Along with Keith Campbell, Motherwell FC’s new head of marketing, Douglas Dickie, ‘Well Society board member and Craig Hughes, Society General Manager, I visited Hearts to find out a bit more about how they have improved over the last couple of years since administration.
Clearly, Ann Budge is a fundamental factor in the club’s recent success. In their thousands, the fans have rallied round her board’s clear improvement plan, which involves fans pledging at least £10 per month to support the Foundation of Hearts.
It also involves a team of, mostly business, people who have the necessary expertise and ability to implement the plan, with the approval and support of the fans. The chairman of the Foundation is also a non-executive member of the Hearts’ board.
According to the Foundation, its aim is to ‘work in partnership with Ann Budge and her team to ensure that the rebuilding of the club can proceed effectively, supported by the vital financial contribution of Foundation members.
Within the agreed (repayment) schedule, we aim to see the ownership of the club transferring from Ann Budge to the Foundation, thus delivering the central objective of fan ownership at Hearts.’
We have a fairly similar situation here at Motherwell. Since Les Hutchison became effective owner, he has provided the club with substantial interest-free loans as a philanthropic helping hand towards improvements.
He has provided considerable business acumen in helping the club develop a clear strategy and operational plan to take it forward in a financially sound, sustainable way. The club is also engaged in a rebuilding programme in partnership with the ‘Well Society.
And when the club repays the loans, ownership will transfer from Les Hutchison to the society, thus delivering the objective of fan ownership at Motherwell.
The progress we have made is often compared with the Foundation of Hearts. While there are clear similarities between us, there are significant differences, creating many challenges for both the club and society. For example,
- the demographics of both fan-bases could not be more different – one from a small, economically-challenged post-industrial town, and the other from a wealthy, capital city
- establishing the FoH was all about rescuing their club from administration. Despite the reality, there is no perception of jeopardy for the Motherwell fans currently
- we have a relatively small, albeit vocal, support – attendance figures for last season show an average of 4,200 (one quarter of Hearts’ average attendance). Of that, our home support is between 3,000 and 4,000.
In view of these numbers, it’s therefore been a huge achievement already to sign up nearly half of our average gate, ie 1,650 members to the Well Society, including juniors FoH has 8,000 members, which is also half their average home gate. So our sign-up rate as a proportion of our average gate is actually not too dissimilar to Hearts’.
This gives us a lot of optimism that the society can achieve its initial target of recruiting 2000 adult members and support the club’s improvement strategy and plan!
The joint club-society team learned a lot from our visit to Tynecastle. The model there is a very good example of how a close partnership between the football club and the fans’ representative organisation can work together to achieve success on and off the field.
We are extremely grateful to Ann Budge, the directors of Hearts and the FoH for their extremely generous support. We would want to thank, in particular, Brian Cormack, chairman of FoH, for his most helpful advice.
I am, as ever, extremely grateful to you, the Motherwell fans, for your continuing support.
Brian McCafferty
Chairman