When and why did you join the Swans Trust Board?
I put my name forward for election to the Trust Board in August 2017 and August 2018 and despite not being elected was subsequently invited on both occasions as a co-opted member from September 2017. After the 2019 elections I was invited to stand as an elected board member and in July 2020 was elected as Vice Chair. In July 2021 I stood again as a board member and was subsequently elected as Trust Chair. I was pleased to have been elected Chair by the Trust board again in August 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
I originally applied for a Trust Board position back in 2017 as I wanted to get actively involved in the many challenges that I could see lay ahead for the Supporters’ Trust, especially in how it translated itself to its members and Swansea City supporters both locally and further afield. That hasn’t really changed over the years but to get anywhere close to it, I know the Trust Board have a huge but exciting challenge ahead of itself in the coming years. I am confident that with the hard-working and diverse set of board members that we currently have in place, The Trust has a great opportunity to make a positive impact for our members and the supporters of our unique football club.
What is your role at the Trust?
I was honoured to become the elected Chair of the Trust Board in August 2021 following the previous year as Vice Chair. My role is extremely wide ranging and regularly involves meetings with representatives of the club and senior management team as well as keeping an overview of all the other work that the Trust is responsible for. To ensure we maximise the knowledge and experience of our diverse Trust board we now have over a dozen active sub-groups that offer advice and support to our full board whenever necessary. I believe it is vitally important to have a good working relationship with our Supporter Director, Associate Director and other Trust Board officers and I am fortunate to have an extremely hard-working board that are all committed to delivering in the very best interests of our members and supporters.
Over the past few years as Trust Chair we have worked hard on forging closer collaborative relationships with like-minded organisations such as the Football Supporters Association and other working groups that cover a wide variety of fan-related projects including supporter safety, Kick it Out, LGBTQ+, Her Game Too and our 50+ worldwide Swans supporter groups. This has now expanded into the Global Jacks initiative where we have an excellent working group that meet regularly to help support our fans from whatever part of the world they live. We now have a regular number of supporters from further afield than the Swansea area who travel from afar to watch us play and we always do our utmost to ensure they have visits to remember.
In October 2022 we arranged the first ever Global Jacks weekend in Swansea that took in two Swans games, tours of the stadium, meeting some of our former players plus photo and interview opportunities with the club coaches and players. Plus of course a few visits to Wind Street!
We arranged another event in March 2024 and hope to do something similar during 2024/25. More details will be announced in due course where once again we expect to have Swans supporters come over from such countries that include Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Poland, Italy, Malta, France, USA and other parts of Wales and the UK.
I am also pleased that we now have full and permanent representation on the board of Trustees at the Swans Foundation who we are pleased to work alongside on a number of like-minded projects and fund-raising initiatives.
We also have a number of Trust board members who are members of the very hard-working Swansea City Disabled Supporters Association. I’ve also sat on the committee of the Swansea City Former Players’ Association since its formation in early 2021 and we meet regularly to raise funds for our former players who have fallen on hardship and for other good causes such as the Alzheimer’s Society etc.
Over the early part of 2023 we took responsibility to renovate the former players and officials’ entrance on Glamorgan Street outside the old Vetch Field as we were concerned it may fall into a state of complete and unrecoverable state of repair. This work has now een completed and we are now looking at other Heritage themed projects in and around Swansea.
What are your views on the future and how will you support that?
I will continue to work hard over the next 12 months or so to look at ways of developing the Trust still further, in particular how it can expand its relationship with the club, majority owners, the Foundation and other associated groups and organisations that all form an important role within Swansea City Football Club. The Swans Trust is in a unique position in both owning a 5% permanently protected share of the club and having a representative on the club Board and this gives us, our members and supporters opportunities to ask important questions that are simply beyond the reach of fans of many other football clubs.
Best Swans memory?
It simply has to be the playoff final in 2011. Stuck on the side of the M4 at Margam Park in a broken-down coach that I’d arranged for 50+ Swans fans with just 3 hours to go before KO we still, by some miracle (and the help of BBC Radio Wales), got into our Wembley seats as the game kicked off. It’s a great story that I often recite with so many emotional highs and lows. The rest of that day is history and I’ll never forget it for a variety of reasons.
