Wednesday 25th September, 2024 at 4:58pm
Hello everybody and welcome to The Wyre Stadium at Firhill for what I expect will be a closely contested game between ourselves and Dunfermline Athletic. I’d like to welcome our visitors to Glasgow and wish everybody a safe journey to and from the stadium today.
Both sides appear to be turning a corner after slow starts to the campaign, and everybody at the club understands the importance of today. These are fixtures that we need to start winning, and soon, in order to keep us on course for the objectives that we’ve set ourselves for the season. As the team continues to gel together and the manager learns more every day about his players both personally and in terms of their abilities on the field, I believe there’s every reason to be optimistic about the journey ahead for us over this campaign.
Away from the pitch, ‘governance’ is a word dominating discussion across the club. Many supporters will have seen Richard Beastall’s comment during the Q+A event that the appointment of a chairman is a priority for the directors in the coming weeks. This is just one part of a wider package of work that I – and I think everybody involved with decision-making at the club – sees as absolutely vital to the future success of our fan ownership model; namely, how is the club structured to ensure sustainable, repeatable success? This question penetrates all aspects of the organisation, from player recruitment and tactics to how we find and retain commercial partners and how we manage the interfaces between Trustees, supporter groups, Directors, myself and so on. Sometimes I think that everybody at the club is very hard on themselves and sets a very high expectation for where we should all be at this stage of our fan ownership journey. Structuring the club for success is difficult. If it wasn’t, we would have done it already. And so would every other club in the country. These conversations have now begun and, on the big issues that will shape the way that we operate, they will conclude in the near future. Everybody at the club is fully aware of the importance of having the right governance and leadership structure in place to take us forward. We have an incredibly talented and experienced board of directors, a Trustee community attuned to the feelings and priorities of the supporters, and we are beginning to develop an operational team capable of delivering our budgets and positioning us to become the Premiership-ready club that we all believe Partick Thistle can become. The future is very bright and this is a time to become excited about what we can all achieve together.
But while governance is the foundation on which all future success will be built, it’s important that nobody loses sight of the day job. For those attending today’s game it will be impossible to miss the changed landscape at the city end of the ground. The scaffold has been removed and hopefully (I’m writing this midweek) by now so has the wreckage that the project left behind! This may only be a small step toward tidying up the stadium but it’s an important one. Firhill is our home and we need not only to take pride in it but to weaponise it. This stadium, and our ownership of it, is the greatest asset that we have. How we develop it commercially, how we market it and open our doors to the wider community will be integral to our success. This is why the first recruitment of my tenure was Eve Wilson as our new Events and Hospitality Executive. The club understands the vital importance of developing our revenue streams and sweating our assets. I am very keen that we punch above our weight across the organisation, and to do so we need to innovate and evolve the way that we operate. The removal of the scaffold is a small step but a significant one. It demonstrates that we will challenge our operating model and evolve, and that we will make best use of the facilities at hand to deliver what all Thistle fans deserve – sustainable success.
Enjoy the game.
