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9 minutes ago, Duvel said:

It's a pointless exercise anyway, if one of us from here turned up for a meeting and started criticising the way the club is being run we'd get turfed out and not invited back.

My opinion has and always will be that if you can approach the conversation in the right way, there is no reason someone should be turfed out. And that there's only one thing that guarantees nothing will change and that's by nobody doing or saying anything beyond the echo chamber that this forum is.

One thing I will say is that undermining what this group can achieve is not helpful. Mislabelling an organisation that tries to reach out to minorities like the disabled, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ etc. or help out in the communities with things like the MFC Foundation, arranging or generating awareness of food-banks around winter time as only 'discussing trivial things like flavours of crisps' is a sure way to distance yourself from it in a way I cannot agree with. Those are all hugely important things that the club can and do discuss at these meetings and things I am happy they do, these are things I'd like to think we'd be happy to help out with too.

There's just no reason I think a clear, concise, well-researched discussion about the running of the club should be ignored or hounded out of the room. It actually affects a lot of how the club can actually approach things like the above. If you barge in, effing and blinding because you're so peeved about it, sure, you can probably expect to be shunned as that's not a particularly respectable way to approach any conversation.

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Hi,    I am the poster that made the comments in the OP I used to run a massive teesside based music forum (over 10k members and massive traffic), and currently run a few large subreddits so

Came here a few weeks ago because transfer rumours with basis kept being posted on FMTTM with oneBoro as the source. I'm sure my mentioning the site on FMTTM has brought over new members too. I'v

DS - I was a daily visitor to FMTTM for many years. I owed a personal debt of gratitude to their Rob, and stayed long after the lack of mobile support and posters 'playing the man not the ball' became

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31 minutes ago, wilsoncgp said:

My opinion has and always will be that if you can approach the conversation in the right way, there is no reason someone should be turfed out. And that there's only one thing that guarantees nothing will change and that's by nobody doing or saying anything beyond the echo chamber that this forum is.

One thing I will say is that undermining what this group can achieve is not helpful. Mislabelling an organisation that tries to reach out to minorities like the disabled, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ etc. or help out in the communities with things like the MFC Foundation, arranging or generating awareness of food-banks around winter time as only 'discussing trivial things like flavours of crisps' is a sure way to distance yourself from it in a way I cannot agree with. Those are all hugely important things that the club can and do discuss at these meetings and things I am happy they do, these are things I'd like to think we'd be happy to help out with too.

There's just no reason I think a clear, concise, well-researched discussion about the running of the club should be ignored or hounded out of the room. It actually affects a lot of how the club can actually approach things like the above. If you barge in, effing and blinding because you're so peeved about it, sure, you can probably expect to be shunned as that's not a particularly respectable way to approach any conversation.

Were the banned Gazette reporters effing and blinding? Bernie Slaven has never been the most articulate but I don't think he was disrespectful either before he got banned from the ground. 

I think a drive to encourage diverse members of the local population is good and the prayer room was a nice idea as well, but there's bigger issues in my opinion. 

I'd like to know why thousands of local fans are being priced out of the ground? Do we feel the walk up prices are reasonable, because I don't. I know suggestions have been put to the club about ticket prices and fairer prices for away fans which haven't been entertained. 

When we have more than half of the ground sat empty the clubs pricing structure isn't working. I think the prices for the family zone are good but why can't this be extended beyond a small section of the ground? 

This is before we even get to the way the club is being run from a football perspective. 

I've read the minutes from some of these meetings, it seems like a lot of the discussion points are very trivial. In my opinion the big problems at the club won't be up for discussion. 

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10 minutes ago, wilsoncgp said:

One thing I will say is that undermining what this group can achieve is not helpful. Mislabelling an organisation that tries to reach out to minorities like the disabled, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ etc. or help out in the communities with things like the MFC Foundation, arranging or generating awareness of food-banks around winter time as only 'discussing trivial things like flavours of crisps' is a sure way to distance yourself from it in a way I cannot agree with. Those are all hugely important things that the club can and do discuss at these meetings and things I am happy they do, these are things I'd like to think we'd be happy to help out with too.

They aren't hugely important things or rather they have little to do with the experience of being a Boro fan so they really have naff all to do with a supporters forum.  If the focus was on things relating to Boro fans then you can see the point of it but so far it appears to be about other things.  So far they seems to have spent time writing letters to various people in football about European Super Leagues and Financial Fair Play, organising food banks, something to do with asylum seekers - what about that stuff has anything to do with the average Boro fan? 

The odd things that might actually have some relevance don't appear to get very far or get a response at all.  What matters to Boro fans in general - the team (not really the place for that), ticket pricing (definitely the place for that), the experience of attending a game (definitely the place for that), access to the ground (definitely the place for that) and so on.  The first question that should have been asked was about recent ticket price rises, not about European Super League's, food banks or anything else.

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Why do these things just have to be things about affecting the average Boro fan as a priority? Discussing and supporting things surrounding minorities is a great thing for this group to be achieving. Getting more minorities to feel safe and secure when they do attend and being capable of attending at all in the terms of accessibility to the disabled is more important to me than the price ticket to the average fan. Racism is gradually getting worse again within football and people should be represented at this group in tackling that, we still live in an age where a footballer would be actively discouraged from coming out as gay as they'd get abuse for it so God knows what it's like for fans in that position, these people need a position to tackle that. Ticket prices aren't unimportant in this battle to create a more accessible environment for fans from everywhere, no, but people should absolutely feel safe to attend whatever the cost of tickets.

Contributing and advertising food-banks that help poverty-stricken families survive around the community isn't about being a Boro fan, no, it's about being part of the community of the club, being part of the area that the club sits within, a community that largely involves Boro fans. If it comes to a toss up between supporting those people in poverty or reducing the prices of tickets, I certainly wouldn't be pitching the latter first and foremost, I'd rather people can afford to look after themselves than afford to get to a match and prioritising that conversation is hugely important to me (and as an aside, it certainly doesn't sit right with me when the chairman endorses a party candidate that supports the measures taken which have exponentially increased the problems of poverty in areas like ours). Seeing that conversation being reduced to something seen as trivial and on par with the selection of crisps in the kiosks on here sickens me.

I agree that there are far more important things to be discussing than a proposed ESL and FFP, though. These are things that only potentially affect us, one of which we already operate in and given the things we have done within our constraints of FFP, we can't just complain about what others have done, we should be looking at ourselves there. ESL could affect us in the distant future but it's really nonsensical to put that above things closer to home.

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25 minutes ago, wilsoncgp said:

Why do these things just have to be things about affecting the average Boro fan as a priority? Discussing and supporting things surrounding minorities is a great thing for this group to be achieving. Getting more minorities to feel safe and secure when they do attend and being capable of attending at all in the terms of accessibility to the disabled is more important to me than the price ticket to the average fan. Racism is gradually getting worse again within football and people should be represented at this group in tackling that, we still live in an age where a footballer would be actively discouraged from coming out as gay as they'd get abuse for it so God knows what it's like for fans in that position, these people need a position to tackle that. Ticket prices aren't unimportant in this battle to create a more accessible environment for fans from everywhere, no, but people should absolutely feel safe to attend whatever the cost of tickets.

Contributing and advertising food-banks that help poverty-stricken families survive around the community isn't about being a Boro fan, no, it's about being part of the community of the club, being part of the area that the club sits within, a community that largely involves Boro fans. If it comes to a toss up between supporting those people in poverty or reducing the prices of tickets, I certainly wouldn't be pitching the latter first and foremost, I'd rather people can afford to look after themselves than afford to get to a match and prioritising that conversation is hugely important to me (and as an aside, it certainly doesn't sit right with me when the chairman endorses a party candidate that supports the measures taken which have exponentially increased the problems of poverty in areas like ours). Seeing that conversation being reduced to something seen as trivial and on par with the selection of crisps in the kiosks on here sickens me.

I agree that there are far more important things to be discussing than a proposed ESL and FFP, though. These are things that only potentially affect us, one of which we already operate in and given the things we have done within our constraints of FFP, we can't just complain about what others have done, we should be looking at ourselves there. ESL could affect us in the distant future but it's really nonsensical to put that above things closer to home.

I'm not equating getting more ethic minority groups to the match and helping out with food banks with choosing flavours of crisps, I thought I made that point in my first reply to you.  

Why does it have to be a toss up between helping people in poverty and reducing ticket prices, can't we do both?

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12 minutes ago, Duvel said:

I'm not equating getting more ethic minority groups to the match and helping out with food banks with choosing flavours of crisps, I thought I made that point in my first reply to you.  

Why does it have to be a toss up between helping people in poverty and reducing ticket prices, can't we do both?

Of course we can, not saying we can't, apologies that I misread your response and I was partly tackling CT's response too and maybe conflated both responses into one in mine. I was simply trying to tackle the idea that there is any triviality in tackling those things, the idea that they're not important for a supporters club to help deal with and really that ticket prices are more important than those things that have been tackled by the group.

Of course I don't agree that the conversation is always in the direction I'd like too, thus why I'd like us to be able to be part of it and put our heads together and come up with a reasonable proposal that both explains why what we're doing is bad and examples of how we could be doing better, why the current status quo is considered among fans on here to be so unacceptable. As I said, without being part of the discussion, we can't affect anything. We might not affect it by being part of it either, we might get hounded out for holding a different stance but we certainly won't have a significant voice if we don't try to get involved to begin with.

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Why does the MFC Fans Forum have to be about things affecting the average Boro fan as a priority?  Read that question to yourself a few times and see if you can come up with an answer.  If you can't then I'd suggest you are the one missing the point rather than anyone else. 

Let's start a forum for dialogue with the club and then prioritise the interests of the smallest number of Boro fans possible and indeed people who aren't actually Boro fans at all.  That seems like a logical use of such a vehicle assuming of course that it's less about being a method for Boro fans to communicate with the club and more about being a socio-political group.

In terms of race and sexuality, I haven't seen anything in the minutes regarding either of those subjects.  So whilst you may well feel they are massively important, they don't appear to be taking up much of the time of this forum.  I'm also not sure what the forum itself can do that the individual groups aren't already doing as I assume the likes of Boro Fusion and Rainbow Reds are groups devoted to this stuff?

I couldn't give a *** who the chairman endorses as a political party candidate.  It has absolutely nothing to do with me and it has absolutely nothing to do with this group.  He's entitled to vote for, endorse or think whatever he likes about politics, as is everyone else.  The fact that you've brought this up illustrates the political side of this and why the priorities probably won't be the average Boro fan unfortunately and of course why you'll be fine with that.

It isn't a choice between supporting people in poverty or reducing the price of tickets.  One has nothing at all to do with the other and only one of them has anything to do with a Middlesbrough Fans Forum but you seem to be confused about which one it is.  Again, that's because of your own politics, which should have no place in a forum like this. 

 

 

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So, we didn’t fill in an application form? Was this deliberate?, a mistake? Or were we advised that our application would be rejected, So to  save everyone the embarrassment our administration did nothing.

Sorry for all the questions but back in August admin was very pro this, but since I asked my initial question I haven’t seen an official answer from the admin team.

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