FAN ARTICLES

A call for transparency?

By Luke Berry :  22/01/2011 :  Comments (23) :

Others have delivered arguments for this issue in a far more eloquent and fact-laden manner than I am able to, and so I will use this post in an attempt to support this stance, rather than impose an over reaching theory of my own.

Evertonians in this current climate, are feeling a sense of increasing alienation from the hierarchy of our beloved club. From a seemingly obvious refusal to release the financial figures of last year and a lack of transparency regarding how much they want for the club, to older issues such as the scrapping of the AGM, a place where shareholders should quite rightly get the chance to to voice their opinions. Bill and his board have progressively shut up the shop and closed any existing channels of dialogue between themselves, and us.

This issue of the boards ostracisation of the fans is becoming increasingly untenable for many, yet there are still some 'supporters' who feel that Bill is the lesser of two evils, a case of 'better the devil you know?' but is it?

The arguments posed to support this are the rough handling of some clubs by foreign investors, the Portsmouths of this world are used as warning of how foreign cash doesn't always come with a guarantee of stability. You only have to look across the park to see just how close to catastrophe a massive club can come. And yet, I find myself doing just that, looking across the park and feeling a pang of jealousy.

Liverpools owners are setting up a new forum with which they can have a more direct line of communication with what they see as their biggest assets, the fans. It is to be called The Liverpool FC Supporters Committee and it will meet four times a season, at Anfield, to discuss all of the issues affecting Liverpool Football Club. The owners take this egalitarian gesture one step futher, Tom Werner and John Henry will attend at least two meetings personally and when they do they will be meeting with 17 'democratically appointed' fans.

Those of a more cynical bent will say that this is a gesture, designed to appease the fans and lead them into a more docile accepting state. They, in my opinion, would be very wrong. Lerner and Heny are boxing very clever here, they recognise that the fans are better placed than anyone else to evaluate the clubs condition, and even if they haven't got the business acumen to strategize a proposal from start to finish, fans can be pool of wealth to mined for the betterment of their business. And make no mistake, this is a business decision on behalf of the Americans, one that our board have neither the decency or the imagination to implement.

Cynicism aside many of the Liverpool fans will just be happy to get a level of transparency at their club, something that we as Evertonians are unlikely to ever get whilst the current incumbents are in charge. I did not wish to use this post as a rallying call to revolution, I am not the man to implement such a manoeuvre as I don't have the requisite skills or contacts to do so, however I do hope we Evertonians might start to think about forcing a change.

That lot across the road have shown us what fan power can achieve, for as much as this was a canny business move on behalf the Yanks, in the back of their minds they will have images of the SOS brigade demonstrating their disgust and disapproval if anything was to go wrong, and they won't want that sort of a fight. Unfortunately our board doesn't currently feel that level of pressure, if they did then maybe they would feel obliged to do the same for us.

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