After almost 12 months of chairing the Fan Advisory Board (FAB), I thought it worthwhile to reflect on year one and to update Evertonians about what the FAB’s been up to.

Our first meeting was an introductory one at Everton’s HQ in the Royal Liver Building, on 7 July 2022. As part of this meeting, we elected our officers, which included Julie Clarke as Secretary, Hana Roks as Vice-Chair (Hana subsequently resigned and was replaced by Dave Kelly) and I was particularly honoured to be elected as Chair.

Initially, the majority of our efforts were spent doing the unglamorous side of being a new independent organisation. This included a lot of policy and framework development, such as:
• Establishing boundaries with existing organisations such as the Everton Fans’ Forum, the Heritage Society, the Disabled Supporters’ Association, Supporters’ Club Committee and the Everton Women Supporters’ Club;
• Ratifying the 2022/23 Terms of Reference and Code of Conduct;
• Creating a constitution and complaints procedure;
• Working with the Club to shape the confidentiality agreement and Memorandum of Understanding; and
• Creating an identity, twitter account, website and getting email addresses set up.

While this was happening, we also engaged with fans by requesting strategy focused questions in August, which were shared with the Club. These were answered in October and the Q&A can be found here.

November saw our first ‘real’ strategic work, as this was when the anniversary of the Fan-Led Review was discussed at Westminster, at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Football Supporters. In advance of this, we had lobbied Merseyside Members of Parliament to garner support for all of the recommendations of the Fan-Led Review of Football Governance. And on the 15 November, we were one of only 15 supporter organisations from across the country that attended; our secretary (Julie Clarke) spoke directly to Tracey Crouch MP about the need for the Government to act quickly in implementing the Review’s reforms.

In December, it was announced that Manchester United were going to charge Evertonians £45 for FA Cup tickets and following member organisation engagement, we released a statement condemning it. We followed this up with a ‘Cap the Cup’ campaign which gained traction nationally and resulted with the FAB meeting with the Football Association’s Director of Professional Game Relations (summary within January minutes). Unfortunately, ticket prices for the remainder of the competition were not ‘capped’ but the FA heard our point of view; we had once again raised our profile at the highest levels of the game. We also continued the campaign with the Reading Supporters’ Trust, as they were drawn away to Old Trafford next, and luckily also wear blue and white!

The FAB was set up to consult on strategic fan-related matters and following concerns raised about the Club’s performances on and off the pitch, the FAB arranged three public meetings. These meetings were open to the entire fanbase and were aimed at gathering supporter feedback. In the spirit of full disclosure, the meeting summaries were shared after each meeting and a consolidation of questions and statements was shared with fans and the Club. Some of the questions were for the owner (not the Board) and Mr Moshiri agreed to let me ask them directly to him, on a video that was shared on FAB and Everton channels. This was followed up with the Board’s answers, which completed the second fan Q&A held during the season.

Also in January, the FAB applied to join the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA). The FSA is the national, democratic, representative body for football supporters in England and Wales; and we were granted Associate Membership. As members of the FSA, the FAB actively participated in two national Premier League fan network meetings, as well as the inaugural Advisory Board informal network. It was actually due to this contribution that I was invited to speak to the Premier League Chief Executive (Richard Masters) at a structured dialogue meeting in May. Since then, I also attended the FSA Annual General Meeting and raised a motion for consideration, which has now been taken on by the FSA’s national council to investigate.

The FAB committed to engage with fans to get their thoughts in case the European Super League should be reinvigorated, so we used this opportunity to also canvass opinions about the Premier League’s own ‘New Deal for Football’. We did this through a survey that ran for approximately two weeks in February and the results were then shared at the end of that month.

As well as the above highlights, there’s been many meetings and to give you a flavour, a summary of those is below:
• 12x FAB-only meetings, held on a monthly basis with the minutes available here.
• 4x FAB & EFC meetings, held on a quarterly basis with committee summaries available here.
• 4x meetings with Merseyside Police, other supporters’ groups and the Club (2 prior to Merseyside Derbies).
• 3x FSA meetings (2x Premier League Network & 1x Advisory Board).
• 1x meeting with the Football Association.
• 1x meeting with the Premier League.

Looking back, we have certainly had some frustrations such as slow progress in getting established and engagement with the Board of Directors this past few months. But, we have also had some significant successes, despite being less than one-year-old. We have established ourselves as one of the leading FABs in the country and have made a real presence at the national level, whether with the FSA, FA or the Premier League.

We know there is still a lot of work to do (especially in terms of our communication), but we remain committed, motivated and look forward to welcoming our new members to the FAB in the coming weeks. There are potentially exciting times and change coming and we will certainly try to ensure that fans are represented at the highest levels within our Club.

I hope to see as many of you as possible on the road and at Goodison this pre-season and I hope that you are all excited about the season to come.

Come on you Blues!

Jazz