"Unless you can come up with a reason for someone who buys a ST not having a say on the running of the club". They are just fundamentally two different things. Friend of mine had a ST for a while. He is actually a fan of another club back where he is from, but lives in London now and just wants to get a football fix. Lovely chap, but why should he get a say in the running of the club automatically?

Silk - your post of 10.55. 'It is fundamentally wrong for someone who goes to no matches to have more of a say in the future direction of the club than someone who buys a ST.' I am in total agreement and have been saying the same for a very long time.

Just read the OS article and I broadly agree with their stance on this. I would maybe have an add-on that someone who attends a certain amount of home or away matches should be eligible for a discount on membership fees. There could be a mathematical sliding scale for this. Make it a perk for attending matches. Those who attend no matches get nothing and have to pay full whack for their voting rights.

Also gets you free Diabetes II lifetime membership ;-)

Silk - That is a different argument. In my view buying a seson ticket is a transaction between the club and an individual, in just the same way as buying single match tickets, a shirt or a burger. Why does one of those transactions deserve more than others? If it is simply expense then perhaps DT membership should be offered to anyone who hits a particular level of spending on any club products or activities. 100 burgers gets you a free DT membership!

Moved house recently and my next door neighbour is an old chap, must be in his 90s. Every morning for the last 3 weeks he’s knocked on my door and asked if I’ve seen his wife. So every morning for the last 3 weeks I’ve had to explain to him that his wife died in 2008. My gf says I should just not answer the door and then I wouldn’t have to tell him but tbh it’s worth it just to see the smile on his face.

OI - my position is that they should have voting rights, and so that means a DT membership, as they put more money into the club as someone who doesn't attend matches but has a DT membership (apart from maybe the odd individual). That means you have three types of member. One that buys a ST, one that goes to a number of games and buys a membership and one that goes to no matches but buys a membership. It is fundamentally wrong for someone who goes to no matches to have more of a say in the future direction of the club than someone who buys a ST. Enough debate for you?

Silk if you’d seen how Michelle behaved during the last round of member resolutions you’d know that, unfortunately, what you hypothesise below is impossible. She behaved so poorly it was hard to believe. Threw every possible trick in the book. She is a very bad person to have as chair.

The important issue is how these things are decided and one can also make arguments about how much an influx of new members will have in addition to the trends Trebor and nicander are identifying. I don't inist that you find it a meaningful discussion but I would appreciate you accepting some of us do.

TF - technically the members could challenge that decision by raising a motion in the AGM/EGM. The club could not scrap concessions for seniors if the membership did not allow them to. And by doing nothing we allow them to do this.

Of course hat trick

OI - how will either giving ST holders a DT membership or not gain us extra income or make us a more financially stable club? I don't see the connection. Have a vote on it by all means and the members can go with what they think is right but it will not make much difference. It will not magically make us some more money nor make this mythical new owner who will invest millions in the club anymore likely to buy us.

You’ve pretty much described our own situation there as well Silk. Spurs fans have as much say in that decision as we have in any of the awful decisions made here.

TF - we will only be an attractive proposition when we clear the debt. No-one is going to take on a club with a £10 million debt unless he is already a Dons supporter. It has nothing to do with our stance. If we sell him the majority he doesn't have to give a fuck about the supporters feelings. Look at Spurs removing concessions for pensioners. The only way the supporters can fight that is by boycotting matches and not enough will do that

Trebor - I don't think the thresholds for member resolutions are affected by membership growing, it's 2/3rds of votes, not 2/3rds of members to pass, I think? More broadly, agree with you entirely - I have to admit, I had previously thought some of your concerns about direction of travel were alarmist. But you were right, and it's too late now.

(My typing when on my tablet is awful – my fingers can't cope with moving larger distances.and I think my autocorrect gives up.)

It seems a shift to a much more "top down" approach, which to be fair is probably the most important st efficient way of running a professional business in terms of decision making, but does kind of throw out of the window the "hopes and dreams" that a lot of people thought the club was founded on. But then the board can't go back and re-decide history: the discussion about "What sort of democracy do we want?" has been avoided ever since 2002 and has instead been resolved by a sequence of little-discussed decisions that have nudged it in one direction.

I still don't get how giving free membership to season ticket holders will make them more engaged. I guess it does make more sense if the board has decided there will be far fewer member votes and more "surveys" that people can quickly react to. That inevitably hands much more power to the board as they can "package" the surveys and then "interpret" the results however they see fit .And that's one way of running the club – representative democracy rather than participatory democracy, (albeit 'listening representation', I'm sure they'd say). But all introduced with very little talking through the implications, just like setting up the plc in 2003. And it effect me vely rules out any member initiated decision making because the threshold for submitting resolutions etc is now so high?

The club is being taken down a different path that’s for sure. And many loyal members of the DT are being tested. Their patience wearing thin. There is an endgame which in truth isn’t being that well disguised. The argument over whether being fan owned is the be all and end all of what we do as a club is close to another tipping point. Its how we all react to it that’s important

I think we’d find a buyer or buyers pretty quickly if we made ourselves an attractive proposition I.e. it’s a purchase not a fucking donation. But that would mean abandoning whatever illusion “fan owned” has mutated into. I used to be a fan owned stalwart but I’d most definitely consider the alternative these days as the club is being abused.

Silk - it may be a meaningless debate to you but that doesn't make you right in saying it is a meaningless debate for others. The governance of the Trust and club will in the long run determine whether we go into administration, lose our league place (maybe the same thing) or eventually find a way to be a well run, financially stable, fan owned club. If you don't care then that is up to you.

CW - the Sky/Premier League thing in 92 fundamentally changed the game. Whilst money had some bearing we and clubs like Luton and Coventry showed you could get by on heart. This was because the bigger clubs had less money and the gap was not big. The Prem League and now the Champions League money has now created a gap that cannot be bridged by heart alone. And the only way to compete is to spend what you don't have.

Keefy - it remains to be seen if the £1.8 million loss was a one-off or the norm. I think the previous year it was at least a million less and chunk on that was interest on the debt. It may mean we do not have to sell to survive if our losses is under a million in the next annual reports. We could have our finance committee report on a quarterly basis as a lot of companies do. It could allay the speculation a bit.

Silk-I think money always talked even back in the 60s when we were winning the Amateur cup by illegally paying our players.Clubs in the poorer parts of town like Romford and Hillingdon went bust whereas the more affluent areas like Barnet and Wimbledon they kept going

We won't stay as we are if we cannot sell a gem every year we will go onto admin