CEO Mark Ashton says there’s been a staffing revolution at Portman Road over the year or so since the takeover, for him the most significant change to the infrastructure at the club.
The Gamechanger 20 takeover was confirmed in April 2021 with Ashton taking over his role after leaving his previous club Bristol City at the start of June the same year.
"I’ve certainly gone a lot greyer in the last 12 months,” Ashton reflected at tonight’s Fans’ Forum, where he was joined on the panel by chairman Mike O’Leary, manager Kieran McKenna and recently-appointed director of supporter engagement Scott Paul. "Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve been here just over a year, it has gone so quickly.
"I think probably both on and off the pitch, both at Playford Road and at Portman Road there has been wide-ranging investment in infrastructure and I think the biggest investment in infrastructure for me has been people.
"Scott is here, you’ve seen a number of people join the football club, Tom Ball’s joined us as new CFO [chief financial officer].
"Wide-ranging people in key positions around the football club because the club had been stripped back, the staffing structure was really thin and I think it was tough for the staff that were here without the finance or the resource to actually move the football club forward.
"A big investment in people and that takes a little bit of time in bringing all those people together and gelling those people, and that’s just at Portman Road.
"If you look at Playford Road, Kieran has arrived and we’ve put together a whole new backroom staff. We’ve had wholesale changes in the academy staffing. It’s really been a revolution over the last 12 months.
"And then I wouldn’t know where to start with the infrastructure projects. Mike laughs, we have whiteboards in the offices and the whiteboards are consistently updated, filled and changed with everything that we’re doing.
"You can physically see the changes in the south-east corner. That’s been a really tough project because the ground has been so run down over 10 or 20 years. Nothing is a simple project, everything takes time.
"You dig down and you find cables, you find Roman ruins, I think we found a few former managers, to be honest. No, I tease!
"It’s consistent, the best way I can describe it is that sometimes it’s like being in a snowstorm and things are just coming at you so quickly and so fast that you have to react and I think for the first time now, now this window’s out the way, I was talking to Tom and [chief operating officer] Luke [Werhun] today and we can actually really start to plan things.
"And we have wide-ranging projects that all have time interdependencies are all very complicated and a lot linked back with the change of the pitch next season.
"There’s just so much been going on and I’m so grateful to the owners and the investors at PSPRS [Arizona Public Safety Personnel Retirement System] and ORG [who manage funds on behalf of PSPRS] because they’ve given us the funds to start to do things.
"A lot of things you won’t see. In the kitchens the ovens, the infrastructure, elevators, the list goes on and on. They’ve put serious money in just to try and get Portman Road back to some kind of decent standard and I’m really grateful to them for that.”
Town will be officially announcing a new #PackOutPR initiative ahead of the three October Portman Road league fixtures tomorrow, while Ashton also revealed plans for two smaller screens in addition to the one installed in the summer, which many fans can’t see from their seats.
"When we looked at putting the big screen in, there was no place that we could put it in the stadium where every single seat could see it,” Ashton said.
"But what we do have are a couple of secondary spots for smaller screens, still fairly good-sized screens that we’re working through, so what we said we were going to do was get the big, big screen in, see how that went, get that working and then we are talking to ADI about one or maybe two secondary screens that would make sure that we’ve covered all of the other areas.”
One thing which won’t be an immediate prospect is wi-fi at Portman Road: "Wi-fi there is no easy answer to, we’ve spoken to a number of football clubs in the country and for us to fix that or to put something in place is a very big number, so it’s something we’re aware of, there isn’t an easy solution to it and I’m going to be honest, it’s not top, top our priority list at the moment.”