enough, facial recognition technology got a mention. There is no suggestion that facial recognition will be used at the bingo after two convicted rioters were found to have got drunk at a bingo hall before taking part in the disorder.

I’ve written for years about the legal treatment and policing of fans, and time and again my legal contacts have told me how an association with football is used to push for heavier sentences for individuals involved in non-football offences, to push for greater surveillance powers, to justify heavy-handed approaches. They are also surprised some of the nonsense spouted gets airtime.

If someone is sent to prison for rioting, there is no need to ban them from a football stadium. Because they will be in prison. If someone is convicted of a carrying out a hate crime, the fact that they may or may not be a football fan is as relevant as whether or not they are a snooker fan or a hay-fever sufferer. What some seem to be clamouring for is an extension of the Football Offences Act beyond its natural boundaries. And that is dangerous territory.

When the need for a headline outweighs the need to establish facts, we should always be cautious, and any reporting around this issue needs to establish what existing powers are and what they can do, and what the legal basis for extending them might be. Questioning why links are being made rather than simply accepting them should also be a prerequisite.

There are a few public figures who should know better who have also too readily blurred the edges between the far right and football fans. I saw comments expressing the view that ‘the violence will stop once they all go back to the football’, people voicing worries about going to games now the season is starting ‘because you know what football fans are like’, and of course the now infamous Sky News reporter telling us about “Football fans, many of whom align themselves with the far right…”

Let’s be clear. It would be foolish to imagine that football matches will be immune to the fallout from recent events, and I’m certainly not going to tell people from communities who understandably feel under threat already that their fears are unfounded. There will be a nervousness as the new season begins, just as there is a nervousness throughout this troubled country. Nor am I equating the prejudice that is too often directed at football fans with that faced by many communities.

What I am saying is that generalisations, ill-founded assumptions and sweeping statements bring all of us to a worse place. The events of the past week should have taught us that.