Trust Board Member Dan Levy give us an update from the Trust

I am writing this on the Monday after the Southend game.  It was a game we could have won, and really showed how far we have come on the pitch.  Southend were on a run of straight victories, but we made them look pretty ordinary.  That game came straight after our victory over hitherto unbeaten Oldham, where again we showed what County can do.  Let’s hope we can carry on where we left off against another Essex team, Colchester United, to whose fans, players and officials we give a warm welcome today. 

This Thursday, I will have been one of the Trust’s delegates to the annual conference of Supporters Direct, this year to be held in Westminster. Supporters Direct is the umbrella organisation for supporters’ trusts.  It will be interesting to see how much publicity this year’s conference will get.  Lord Triesman, chairman of the FA, is a keynote speaker, and he will have got a warm reception if he laid into the greedy clubs of the Premier League, their wanton disregard for running their business effectively, their huge and dangerous indebtedness and their happiness whenever a new foreign trillionnaire comes along to use them as his plaything.

Meeting other trusts is always an enlightening experience.  Firstly, and least importantly, it gives me a warm feeling, as Stockport County is seen as one of the real success stories of the Trust movement.  We are one of the four trust owned and controlled clubs in the League, along with Exeter City, Notts County and Brentford, and we are of course the one doing best on the pitch.  It is always easy to see the faults of one’s own family – County fans do sometimes look for the cloud to go with every silver lining.  It is nice when people from outside the family point out the good things we have going for us.

But much more importantly, we can learn from how other clubs and trusts do things.  For instance not every trust owned club has the same governance rules as we do. County has two distinct boards, for the trust and for the club, and I think that this is a very effective way of running things and making sure that the club has to be run on the lines of prudence.  The trust board holds the club board to account.   But maybe for instance we could learn from Exeter, where the two organisations are less distinct, and where there are more members of the trust than there are average attendances and where volunteers do a huge amount of the work of the club – I wonder if County’s fans would be prepared to make the sacrifices that Exeter’s approach would entail?    Or from Brentford, where there is a specific “fans’ director” who holds regular matchday surgeries.

And it will be great to have spent a day with likeminded fans.  Mutual ownership of businesses is coming back into fashion, as most of the banks that have failed over the past few months have been ones that gave up being mutually owned building societies and instead turned into banks to “follow the dream”.  People are starting to realise that the bloated debts of the bigger football clubs might be leading to a bubble that is about to burst.  The trust way of doing things, with minimal debt and with the club trying to live within its means, is going to get even more fashionable soon!