On Thursday 21st March, Union FS held a Fans’ Forum at Duffy’s Bar in Leicester city centre. I couldn’t make it, but the conversations that night made a big impression on several people I know.
These were people I’d got to know through either The Fosse Way or the BSLB podcast, both set up in the summer of 2022 to give an alternative voice to Leicester fans. TFW and BSLB are clearly cut from a similar cloth, and there’s been lots of overlap in the past with guests from one appearing on the other and vice versa.
What these people were telling me struck a chord – that when the Foxes Trust joined forces with Union FS on the general sale issue, that strong, combined voice carried weight with the club.
Trust: the process
Suddenly it felt negligent to be using this platform just to have a moan about the club without making any attempt to influence the change I want to see through the existing democratic channel.
Some of the people associated with TFW and BSLB started talking about what could happen if we were able to bring more people to the Trust and strengthen their hand with numbers and expertise in various areas.
So on the Tuesday evening following the Union FS Fans’ Forum, I found myself at Leicester City’s vast Seagrave training complex attending the Foxes Trust’s AGM as one of around 40 new members who had joined during those four days.
I was heavily conflicted. I felt there were things that a supporters’ trust should be pushing the club hard about, which seemed impossible while it was holding a cosy AGM within the club’s inner sanctum. How do you hold a club to account and ask the difficult questions while maintaining a relationship that gives you the access needed to have any kind of influence? It must be a tricky balance.
But truthfully, that night, it felt like the £10 joining fee had already been worth it to see Seagrave from the inside and get the chance to ask Ricardo Pereira a question as part of the AGM.
Expecting all the other questions to be some variation on the theme of the financial situation and its effect on the squad from a senior player’s perspective, I instead asked whether Ricardo shared Enzo Maresca’s view that the atmosphere at home games needed to improve.
In fact, that question was a bit of an outlier. The toughest question he faced was more along the lines of his favourite curry or whether he’d been to Bradgate Park.
