At the Fusion Centre in Digbeth
today, the Blues Trust held their second ever Annual General Meeting, with some
exciting news. St Andrews is now listed with the Birmingham Council as an Asset
of Community Value, for a duration of five years. If the owners now propose to
sell the ground, the Birmingham Council must be notified, who in turn will notify
the Blues Trust, who would have the opportunity to make a bid within six months.
This is excellent news. Not only
does it make it harder for Yeung or Pannu to sell the ground if they decided
to, it also gives the Blues Trust more power, and perhaps more publicity. They
now have an official platform with legal entitlements, and are not simply a
group of fans 'getting together'. It means that any new owners potentially taking
over Birmingham City will have more of an obligation to respond to the Trust. This
may mean that in future, fans will have a say in how the club is run and have (a
lot) more transparency in their relationship with a board.
A few days ago, my criticisms of
the Blues Trust would have been that they have not reached out to enough
supporters to get involved. The website has a very political, formal feel, and
I was unsure if that would necessarily resonate with our fanbase – Blues are known
to be a bit of a working class club. I did think the number one priority with the
trust was getting loads of people involved at the earliest possible stage. The
best way to do that would have been to take a much more informal, perhaps even
laid-back stance.
But I was wrong on that
account. The problems with Birmingham City-based support groups in the past
have been unity - different people with different ideas clashing. Too many
people involved can lead to a series of disagreements, and potentially split
fans into their own sub-groups which can be, ironically, the exact opposite of
what you want to do in the first place!
Raising the profile is definitely
a growing priority for the trust, but so far, so good. In the
week leading up to the meeting, I was questioning why they hadn’t had a
matchday presence, as I had volunteered to do some leafleting outside St Andrews
previously. But much of their work since the last meeting in June as well as,
lest us forget, full-time jobs, has been dedicated to the ACV project. The
Blues Trust team deserve a lot of credit for the work they have done to pull
that off, but the formal nature of their website has perhaps helped. It has
meant that the Birmingham Council, and MP Phillip Hunt who agreed to chair the
AGM, have recognized that the trust are taking themselves seriously as a group
and are there for the long haul, rather than acting on a whim.
With this first taste of progress
for the Blues Trust, I genuinely believe that the infrastructure is there for
them to start growing on supporters. They have been criticized by some for being a
bit high-heeled, in the sense that the language of the text on the website and
twitter page was more impassive, and some may say self-righteous, than their progress had justified.
They were also criticized for ‘cozying up to the club’ too much, which is
difficult to avoid - do you improve transparency between a club’s internal
affairs and the fans by smashing windows?
By taking a respectful approach,
the good people inside the club such as Andy Walker, Ian Dutton and Sarah Gould
among others, can gradually get on board. The more important
contacts the trust builds over the next few months, the more ex-players can get
involved and the trust will grow as a unit, and therefore increase its fanbase.
Whereas, if you take the approach of going out all guns blazing to build the
network of supporters from the off (which was my initial line of thinking) you
lose the structure. People start to disagree, which is inevitable when you get
a group of passionate fans together, it can lead to fallings out and the
strategy becomes muddled. In that scenario, if you’re a new owner of the club,
or anyone with authority, you won’t take the trust seriously because it’s just
a bunch of fans squabbling amongst each other.
Getting St Andrews listed as an
Asset of Community Value also stamps on the feet of some of the whingers around
B9, who insist on having a go at anyone who tries to help the club. As I remember,
the trust received its fair share of abuse on twitter in its infancy, which won’t
happen as much now. The achievement means that anyone who joins the trust, but
disagrees with the general consensus or certain methods, will need to acknowledge
the success it has had with this board.
The more supporters who become
aware of the hard work the trust has put in, the more loyal members it will
gain, the more the group will grow in the coming months.
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