What the first FAB minutes tell us about Tottenham Hotspur

The minutes of the first meeting of the new Fan Advisory Board have been published. You may have missed them, as they were issued at 9am on Saturday morning as everyone prepared for the Sheffield United game. This was 11 days after the meeting had been held. Back in the days of the Trust “Board to Board” meetings, 72 hours had been established as the time in which minutes of meetings between fan representatives and the Club’s board should be published, so this is a significant step backwards.

The longer the time between meetings and the minutes, the less credible those meetings seem and the harder it is to convince fans of their value. Reps on the FAB need to assert themselves to ensure timely publication of minutes. The FAB’s Terms of Reference are not yet available – they should be – so we don’t know if 11 days is actually ahead of target, but it is still significantly longer than 72 hours. Faith in the process would also be improved by including some detail of any discussion or push back. These minutes read like a presentation rather than a discussion, and while that might fit the Club’s communication strategy of saying as little as possible about anything, it is not in the spirit of the fan-led review of governance.

The minutes, however, are worth reading, and there are questions arising that are worth asking. Our observations, while critical in places, are intended to be feedback that FAB members can usefully take on board.

To start on a positive note, the Club has been pressed to explain its strategic direction for some time, and some progress has been made since the haughty dismissal the last request got. But the answers reveal some confusion.

Minute 5.1 (a) states that “First team football is the core of the Club’s ecosystem”. But 5.3 says the “key objective” is to “deliver revenues to fund a sustainable, successful football club”. And 5.4 (a) says “football is at the heart of everything the Club does”.

So, is the priority football or the generation of revenue? There is a lack of clarity that means the focus swings back and forth between 5.1 and 5.4. The underlying assumption seems to be that success is not possible without the ability “to deliver revenue”. Although if success is defined as delivering revenue, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The use of the word ‘sustainable’ is also interesting. Is this recognition that Spurs could seek success without prioritising driving revenue but that this would not be sustainable? Fans would benefit from more explanation of this important point. It would, for example, be interesting to look at the difference between the operating models of Spurs and Brighton & Hove Albion and then to ask why Spurs are so different as to require revenue generation to be the primary objective. We would like to see some recognition that success can drive revenue, which in turn can drive success. Having success as a primary objective seems to us to be a good idea for a football club.

Minute 5.1 (b) says the stadium is evidence of the attention paid to detail. There’s no reason to dispute that, but the stadium is not the only measure of detail. On Scott Munn’s contract, Fabio Paratici’s availability for work, or the number of loan players on the books, to take just a few examples, there has been plenty of evidence of a lack of attention to detail. Some indication of whether the much-talked about reorganisation of responsibilities was going to address this, and how, was really what was required here.

The impression given throughout is that there is not much formal governance at the club, something where the checks and balances offered by normal company governance structures underpin the quality of decision-making and run quality checks on proposals. Much of what is provided as evidence of strategic thinking reads more like something that’s been hashed together because the people running the Club have been asked to come up with something. And that’s especially true of the use of the phrase “virtuous circle of investment”.

It’s a pretty awful phrase, but what place does the word “virtuous” have in a serious business plan? The Club likes to emphasise the chairman’s business savvy, but savvy is not virtue. Do we even want to be virtuous in this sense? That would mean, for example, we offered to overpay a club in financial difficulty for a player. As Everton will attest, we do the opposite.

The use of “virtuous” seems like an attempt to dress nothing up as something, and that conclusion is underlined when looking at the diagram presented that purports to illustrate “the virtuous circle of investment and performance”. The ability to attract talent does not automatically lead to improved performance on the pitch. Don’t take our word for it, take the word of the THFC Board, which has stated exactly that on numerous occasions. Not for the first time, the Board seems to say the first thing that comes into its head in answer to a question, even if it contradicts something it has said before.

Before we get on to numbers, there’s the matter of the “N17 manifesto” set out in 5.2. This is, we’re told, an “internal manifesto that was created for staff”. It is vacuous word salad. Read it, read it again, then read it a third time and you will be hard pressed to find any substance at all. Those familiar with the classic sketch from TV series The Thick of It where the political advisers come up with the idea of “The quiet batpeople” as a target voting demographic will be familiar with the sort of thing.

We are told that “today is the day when we build the foundations for tomorrow” and that these foundations “will change lives. For generations.” What does any of this mean? Where does laying the foundations for future generations fit with pricing kids out? The statement is not credible as a workplace strategy and appears to have scant relevance to a football club. But it is again revealing. The words ‘success’, ‘winning’ and ‘achievement’ are conspicuous by their absence.

Minute 5.6 indicates it might get down to some financial nitty-gritty. But doesn’t. EBITDA is mentioned but not presented. If you’re going to bring it up, show us. Give us a graph of EBITDA over the last 10 years. Credible businesses do it. It doesn’t betray any commercial confidences. Net spend figures are given but in isolation. We need benchmarks to truly assess them. This is not even a token gesture at providing proper information. It’s simply not good enough.

Minute 5.8 outlines five points that constitute the commercial department’s focus, although (b) is an explanation of (a) so there are just four. And while this section is presented as a positive, two of the points of focus are on the Club taking more money from fans. And yet this is presented as a positive to fan reps. It’s one area where publication of some push back might have given people more faith in this process, and not doing so risks making the fan reps look foolish.

Minute 5.9a contains a claim that the stadium has driven £344m into the local economy every year. Where does this figure come from? We are not told. Spurs do some fantastic work in the local community but claims such as this need to be backed up, and they need to be presented in full context. Otherwise, they are meaningless.

The final section addresses questions from FAB members. Minute 6.2 mentions a “full ticketing review” but gives no detail of what that will be, how it will be conducted or who will be involved. It says the FAB will be “included in discussions” but a much wider group than just the FAB needs to be included on this issue.

There was an important question to be asked here, and it seems not to have been raised. Previously, the Club has indicated that the banks demand an increase in every revenue stream in order to maintain our debt and funding. Anyone with basic business knowledge knows that as long as banks get the money they are due, they are not generally concerned about how it is (lawfully) generated. And any director that agreed to covenants requiring perpetual growth would arguably be negligent. What is more likely, but less palatable to fans, is that as part of the key objective of driving revenue, it is the Club’s choice to push prices up. We deserve to know the truth.

Minute 6.3 talks about driving extra revenues to make up for lack of cup games. We would like to have seen a clearer commitment to actually progressing in cup tournaments. That would reduce the need to make up for lost revenues. Call it a virtuous circle if you will. We’re also told that the lack of European fixtures means more women’s team fixtures could be held at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium. We’re uncomfortable with the implication that the women’s team only gets opportunities when the men’s team fails, something that also means any success for the men’s team is bittersweet. Because it can only come at the expense of the women’s team. It’s another example of wrong thinking at the very top of the Club.

A question asked about what success looked like provided an ideal opportunity to give an answer that delivered SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). These are commonly used by businesses with serious governance structures. Instead, we got waffle. “Success changes over time, but the most important thing for the Club is to be a highly competitive team that wins and, importantly, entertains fans.”

Not only is it waffle, it adds to the growing list of core, key, primary, most important objectives that now stands at revenue generation, first team football, being highly competitive, and entertaining.

It would be wrong to see the FAB as a waste of time, as some are. What is revealed is a club with no clear sense of what it is or what it is for, and therefore with no clear strategy. That explains much of what has happened over the last few years. The poor quality of governance is revealed throughout, as many of the answers have the feel of something chucked together just to stop the pesky fans asking questions and escape the impending shadow of the regulator more than anything else.

One meeting and one new structure was never going to achieve everything overnight. This is a starting point that provides a clearer picture of what we are dealing with than we have had for some time. And that is valuable.

Martin Cloake & Tristan Foot