Where are the Foxes Trust? The voice of Leicester City supporters has been sidelined
A new season dawns with Leicester back in the Championship and the club refusing to engage with supporters on key issues. Jamie Barnard questions what has become of the Foxes Trust that helped to save the club two decades ago.
It’s December 2002 and Millwall are in town. But they’re not really in town. A few weeks prior, Leicester City fans were barred from attending the away fixture at The New Den and the club have reciprocated by telling Millwall that their fans won’t be welcome in the Walkers Stadium as a result.
For the past few weeks we’ve walked towards the stadium to the beat of jangling buckets. Our club is in grave danger of going out of existence and a flurry of volunteers line the pavements; shaking pots of change, asking fans to spare what they can to keep the club going.
As a 14-year old with no means of income, I implore my dad to be generous. Where I see coins, I want to see paper notes instead. Usually frugal, I think he obliges.
Football clubs are steeped in community. Passed down through bloodlines, through generations and through shared experience. And in recent weeks, the Leicester community has stepped up to gather the money to try to save the club. Emile Heskey has donated some of the signing on fee from his transfer to Liverpool, a Foxes Trust supporters group has been created and mobilised quickly and Gary Lineker has contributed towards, and fronted, a consortium to attempt a rescue bid.
In subsequent years, the worry and doubt and suffering of this period for our club, its employees (many of whom lose their jobs) and its supporters will fade away. In a Twitter-banter era we’ll be subject to the lazy accusation that we “got away with it” and cheated the consequences of our financial troubles. Neil Warnock, whose Sheffield United team are pursuing promotion alongside ourselves and Portsmouth, will be the loudest critic and set in motion a myth that will endure over time: Leicester City over-extended financially and got away with it, scot free.
Whilst there were undoubtedly poor managerial decisions made, the truth is that the rug was pulled from beneath the club’s feet in a way few could have foreseen at the time and which culminated in administration. The collapse of ITV Digital took away huge sums of money the club was expecting to receive, at the worst possible time, and on the back of a relegation (I sometimes wonder how a few middling Premier League clubs would cope tomorrow if TV money was suddenly whipped away without warning). Wage reductions for relegations were not written into player contracts at the time as they are now - a lesson learned by the Leicester experience - and it created a potent cocktail of debt.
And the creditor who wouldn’t settle on a deal to prevent the club entering administration?
That would be Dennis Wise, of course, somehow owed compensation for an unfair dismissal case, despite having been sacked for breaking a team mate’s jaw over a game of cards. He’s back in town with this Milwall side today and in the 20 years that follow we’ll not see such hatred raining down from the stands - alongside the spare change that hadn’t found its way into a collection tin in recent weeks - as directed at Wise today.
Pre-match, an announcement by The Birch on the pitch brings jubilant scenes: the Lineker consortium bid will progress and save us.
As fans, we’ve played our part. Our inaugural Supporters Trust, the Foxes Trust, has quickly gathered a membership (myself and my dad included) on the promise of funds going towards the club and all efforts to save it. Unfortunately, in the coming years there will be more and more clubs needing a Supporters Trust to conduct a rescue attempt for their club, and I’m sure the Foxes Trust provided a great example to follow.
The troubles of 2023
The consequences of relegation this time round, in 2023, fortunately do not seem to be as stark as the one in 2002. It is not, however, beyond the realms of possibility that they could be eventually.
Whereas many lost their jobs back in 2002, this time the club has made minimal redundancies off the pitch from an operation that dwarfs that of prior eras (there are more than 50 ground staff just to care for the £100m training ground). It enters the second tier off the back of a season played with the seventh highest wage bill in the Premier League and will go into this season with a playing staff that costs, by some distance, the most in the Championship. And it has already borrowed money against the parachute payments designed to soften the bumpy exit from the top tier for the next three years.
Are we gambling on an instant return? Time will tell.
It’s certainly something we should be hearing reassurance from the club on, however. And given the stated aims on their website to: “Lobby the board, raise the concerns of Leicester City supporters, strengthen the bond between club and local community and to ensure the club meets the highest standards of business management”, the Foxes Trust, 21 years on, feel like the ones who should be obtaining that reassurance.
We recently discovered that the Foxes Trust submitted a list of questions to the club, to seek assurances that lessons had been learned from the failures last season. Soon thereafter, we heard that the club had broken a commitment to engage and that, weeks after receiving them, no answers to the questions had been forthcoming. The Foxes Trust have not yet outlined how they plan to tackle what is a contemptuous disregard by the club for an organisation whose overarching purpose is the protection and wellbeing of that very club.
You might be wondering who the Foxes Trust are. And it would be a reasonable question to ask, given that on recent issues affecting Leicester City supporters they have often been silent or ineffective. Reflecting on the biggest issues hotly debated and contested by fans recently - safe standing, FA Cup Final mandatory buses, stringent ID checks at away games, mobile ticketing, ticket administration fees, a singing section, pay-per-view games, away ticket allocations for big games - I cannot recall anything the Foxes Trust has demonstrably done to have a positive impact, even though Supporters Trusts have a valuable role to play in safeguarding the supporter experience within the English game.
As an official Supporters Trust, they have of course contributed to initiatives led by the Football Supporters Association or governing bodies (contributing to the Fan Led Review by the government for example). But when it comes to club and community-specific matters, there appears to be little to show for the last decade in particular, which is concerning when decisions made by those in power at the club have been detrimental to it in recent times.
Their weak recent statement on relegation concluded: “We are where we are” with the same air of resignation Brendan Rodgers was showing around this time last year.
More concerning than that, however, is that when they do lobby, they are sidelined. Our club was recently fined £880,000 by the Competitions & Markets Authority for essentially working to deny Leicester City fans the chance of a fair price on the purchase of a Leicester City shirt. On the Foxes Trust website, they explain: “We spoke to the club about this and had hoped that further public comment on the matter might be made by the club. This has not happened”.
You may ask who is in the Foxes Trust. Well that much is not clear - they have not disclosed how many members they hold in this privileged position with direct access to the club or how many people are part of the organisation to support its aim to: “create an independent forum to raise the concerns of Leicester City Football Club supporters”. That ambiguity doesn’t help to engender confidence in the strength of that representative voice.
What is clear though, is that the democratically-elected chairman, Ian Bason, has been in position now for over 20 years. It doesn’t scream innovation, change and fresh-thinking when those in charge of our Supporters Trust have been doing it since James Scowcroft was bundling home a brace on that seminal day in 2002 against Millwall. Maybe that’s not such a problem when things are going well at the club (as they had for a long time), or when the club has a clear and open line of communication (as they have not had for a long time), but when things do not go well we, as Leicester City fans, should all be invested in having a Supporters Trust the club is answerable to and who are willing to hold the club to account.
As we ramp up for the opening day of the season this weekend, my biggest concern is that we are hoping for change on the pitch despite little discernible change off it. Enzo Maresca’s recent comments on the farcical pre-season tour to Asia suggest a man not afraid to let on where he thinks the club has come up short or to create some constructive tension. I hope we can rely on the Foxes Trust to follow suit in insisting that the club do communicate answers to their questions and tell us what the lessons learned have been.
Because, quite frankly, who can we trust to help us avoid another day like that Millwall home game in 2002, if the Trust cannot be trusted?
