Thursday 20th July, 2023 at 2:59pm
A truly significant event in the modern history of Partick Thistle Football Club took place this week with key supporters’ groups uniting as one in holding the majority shareholding of the club.
Tuesday saw the ‘PTFC Trust Deed of Assumption and Conveyance’ signing take place at the Wyre Stadium at Firhill, creating two new corporate Trustees, namely The Jags Foundation and The Jags Trust, duly appointed as trustees of the trust which holds the majority shareholding in The Partick Thistle Football Club Limited.
In everyday terminology, this essentially means that members of The Jags Foundation and The Jags Trust join The PTFC Trust and other individual trustees in becoming fan owners of the football club they love.
Welcoming the appointments, Partick Thistle chairman Alistair Creevy said: “This is an historic moment for Partick Thistle Football Club in the fan ownership journey we are all on together. The togetherness this signing represents is in keeping with the togetherness Thistle fans can feel across the club just now, on and off the pitch. Speaking on behalf of the board, we are forward looking only and anticipate that relationship between supporters and the club growing ever stronger as we strive to deliver future success for Thistle fans of all generations.”
This week’s signing was the recommendation of the supporters Working Group set up in late 2022, overwhelmingly endorsed recently in a beneficiary vote.
Neil Drain, of the PTFC Trust, said: “The PTFC Trust are delighted to be fulfilling their promises to deliver genuine fan ownership to Jags fans. We welcome our friends and fellow supporters from The Jags Foundation and the Jags Trust into the PTFC Trust and look forward to them taking the leading roles going forward. With the fans as majority shareholders we hope this brings them and the club even closer. Today marks the next step in the beginning of fan ownership. It’s a great time to be a Jags fan.”
Sandy Fyfe, chair of The Jags Foundation, said: “This is a landmark moment for Thistle – from a TJF perspective we would like to thank all of our members for their incredible support which convinced us, and in fact compelled us to keep fighting for a fan ownership model worth its name. We would also like to thank the individual trustees and Club Board members who have supported these positive, unifying, and forward-looking developments. All this means we can now welcome all of our members as fan owners of their football club and look forward to being on this journey with them.”
Morag McHaffie, Chair of The Jags Trust, said: “This signing represents the start of a new era for supporters of Partick Thistle Football Club. Neil and his colleagues at the PTFC Trust have demonstrated they were and are very open to working with the Jags Trust and The Jags Foundation and we have all worked together very well in the last six months to the point we have signed this legal document, which is momentous.”
The next step in the process is the signing of the ‘PTFC Trust Deed of Variation’ which will be confirmed in a further update.
