New Blues co-owner Mark Detmer wants to get what he believes is a lost generation of Town fans back to Portman Road.
Detmer, speaking to TWTD and Blue Monday in the first podcast of what will be an ongoing collaboration, says it was notable that in the wake of the takeover the successes fans were talking to him and his fellow Three Lions Brett Johnson and Berke Bakay about on social media were all some years ago.
"When we closed on the club, with all humility, there was reach from far and wide, to me personally, to Brett, to Berke and all our group, just thanking us for our involvement, thanking us for our interest in the club and for trying to hopefully get the club back to its former glory.
"With that, the stories were constantly about 1981, 1978 - 40 years ago - it was very hard to find a young fan that reached out to us saying ‘wow, I can remember in 2012 when they got this victory’.”
He added: "There’s been this whole lost generation or era of fan that we want to engage. I think that’s really a big part of our strategy to bring the energy back into the club, which again transfers on to the pitch.”
What have the Three Lions done at their USL club Phoenix Rising to engage the community that they believe can be replicated at Town?
"Some things will translate through football. Others maybe just slightly different [within the] community,” he reflected.
"We’ve engaged with the children, I think that’s something that we need to do and you saw that we've offered up under-19s [season] tickets for free, which was a way to hopefully draw in some of the younger fans.
"I know that as soon as it’s acceptable with the restrictions I’ll be travelling with my family to Ipswich and we want to get more engaged there. I think that’s an area that we can definitely help.
"And a couple of other areas. Obviously performance is at the top of it and that involves training, that involves nutrition, that involves recovery, that involves so many other aspects of the player other than just their pace or their foot-skills.
"We’ve done a phenomenal job at Phoenix, and give [head coach] Rick Schantz all the credit for creating a programme that kept our players healthy through the season and identifying the right talent that [incoming Town CEO] Mark Ashton and collectively the team are really good at.
"Finding a way to keep them healthy and on the pitch because it’s a long season, there are a lot of matches, their bodies take a lot of abuse. It’s all about recovering and I think those are a couple of things that we can bring that we’ve learned in Phoenix. Some of that new science and technology around nutrition and recovery.”
He added: "We think we bring a different perspective to the boardroom, to leadership, to culture, to fan engagement, to the ability to hopefully engage the children.”
The 49-year-old knows it’s not something which can be done at the drop of a hat.
"Creating a better fan experience, it won’t happen overnight,” he continued. "I don’t want people to have unrealistic expectations. We would all like it to happen overnight.
"These things take time. Just like it took time for the club to go from the Premier League to the Championship and the Championship to League One, it will take us brick-by-brick, time to build back the club both with the play on the pitch, which is our first and foremost and, as you know, there’s so much happening right now between the manager and the players and so much of what we want to do [is] to get the performance that we’d all hope and expect on the pitch.”