Following an exhausting, ‘interesting’ and ultimately successful season and after a couple of weeks to recuperate, the Collective will necessarily now turn its thoughts to next season and our future activity and structure. Circumstances forced us to focus largely on protests over the period since September 2025 to the final five or six weeks of the season but, contrary to popular belief, that is not what the Collective is primarily about and is not, in any case sustainable.
Leaving aside the very difficult circumstances of the last year, most of us recognise that there have been long-standing issues of poor recruitment, poor engagement with fans and generally poor corporate governance of the club. Those problems have not gone away and it remains crucial for fans to be united in demanding better from those who currently run our club. The way that we do that, however, cannot be to be in constant protest mode, albeit that those protests were, and continue to be, successful in a number of respects and may be necessary again.
The Board cannot be allowed to think that the League and Cup Double, as unexpected and as welcome as it was, makes everything ok – not while they continue to show very little evidence of professional and timely recruitment practices, not while they continue to allow the principal shareholder to run the club like a feudal lord and certainly not while they continue to attack and hound two of our fellow fans in a vindictive and totally unnecessary way.
However, it is possible for us to unite, to engage and to continue to seek dialogue with the club to progress our interests as fans while aiming to keep matchdays clear for us to just enjoy the game. We have a number of positive proposals remaining from the initial campaign eg Fan Advisory Board and a united fan body like the Collective is the best way to progress those proposals with the Club.
The circumstances of last season also meant that we had little time to focus on the structure of the Collective, how it would make decisions, how voting would work etc. During this summer we need to take the time to consider these things and ensure that we can build a representative body which is united in how it makes decisions and how it takes those decisions forward. A number of alternative models were tabled at the last meeting of the signatories and the Steering Group will further consider and develop them so that we have a proposal to put to members in time to have an agreed structure in place for the start of 2026-7 season. So enjoy your break and watch out for communications from the Collective on the timetable for this process.