Banbury United's Board of Directors

[arlidi]

It is somewhat disappointing to learn of a few so-called supporters posting on various social media outlets such outrageous and unfair comments about the current Board of Directors. As I do not subscribe to social media outlets I rely on other people to show me the messages from apparently disgruntled supporters fearing the Club has been taken over by the "funny-hand shake" brigade and that there is no ambition at the top.   What rubbish!  

First of all Board members are VOLUNTEERS. They receive no financial benefit for giving up their time, knowledge and experience to look after the club which may well be a community owned /supporters club but it still needs a good management structure in place. Any club member can put themselves forward before the AGM to become a Director. In the event of more applicants than available Board spaces an election is held.  In my time with the club I cannot recall too many applicants coming forward and therefore no election or voting. Increasingly the Board appoints new directors through out the year from people volunteering and interested in helping the club. 

As a member of the volunteer grounds team I regularly see board members down the ground either attending meetings or discussing on site improvements/alterations needed to keep the club viable in the National League North. On Home match days board members arrive early to assist in making all the preparations for the arrival of visiting supporters, players and directors.  However, that is the small, visible side of being a volunteer director.  With a Chairman as enthusiastic and as AMBITIOUS as Ronnie Johnson there are numerous meetings, phone calls and Emails to deal with on an almost daily basis.  But even Ronnie has his limits and uncalled for, and sometimes derogatory comments, will one day have an unfortunate effect.  The time and effort the Chairman put into ensuring the Club has a ground (for the next two seasons) in dealing with landlords who hold all the cards was nothing short of unbelievable.  Be grateful for our volunteer directors, and respect their commitment.

The reality of being a Director of a Non-League football club is far removed from being a director of a football club in the Premier League or the EFL. 

I have seen the reaction the Board members have on hearing, or even worse, reading some of the Key Board Warriors comments - often made in complete ignorance of the facts or lacking any common-sense. How Ronnie, Claire and Lisa carry on I do not know.   If you have something to say about your club say to their face. Better still, become a member and come along to the next AGM.  You may even feel strongly enough to stand for election to the Board.

[craig]

An interesting take on something you admit yourself you haven't read Roger.
So instead of talking if's, but's, and maybe's about 2nd hand information, lets actually talk some facts about the topics which have been discussed on social media, and lets address some of the points in your post.

Firstly, calling people "so-called fans" is an absolutely pathetic insult towards people that you clearly have absolutely no idea who they are and the passion they have for the club.
Some of the people bringing up these points and issues are former directors, former board members, as well former and current volunteers. All who have contributed in ways most people will never truly understand because they dont feel the need to tell people what they have done, and far from just "Keyboard warriors"
Rather than insult people and try to create further divisions between an already divided fanbase, how about actually talking to those people like myself, Brian B, and many others do on a regular basis. It might help you have a better understanding of why things have blown up in the way they have. Certainly more than reading a couple of out of context posts that have been passed along by someone else.

To the best of my knowledge, in absolutely none of these posts have any insults been directed to board members as individuals. In fact, if you spent a bit of time reading through these accounts, you would see there are far more positive posts about the work the club does than negative.
However, I feel like you have completely missed the point.
Absolutely nobody has or will criticise the level of work the volunteers put in at all levels of this club. But this does not mean that decisions that have been made by the board as a collective are immune to criticism or accountability.
I have been involved, and I still am involved as a volunteer, I have tried to help in almost every area of the club in my lifetime of supporting. The criticism I received on certain things I was or was not doing helped me to improve in those areas and, in turn, benefitted the club in the long run. Criticism isn't the same as a personal insult.

You talk of the involvement of the secret hand shake brigade being rubbish. Can you please give me an example as to why that is rubbish in your opinion?
Have you actually sat down and spoken with anybody at the club about the current involvement of the local police and authorities?

I have.

In 2 separate meetings with the chairman, he has gone into great detail about the pressure both the police and local council have been putting onto the club and the veiled threats they have made.
Now this is absolutely not the fault of the club, these kinds of people always have, and always will try and stiffle the club at every single stage of its development.
But, in all of these meetings, where potential legal threats have been made against the club, we have not taken any legal representation into these meetings. People with a deep understanding of the laws regarding football matches and how match days can and should operate.
It is simply not acceptable to give in to these baseless demands without having gone through the proper routes. organisations like Sport England are there for exactly these situations. So, to not seek help is something that should rightly be criticised.


I think that covers most of your post. so let's move on to the real reasons for the discontent among a growing amount of our support base.

Stewarding/Policing

As we move up through the leagues, we all understand that match day operations will become a bigger task for the club.
As fans, we accept that there will be more stewarding and a bigger police presence.
But what a lot of us absolutely will not accept is being treated as a criminal just for trying to enter a football ground.
In the last 2 seasons, there has only been one arrest that resulted in a prosecution at one of our games.
The incidents of disorder have only happened at games where the opposition have been known for having problems with their support. Games at which advice was given by fans to the board about the potential issues, and none of which was acted upon. Games at which our fans were attacked, yet the club seemed to be willing to take full responsibility and put the blame onto our own fans with admissions of guilt and apologies before any evidence of wrongdoing had been provided.

The response to this has been blown massively out of proportion.

we are now seeing children, some of whom are as young as 13 and have never been anywhere near any trouble, being asked to remove items of clothing in public view, asked to take their trainers off for searches and being aggresively patted down by stewards. some of these children are not accompanied by an adult. I could be wrong on this, but it doesn't seem right to me that people who are legally unable to give consent to these searches are being treated this way.

Elderly couples are being treated to the same level of searches in some cases. For what reason?

We now see stewards making threats off bans to children who are doing nothing more than singing completely non offensive songs towards away fans. that is and always will be a part of being a football fan in the ground.

We are seeing young fans who have now had restrictions placed on where they can stand, based on nothing more than the words of these same stewards who have shown on multiple occasions that they simply dont understand what a football crowd is.
Some of these fans, again, underage and unaccompanied, were forced into signing a behavioural code and have been told they are not allowed to stand on the townend.
As far as I'm aware, absolutely nowhere within the terms of entry on the clubs own ticketing site does it say they have the right to do this. They obviously have the right to refuse entry, which they have done to 4 people they claimed to be trouble makers, but that is not the same.
All tickets are sold as general admission, giving access to all home areas of the ground.

We finally seemed to be making some ground on these issues towards the end of last season. But then we decided to change the segregation, with absolutely no consultation with the fans who would all have told you it was a bad idea, and now we find ourselves at rock bottom with it all again.

Finances

We all know what we are. We are a small, supporter owned, non-league team.
We do not have a wealthy backer, and every penny in our account is raised by the hard work of the board, the fans, and our success on and off the pitch.

But the question a lot of us have is what are we doing to work towards improving our situation?
Some of it is clearly visible, such as the unbelievable work the commercial team has done in securing the most sponsorship money we have ever had.
Some of it though, is a lot more frustrating. Simple things such as not giving jay Williams a letter of re-engagement before his contract ran out, which meant that regardless of if he had stayed, we missed out on a development fee when he signed for Crawley and also meant Brackley benefitted. They were people attatched to the club who knew about these things and tried to warn them, but were not heard.

When things like that happen, it makes it very hard for those of us involved in the re launch of the spencer villa fund to then go to fans and ask them for money. A lot of people will rightfully feel like it is not their job to make up for the clubs mistakes.

We hear all the time about how our budget needs to be more competitive. I think the ones who get annoyed by people saying this are misunderstanding the context.
We know we can't get up to the kind of top 6 level wages overnight. But there does need to be a bit more understanding of just where we are now.
This might be classed as non-league. but really it is the very bottom of professional football, and for us to be able to sustain this level, we are going to need to find a way to move towards becoming full time on and off the pitch over the long term future.
Just like the majority of clubs in this league are, or are moving towards.

At the minute, our wage bill is probably mid to high, 4 figures a week. If we need to get it to 5 figures a week, then as I've already said, we are supporter owned, lets have a better dialogue between the club and those fans who might have idea's for opening new revenue streams for the club in ways they might not know are there.

Again, it's not about personal insults. it's about trying to be heard. which brings me to the next point.

Communication.

This is something we have clearly understood as an issue and have been working to address it.

Bringing Claire on board as the media director and having the new social media team put together has had an immediate impact on how professional the club looks across all of our media platforms. The content and information being put out is brilliant.

But where we still struggle is creating an active involvement of the membership.
Last year, we had over 600 members, which for a club of our size is incredible.
But other than an occasional email, we didn't really engage them.
It has been suggested for a long time now that there should be more members' meetings.
These dont have to be formal. They can just be a social get-together for the board and fans to interact away from the pressure of a match day.
I appreciate it is hard to make the time for these things. But even if this isnt possible, we have puritans radio, surely we could have a weekly or monthly show on there where a different board member or volunteer goes on to talk about what they are doing in their role and what their aims are. If people understand what is happening, then maybe they wouldn't feel so disconnected.
We have a lot of the right things in place. We just need to utilise them a bit better.

We all know Ronnie. If you went in to have a go at him, you'd more than likely come out with a smile on your face, and probably a pair of tickets for a coach trip to a musical you didn't want to go and see.
Nobody has any kind of personal vendetta against him, and I think we all want him to succeed in the role.
But it sometimes feels like he wants to take too much on, and there are plenty of people around who can and will help if asked. We just need to be more willing to be open and ask for that help.

Attendances

When you take in all of the above, you can start to understand why our crowds have dropped down to not a great deal better than some of our better southern league seasons.
On Saturday, there were less than 500 home fans in the ground.
People can bury their heads in the ground and blame the weather or historical results.
But the truth is that because of some of the above-mentioned issues, the 16-20 year old demographic seems to have dropped by at least half.
the 25-40 demographic is dwindling by the week, and across just about every single demographic of our support base, people are being put off and feeling disconnected.

We have to address this and fast. Because on crowds of less than 600, we simply cannot maintain this level of football and now having got here. After never really believing we would. The anger comes from the fear of us losing it and never getting it back.


Like it or not. Social media is the way in which most people air out their frustrations. Because the media side of the club has improved so much, people will continue to vent their frustraion there because its the most likely way they will get any response.
But rather than naively disregard it, if multiple people are posting about the same topics, then maybe it's something that needs discussing.

There are so many other areas of the club and how it is operating we could go into, but for now, I'll just stick to the current reoccurring topics.

Finally. With all of that now said. Brian and I have been invited to a board meeting on Monday to discuss all of the above issues.

As supporter liaisons, we have had a lot of issues and lack of clarity over what the club see's our role as being, and we have really struggled to make any meaningful impact on the subjects we have tried to raise. Until being invited to this meeting,
we have also never been given the opportunity to speak to the board as a whole.
But after having written out what seems like a thesis, I dont really need to go further into that now.

But we are both more than happy to take any questions or points of view to this meeting, and we want as many different viewpoints as possible. So please feel free to add any more suggestions i can take with me, or drop either one of us a message across the various platforms we're on.

Everyone wants whats best for the club, and just because you dont agree with how they say it, or just because you dont know who is saying it. It doesn't mean they are wrong.

[Sparky]

Craig, I have to say that yours is the most eloquent post I have read regarding the current situation of the club as a whole. Aas has been said before there are always going to be keyboard warriors who have nothing else better to do than criticise and mostly driven by lack of communication from the club. I have personally felt a level of disengagement for a while now and having been a supporter for more years now than I want to remember this saddens me greatly. It does seem some of the people who we didn’t really know who have come and gone either couldn’t get any personal gain or really couldn’t be bothered in the long run, we will never know. Anyway as you say in you ‘thesis’ we have to work together as a collective not individually.

[Steve T]

"An interesting take on something you admit yourself you haven't read Roger."

Not a great start. How would Arlidi know of the content of the messages if he hadn't seen them? Read his second sentence again.

It seems to me that the two of you are not that far apart in that you understand the pressures on a volunteer board for whom Step 2 football has been an even greater leap than expected. However, you are far more critical of the board and that's your right so we look forward to hearing the results of your forthcoming meeting. Perhaps you could push them to publish an account of it.

I am concerned by your remarks about 'pressure on the club from the police and the local council'. Can you tell us more? Unfortunately, what follows sounds a bit like "They started it". The 60-something Hereford supporter with the bloodied head at last season's home game didn't look much like a violent offender.

Very simply, Banbury's recent success has attracted undesirables. They were evident in the promotion season and embarrassed the club at Rushall and Nuneaton. I was at the latter game and spoke to the chief steward afterwards. His description of some of the Banbury supporters that day was unprintable.

We know why personal searches happen. I don't doubt some of them are a bit heavy-handed but the solution is simple. Nor should the cost of policing and stewarding be forgotten. It's unnecessary expense and fines are money up in smoke – quite literally at some matches.

"...the 16–20-year-old demographic seems to have dropped by at least half...the 25-40 demographic is dwindling by the week, and across just about every single demographic of our support base, people are being put off and feeling disconnected."

Attendances fell markedly last season in the New Year. The collapse of the team's form in the last 10 weeks didn't help, though it should be noted that five of the last 11 matches were evening KOs. This season wasn't helped by the departure of Andy Whing and its consequences. And maybe the novelty of Step 2 has worn off a bit. That's football but...here's a post from NLM. The writer was at Easington Sports on the day Banbury played Chester. He had noticed the large police presence in the town.

May account for the fact that there was a reasonable sized crowd at Easington. When on Google, I found some comments from locals indicating they were getting put off going to BU. So some locals may well be switching their allegiance if they just want a peaceful afternoon's football.

www.nonleaguematters.co.uk/forums/threads/saturday-19-august.11177/page-4#post-229280

[puritanmk]

Sept 13, 2023 12:07:06 GMT 1 Steve T said:

May account for the fact that there was a reasonable sized crowd at Easington. When on Google, I found some comments from locals indicating they were getting put off going to BU. So some locals may well be switching their allegiance if they just want a peaceful afternoon's football.

www.nonleaguematters.co.uk/forums/threads/saturday-19-august.11177/page-4#post-229280

I'm a season ticket holder, and I choose to miss the more 'vibrant' matches. Each to their own, but continually calling opposition players paedos and the c-word is hardly banter. Try that when you next go to Sainsbury's. 

If the club can manage on (home) att 700s with reduced police presence over 1000 with 15 plod (at club cost) then I'm all for it. 

The change in segregation was raised at a meeting. I don't remember much noise against it? It means we have both ends again.

The board and volunteers are the heroes.  

I'm starting to feel like I'm the wrong sort of supporter for some of the 'activists'.

[chuppachupp]

Some of the people on this forum are stuck in the Hellenic days, and don’t have the foggiest idea about what it takes to become a football club playing higher up the league pyramid. Just feels like many of you would be happy for us to go back to step 4 football with manageable 350 crowds and no atmosphere, just so you can happily stand in the same spot each home game. Our club needs larger crowds to become financially viable, it wasn’t long ago we were heading in that direction, because of our performances on the pitch and creating an excitement amongst people in Banbury, part of growing as a business is attracting lots of new people, it means we are successful, and this means attracting all age groups and new supporters who don’t live in grimsbury.

And in regards to the comment about Banbury fans causing trouble at Rushall , there in lies part of the problem, other fans perception. I was in the crowd that day and I can assure you it wasn’t Banbury that started the trouble. The problem was though that we made a statement as a club within 24 hrs without knowing facts basically apologising for our fans. Chester game on the Tuesday night was a massive balls up by police and the club who didn’t want to segregate ( other than Ronnie who did ).

Anyway enjoy step 2 while it lasts, because we will be heading the other direction unless our mentality as a whole club changes and that includes some of you lot who want the old days of playing Hellenic league.

[Steve T]

What an extraordinary distortion of some of the opinions expressed above. I can assure you that there are no forum members wishing to return to the Hellenic days.

Bizarre, perverse, insulting and utterly wrong.

[puritanmk]

Spot on Steve.

I just don't understand the binary thought process of some (poss small number) of supporters, especially with the 'atmosphere' issue. 

One example: pyro/flare/smoke - it doesn't matter what your view is, they are illegal and all clubs face a action or a fine each time one hits the playing surface. It's pointless to complain that clubs enforce the rules - find a way to have the rule altered if it spoils your day.

Full disclosure, perhaps I have an honest face, but apart from a quick pat down I've never had to take shoes off/empty pockets - but then I'm the different age group to those mentioned who have recieved more attention.

I for one don't want the Hellenic days again. I want BUFC to go well in the NLN - for as long as possible until new ground, further investment comes and we can push for NL. 

We know the council won't/can't invest or help. Cherwell is so far in hock they have to sell their own buildings.

Anyway, gone off topic of thread, but the club's situation needs to be viewed in the round, rather than saying 'everything is sh1t and the board are corrupted by the masonic influence of council and the police'*

*obviously that's not was stated - just a bit of light-hearted fun to finish off. 

[Steve T]

Who can disagree with the plea: "We need more money?" No one. All suggestions welcome. It's the special pleading for the victims of match-day police prejudice that's beginning to grate.

[Sparky]

Three posts since 2019 and comes up with inane rubbish and completely misses the point of the thread, ah well he got a reaction which was probably the point of the post😂😂😂

[craig]

I am aware that i still need to respond properly to this thread, but i wanted to wait until I had spoken to the club before making any further comments.

Last night, myself and Brian had a meeting with 4 of the current board, as well as 2 officers from thames valley police.

Everything that has been mentioned in this thread was spoken about in great detail, and there was good dialogue between all parties on these issues.

As was suggested in a previous reply. I have asked Ronnie today if the club will be releasing the minutes and/or a summary of the meeting.
He is going to speak to the rest of the board and get back to me. until that decision has been made i dont think it is right for me to go into full details about the meeting.

But to briefly summarise. Although there were a lot of differing opinions on what some of the main issues are and how to tackle them. It was a very open and honest discussion about the current position we are in as both a club and fanbase, and it was a very positive first step into working towards getting things back on the right track.
I was also very happy that the police were willing to sit down and discuss things as it helped to clear up some of the confusion around who controls what on match days, and what their objectives are going forward.

We have set a provisional date of the end of november for our next sit down, and hopefully this will now be an ongoing thing.

credit to everyone involved for making the time for this much needed meeting.

Hopefully i will be able to add further comment shortly. But until then, if anyone has any specific questions then please feel free to contact me or reply to this and i will do my best to answer.

[puritanmk]

Great update - thank you.

[Steve T]

banburyunitedfc.co.uk/news/outcomes-from-supporters-liaison-meeting--18th-september-2023-2811633.html