You might be right, but the loud silence around Blues needs to be filled, so this is our attempt to do so.
Blues have had some very difficult seasons over the last decade, and not very much time to take a breath, sit back and think about where we go.
We have a good young coach who’s saying and doing all the right things, so fingers crossed and for once we can enjoy a bit more of a relaxed season and use some of that mental energy toward something positive for a change.
It’s easy to say “we need to get back up to the Premier League”, but there are 20 other teams in the same boat in this division. Some of them will spend a lot of money and get nowhere. Some of those teams will end up going the wrong way out of the league – as we’ve nearly found out on a few occasions.
We can all agree that promotion is important, but the methods have to be right. You can get promoted and play backs to the wall football for 9 months and get relegated and try again, or you can get promoted with a medium term plan and try to succeed in a different way.
The Good Doctor over at B6 had a moment of epiphany over the summer when he said that the way forward was “….sustainable football club…. the football club always remains through it all.”
He may have been wrong about many, many things, but he hit the nail on that one.
There have been times over the last few years where there very nearly wasn’t a Blues to remain through it all.
As people around the club have said time and time again – this must never happen again.
We wanted to come up with a constructive way of getting Blues fans to put their point across – whatever that point might be.
Of course, supporters don’t know anything about running a football club. But we do have an idea about how we want our football club to be run. Above all else, it’s not unreasonable to state that although the owners of the bricks and mortar come and go, we are the moral custodians of the club and that we must take that responsibility seriously.
Blues Trust thinks that this is important and we want to keep trying to communicate that to the Board in a positive way. We feel that this represents an opportunity to do so.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it. The owners and Board would, technically, be totally entitled to run the club into the ground, take the money and run if they so felt. We’re as confident as we can be that their intention isn’t to do that, but even so you wouldn’t bet on the Football League being able to protect us.
We believe that the Board wants the same things that we do, namely on the field success for Blues and a team we can be proud of. It wouldn’t make much sense for them to not.
It would be difficult to disagree that they have found the transition from their previous businesses to running a football club somewhat challenging. This is because football is unlike most businesses. For instance, if your focus is exclusively on tightly controlling the bottom line you are very unlikely to succeed; there are numerous variables entirely out of your gift to alter, and unless you identify the key elements of success very quickly it is very easy to make expensive mistakes just as quickly.
This is where the fans come in. We have no practical knowledge of running a football club, but we know what a positive Blues should feel like. We know what we do and don’t like. Bitter experience has taught us much about these key elements and we know what gets Blues fans going and gets St Andrew’s full.
What we’ve always wanted – meaningful dialogue between the Club and its support via the Trust.
We have been pleased to see Board members at the recent Supporter’s Forums, and welcome this positive step toward meeting Football League recommendations for engagement. Blues Trust has never believed that the way forward was through conflict and discord. Organisations can only succeed when all parties are content and pulling in the same direction, from terraces to pitch to back offices.
We hope to write them up and publish them as well as the raw data. This might take time – there are only a few of us running the Trust and we will have to get some help in if, as we hope, the survey is successful. But for this to mean anything at all we need as many responses as possible. If it takes all season to collect enough then so be it. But we will keep reminding supporters and canvassing for opinion – it’s up to you to help us to fill in the picture.
Complete the survey! Give us as much detail as you can. What have you seen or read about at other clubs across the country or continent that has worked well, and what could Blues do to emulate them?. Get your friends and colleagues to do the same. We can sit on our hands complaining or we can at least try to affect what we can affect.
If you haven’t already done so, we suggest you read this brochure from Supporters Direct before completing the survey.
Here is a link to it on their website
