Chair's pre-season message

Chair and co-owner Michelle Harness pens a pre-season message to supporters ahead of the Iron’s first league encounter at Brackley Town this weekend, with her message on behalf of the four owners of the football club…

The season is upon us, and it’s been a culmination of long days, weeks, and months of hard graft both on and off the pitch to get to this stage. It’s periods like this where we take stock of how far we’ve come in just 10 months, and it’s taken a monumental effort from everyone - the hard-working staff we have at the football club, our superb bank of volunteers, all our sponsors, local businesses that have supported us, and of course, you as the supporters.

When we took over last year, we couldn’t have imagined getting to where we have now. We still have a way to go, but the progress we have made is monumental. Now is not time for complacency, we must continue our efforts, and continue to drive revenue, sponsorship, and donations. Each pound spent in the football club is vital to it’s survival, and we are always looking at new ways to both save money, and drive revenue.

On the pitch, it’s been a hard, gruelling pre-season for the players. When we gave the first team manager’s job to Andy Butler, it was clear his philosophy was going to be to strive to be the fittest team in the league, and that worked started in the close season, prior to pre-season starting with the testing, and then during pre-season itself. Andy and his staff, a couple who are new to the club, have settled in seamlessly, and we are all really looking forward to seeing how the team fares in competitive action, which starts this Saturday,.

The football staff put together an intense programme, which included several fixtures. We were delighted to be able to support a number of local clubs in pre-season by visiting them. It’s really important that we do this for the community, and for the local football clubs. With travelling to Barton Town, Bottesford Town, Brigg Town, Gainsborough Trinity and Winterton Rangers, we have been able to give our community clubs a real foothold for the season, with circa £50,000 put into local grassroots football, a lot of it coming from you attending games, buying refreshments and food, and being part of their day. It’s as important to those clubs as it is to us to be able to support them, and we wish each team all the very best for their campaigns. We always have one eye on their results and wish for them to be fighting up the top end of their respective leagues.

It’s not too long ago when myself as sole owner became four joint owners, with Roj, George and Ian coming on board to split 80% of the shareholding in Scunthorpe United Football Club Limited. Over the course of their stints alongside myself, all three have come to realise even more the importance of their roles as custodians of the football club and the business, and that we all must work together and continue to strive for sustainability and success. The work that all three of them do, alongside myself, is superb, and lightens the burden that I carried with over 90% of the shares.

Both George and Ian have taken an active impact on the football side of the business, with the football staff effectively reporting to them, while Roj has taken hold of the stadium side of things and has managed to call on so many people in the local community to assist in improving the Attis Arena significantly. This has allowed me to focus more on the day-to-day running of the football club, with sustainability and reducing the debts inherited continually. We all hold a massive responsibility to the badge and to you as supporters and continue our promise to do our best for the football club each and every day.

Another word on our dedicated volunteers over the summer. The Attis Arena looks superb, and a stadium truly proud to work in each day. The number of businesses that have supported us over the course of the summer with products, supplies and bodies to complete jobs which otherwise would have been beyond our means, to the individuals who have given us hundreds of hours since the end of last season to help make the stadium an inviting and welcoming place to come and watch football. From the external first impressions of the stadium, to the cleaning of the interior, the decorating of boxes, the sponsorship both renewed and brand new, everyone concerned will be working right down to the wire of next Saturday when we welcome Marine to get a number of jobs completed. On behalf of everyone at the club to our volunteers; thank you, we simply could not have achieved any of this without each and every one of you.

We know we will not always get everything right every single time, but what I can say is there are so many people within the football club who bleed claret and blue and will go the extra mile to try to make sure everything is either right first time, or rectified over time, however long it takes. There’s so much success we’ve been able to share in such a short space of time, and that comes down to the hard work of so many people who will run through brick walls for the badge.

We are overwhelmed with the response to both our home and away kits so far. The sales have been fantastic, the pre-orders were immense, and we have already nearly surpassed the total number of home shirts sold for the entirety of last season already. In total, across all three shirts, we ordered over 4,000 shirts, we increased the junior sizes massively, and increased the order of larger sizes significantly too. Such is the popularity of the home and away designs, a handful of sizes are already in short supply, or sold out. This just shows how much you love the designs, and how much you want to support us, and I’m confident that we will achieve record sales this season.

I’d like to pay tribute once again to everyone involved in the kit launch videos we’ve seen. What Aaron Cheeseman, Pete Hewes and Mitchell Blades, along with James Moody and Jake Pullan in our own media team, have produced has been so well received, with a combined viewing of over one million people. I said in a previous message prior to the launches that we were going big for our 125th year and wanted our launches to rival those of teams in the Premier League, and we’re all proud to say that everyone involved have achieved this and more. I saw a comment on social media that stated that, while we may be playing in the sixth tier of English football, our kit launches were Champions League quality, and that is truly humbling, amongst so many comments we read. Those involved deserve all of the credit and, once again, for giving their time and hours of effort to produce what we’ve all been able to enjoy and shed a tear or two over.

Additionally, during their trip to San Sebastián in Spain to shoot the away kit launch video with Alex Calvo-Garcia, Hotel Londres were kind enough to accommodate the film crew for James to conduct an extensive interview with Alex, which will be released over the course of the season. There was one part of Alex’s response that struck a chord with the team out there, and we’re sharing this snippet (below, or by clicking here) with you ahead of the season commencing. We’re one team, and we showed in our Iron Aid and Open Day event a couple of weeks back just how united we all are, and how much our former players and managers are still part of this iconic and historic football club. The door is always open for every single person that has contributed to our long and illustrious history.

Our third kit for the 2024-25 season has also landed with us and will be launched in due course. While it will not be a Hollywood premiere in terms of a kit launch video, like the other two were, a more rustic and poignant video is being finalised as you read this message. It’s a shirt that will hopefully resonate with the town, our heritage and solidifies the unity in the community that we strive to have. Our home and away shirts have been retro jerseys reborn, while our third shirt is completely different, and features something that’s so important to Scunthorpe. We’re excited to show you it, and hope you will love it like we do, and understand how important we feel to have a shirt like it in our 125th anniversary.

With all the above considered, it’s now over to the team. We’ve set the clear goal of promotion this season, and we’ve supported the team with what they’ve needed so far. It’s by no means an easy start at all - we first face the beaten play-off finalists, and we also face several teams who will hope to be promotion challengers in the opening weeks of the season. That said, we have a great squad, a tight knit group, and we’ve left no stone unturned. We will support Andy, his staff, and the team 100 per cent of the way. We’ve done our bit, you as supporters have done your bit, our volunteers have done their bit, our dedicated staff behind the scenes have done their bit, and now it’s time for the players to do their bit. We’re confident that they will do just that. As always, it’s a long, tough season. There will be ups and downs, but we hope there are more of the former than of the latter. We won’t win every game, but we will go out to win every game, but I’m sure you’ll all agree if we see 100 per cent effort week-in, week-out, we won’t be far away from success.

Let’s enjoy the journey, enjoy our 125th anniversary season, and hopefully it will be a new positive chapter written into our history books.

United we Stand from the start and throughout. Up the Iron!

Michelle