Unless you’ve been on the moon over the past month or so, you’ll have been kept up to date with the managerial situation at BP, so I will spare you a few more column inches in your shiny copy of ‘The Mariner’ and will instead choose to, rather enviously, take an in-depth look at today’s opponents and their supporters groups.

Wycombe Wanderers has always been one of those football clubs I have a soft spot for. Despite our terrible record against them and the fact that they’re a bunch of southern softies really, I have always found the locals very welcoming in my two visits to Adams Park, and that as a club, they do things the right way.

However, it is their supporter organisations that really impress me, particularly when you consider the size of the Wycombe Wanderers Football Club. There are now two supporter directors on the PLC board of the football club from the Wycombe Wanderers Trust Ltd, the single body formed as a result of the merger of Wycombe Wanderers’ Supporters Trust and its Founders Trust, which was completed last month.

The Founders Trust came first, formed in July 2004 after the membership of Wycombe Wanderers Football Club voted to change the club into a PLC with a share capital of £4 million, 500 of which were designated Founder Shares, with existing members each receiving a single share.

Soon after the Supporters Trust emerged and in February 2005 purchased 100,000 shares in the PLC, earning them a place on the board. The interesting thing about this is that, for the most part, the purchase was on tick. Of the initial £50,000 paid to the club for the shares, £35,000 was an interest free loan from a sympathetic member, made on the understanding that failure to repay upon written request would result in forfeiture of the shareholding to the lender and the loss of the seat on the board.

The details of the transaction highlight the way in which all concerned parties have worked together for the benefit of the club. Another £5000 of that payment was a donation from a third supporter organisation, the Supporters Association (or Blues Club). Under the rules of the PLC, no one shareholder could own more than 25% of the issued shares, so the Trust’s purchase paved the way for three other shareholders to purchase another 50,000 shares each. And of course, how many football clubs would allow the purchase of shares on a promise?  

The Trust were however good for the money, with the second £50,000 instalment paid a year later. They were still faced with the task of repaying the loan, but that pressure now seems to have been relieved, with their annual accounts reporting that the last £25,000 of the loan was waived during 2007.

So the unified Supporters Trust and Foundation now have two representatives on the board, a remarkable achievement given that Wycombe, although in debt, were not classed as a club in crisis when all this supporter activity was going on. Their average gate is only about 1000 more than ours this season and it might also surprise you to know that at the end of 2007, their Supporters Trust membership stood at only 257, around the same size as GTST.

How did they get where they are whilst we have been struggling to keep going and still view a seat on the board as a distant dream? Well for a start, they set their membership fees a lot higher than we did, with life membership at £400 and a one-year subscription at £60 per annum so that, in spite of their modest numbers, those who did join (including 98 life members) were enough to generate the majority of the money needed.

In light of John Fenty’s recent comments and the fact that our Russian billionaire saviour’s private jet must have been delayed, perhaps we should be looking to Wycombe as a benchmark.  We have raised almost £30,000 in the last three years and own 22,000 shares but would our efforts have borne far more fruit if the prize of a seat on the GTFC board had been on offer?

Whatever the answer to that question, Wycombe Wanderers is a prime example of a club that is all the better for having its supporters at the heart of it and involved in shaping its future. If you would like to help GTST work towards this, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .