FC United’s Stakeholders Relationship Committee

An update on the work of FC United’s Stakeholders Relationship Committee which was established by the Board in 2018 to oversee the club’s relationships with its various stakeholders including Manchester City Council.

When we were gallivanting round Lancashire mill towns, twirling bar scarves and celebrating punk football in our glorious first season as football club owners it’s a fair assumption that few of us would have envisaged regular mentions of something called a ‘Stakeholders Relationship Committee’ popping up in the club’s monthly board reports and general meeting presentations little over a decade later. It sounds like something straight out of a book of corporate lingo that has little in common with standing on a terrace in Moston cheering on a seventh tier, semi-professional football club but, despite the unsexy title, the SRC has been instrumental in enabling the club to move beyond the short-term fire-fighting that dogged its early years at Broadhurst Park and focus instead on its long-term future. 

So who are these ‘stakeholders’ and why is there a need for a ‘committee’ that looks after our ‘relationship’ with them? As owners and supporters of FC United, of course, we all hold an important stake in our football club – without us there would be no FC. Likewise the staff employed by the club, including players and coaches, and our football partners Moston Juniors and the wider community in Moston and across North Manchester also have a substantial interest in the future of FC United. And so too the organisations and individuals that have helped to fund the building and renovation of our Broadhurst Park ground through loans, grants, donations, loan stock and community shares, including Manchester City Council, Sport England, the Football Foundation and Power to Change. And with the funding from each of these organisations, whether in the form of grants or loans, come legal obligations and key performance indicators. 

In late 2018, FC United was languishing at the foot of the National League North table and was in such dire financial straits that the club was forced, on an otherwise fixture-free Saturday in December, to arrange a friendly match against Chadderton (in which the FC players played for free) to raise much-needed cash to enable it to pay at least some of its employees ahead of Christmas.

It was the toughest of times and it was plain to see that, if things continued as they were, meeting the repayments and interest on loans, loan stock and community shares (the latter becoming due as the club had by now been in its Broadhurst Park home for more than three years) in the months ahead was going to be almost impossible. On and off the pitch FC United was struggling to satisfy even the most basic expectations of its various stakeholders whether they were owners, supporters, employees, suppliers, local residents or lenders.        

The board responded to this mounting crisis by establishing a stakeholders relationship committee “to oversee the club’s relationships with its various stakeholders and our obligations to those organisations and individuals” and to offer much-needed support to the club and its board. The members of the SRC are drawn from the club’s membership and possess a wide range of professional expertise and senior-level experience across legal, financial, commercial, strategic and communications matters and offer a reminder of the tremendous strength in depth of a football club owned by more than two thousand people.

In addition, the SRC has benefited from the advice and local knowledge of two individuals, Peter Tavernor and Paul Murphy, who are Moston born and bred and were nominated by the local Labour party to advise FC United in its negotiations with Manchester City Council.

The SRC’s primary role on its formation was to ensure the short and longer-term financial sustainability of the club and manage its relationship with key stakeholders such as the Council. The committee’s terms of reference noted that the SRC would seek to build “a strong working relationship with Manchester City Council” and also outlined that the SRC would liaise with creditors and investors “to identify and negotiate opportunities for refinancing debt and/or adjusting loan terms and conditions so as to make these terms and conditions more favourable to the club’s current and future financial position”.

At its first meeting in late 2018 the SRC agreed that the club should refinance its debt in order to meet its obligations around repayment of loan stock in February 2019. The completion of FC’s Broadhurst Park ground in 2015 had been aided by securing £275k of loan stock from individuals and £50k from organisations and these loans were, by now, fast approaching maturity. The SRC subsequently moved at pace to secure a loan of £150,000 from Big Issue Invest (the investment arm of the Big Issue magazine) and, at an extraordinary board meeting in early February, the board voted unanimously to accept these funds.

With short-term cash needs addressed the SRC’s focus subsequently shifted to working with the Council. Negotiations and discussion with Manchester City Council continued throughout 2019 and eventually culminated in the major announcement at FC United’s Annual General Meeting in December 2019 of a new ‘working in partnership’ deal with the Council that helped to secure the club’s long-term future and also strengthen its contribution to its local community across North Manchester. It was a landmark moment for the club.

As part of the deal the Council agreed to refinance a portion of the club’s borrowings through the provision of a new credit facility of up to £250,000 to be repaid over a fifteen year period. The first tranche of £80,000 of this loan allowed the club to repay outstanding loans from individual members and a further tranche of £170,000 was used to repay loan stock holders with the remainder providing the club with all-important working capital.

Since its inception the SRC had liaised with loan stock holders around the repayment of their loans and, whilst the vast majority were extremely supportive of the club and understood its financial position some were keen, understandably, to be repaid as soon as possible including one individual who had a desperate need for repayment due to life-changing circumstances.      

After a year-long hiatus as a result of the coronavirus pandemic the SRC began meeting again earlier this year and in May 2021 the board unanimously approved a proposal by the committee to update the SRC’s terms of reference and extend its remit to scrutinising and assessing the viability of any major new proposed projects or investments and also, at the request of the board, to advise “on any matter concerning governance of the club and any of its committees”.

Meanwhile in August the board approved a further proposal from the SRC for a ‘fixed committee’ structure that seeks to turn the present mishmash of various volunteer-run committees and working groups into something more cohesive that is underpinned by strong governance and a commitment to openness and transparency that would see minutes (subject to redaction) shared not only with the board but also the club’s co-owners. The new committee structure will see the creation of four new committees covering communications, membership, football and community in addition to the existing Commercial Strategy Committee and SRC with each group having clear terms of reference and roles on each committee promoted to the club’s members.

This shift of focus to governance matters stemmed from a recognition that the landscape has changed considerably since the formation of the SRC in 2018 and that the club is now operating in a stable financial environment that enables it to consider its future growth. Remy Zentar, the SRC’s chair, feels that “the club is now in the strongest and most secure financial position in its history” and this strengthening of the club’s financial base has, in turn, allowed the club to bolster its management team by appointing Neil Reynolds as a full-time Head of Football and Academy Principal and also look to recruit a Head of Commercial and Marketing.

Reflecting on the SRC’s work over the last three years FC United’s board chair Adrian Seddon said “in my role as chair of the board, I’m determined to draw on the talents and expertise within our membership. Fortunately in the club’s hour of need in 2018, we were able to call on the assistance of a group of highly qualified volunteers to help turn around the club’s fortunes and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the SRC volunteers for their hard work and commitment dealing with many complex and challenging issues over the last three years”.  

These are exciting times for the club and the culmination of a considerable amount of hard work that has gone on, and continues to go on, behind the scenes that has enabled the club to not only survive the existential threat of the Covid pandemic but begin to glimpse a promising future too.

This is an abridged version of an article that was shared with the club’s co-owners on FC United’s members’ forum in August 2021 which includes further details on the work of the SRC and brief pen portraits of all its volunteers.