About the FAB

What Is The FAB? 

Fan Advisory Board's (FAB's) are an initiative of the Premier League for supporters to have a voice at the higher levels of their club.  Aston Villa's FAB currently comprises 12 members, who represent the diversity of the fanbase.

The Origin of Aston Villa’s Fan Advisory Board (FAB)

Fan Advisory Boards (FABs) are a Premier League initiative designed to ensure supporters have a voice at the highest levels of their club. Aston Villa’s FAB currently comprises 12 members, representing the diversity of the Villa fanbase.

How It All Began

The roots of Aston Villa’s FAB trace back to 2015, during a turbulent period when Randy Lerner was preparing to sell the club. Recognising the uncertainty faced by supporters, empathetic Villa staff, with approval from the acting Chairman Steve Hollis, established a Fan Consultation Group (FCG). The group aimed to promote transparency by providing fans with a clearer understanding of developments at the club. Previously, there had been none.

At the same time, Villa’s relegation to the Championship introduced fresh challenges. Fans lost the protection of the Premier League’s £30 away ticket cap, and larger away allocations became a possibility. To address these issues, an extention of the FCG was formed in the form of the Away Ticketing Group. This allowed fans to raise concerns about away match logistics directly with club representatives and West Midlands Police.

The group played a practical role in managing the club’s £30,000 fund to subsidise away ticket prices, recommending the matches it should be used for and advising on allocation size requests.

One of the group’s early initiatives was the proposal and implementation of the @AVFC_Support Twitter (now X) account, improving basic communication on ticketing for supporters.

Building Trust and Transparency

Over time, the FCG fostered an increasing level of trust and transparency between the club and its fans. In an era when information for supporters is dominated by hearsay and clickbait media, the group provided a platform for open dialogue, giving supporters deeper insights into the club’s operations and the practical challenges it faced.

A combination of formal (documented meetings) and informal (off the record) meetings has been key for this. 

The FCG and now FAB has endured through three different ownership regimes and numerous CEOs or equivalent leaders, which brings its own challenge of having to rebuild trust and a good working relationship.

Nationally, the FCG was initially considered a benchmark of good practice, as many Premier League clubs had no regular consultation or dialogue with their supporters at the time.

The FCG also engaged in meaningful consultation on significant projects, including the redesign of the club badge and the proposals for the new North Stand.

The Fan-Led Review and Transition to FAB

Following the tumultuous Tony Xia era and the Recon Group’s near-disastrous ownership, an FCG member contributed to the Government’s fan-led review of football governance. This review, prompted by the failed European Super League project in April 2021, explored how fans could best be represented at board level.

To pre-empt the recommendations of the fan-led review and subsequent government white papers, the Premier League introduced a mandatory requirement for clubs to establish Fan Advisory Boards. For Aston Villa, this was a natural transition from the existing Fan Consultation Group into the FAB structure.

The Role of Aston Villa’s FAB

The Premier League’s guidelines for FABs require quarterly meetings between the board and club executives, with at least one representative from the Aston Villa Board of Directors present at every meeting. Additionally:

• The CEO (or equivalent) must attend at least two FAB meetings per season.

• Public records summarising the discussions will be made available through the club and FAB communication channels.

Villa’s FAB members also participate in twice-yearly meetings with representatives from other Premier League FABs and the Premier League itself, providing a national forum for fan concerns and collaboration.

The reality of supporter groups like FABs is their success is limited to the willingness of both members and the clubs themselves to embrace them more than just a Premier League box-ticking excercise.

FAB's as a reactionary group achieve very little and just build-up frustration for all involved, plus, having a model where supporters just turn up to meetings without any planning or consulting with each other, doesn't lend itself to constructive representation of the fanbase.

For the 2024/25 season, there has been a refocus of what a Villa FAB could be and how it should function to better represent the fanbase. The first step has been to take greater agency of its organisation and to shape it so it has more outreach to the supporter base at large. FABs shouldn't simply be a set-up where the club runs it and supporters just turn-up. They should be organised and proactive in trying to improve matters for supporters and in looking out for their interests.

CURRENT FAB MEMBERS

Joanne McKibbens Aston Villa Disabled Supporters Association 

Mo Razzaq Aston Villa Supporters Trust

Steve Gough/Julian Bristow Independent Supporters Clubs

John Gillett Lions Clubs 

Nilesh Chauhan Villans Together

Lena Curran Younger Fan Representative

Guri Nandra/Harjit Badesha Punjabi Villans

Connor Smith Younger Fan Representative

Sarah Breslin Villa Bellas

David Michael My Old Man Said 

Kerry Lenihan Fan Community Representative

Ben Redding Fan Ticketing Representative

Extended Network

Simon Lines/Max Stokes - Villa on Tour 

Nick Saunders - avillafan.com

Priyanka Jasraj - Her Game Too

The members include a current employee, former National Council member and Premier League Network representatives of the Football Supporters Association.