What is the Fan Advisory Board, and why does the club have one?
The Fan Advisory Board (FAB) is a group of elected supporters who meet Barnsley FC's senior staff regularly to raise supporters' questions, get answers on the record, and feed into the decisions that affect fans. Each member represents a part of the fan base: season ticket holders, matchday ticket buyers, disabled supporters, women and girls, youth and families, supporters living away, the Supporters Trust, sponsors and hospitality, and diversity and community. The FAB advises and challenges the club; it does not run it or take its decisions.
The group was set up at the start of 2024. The first meeting on 29 January 2024 outlined the structure, and the second meeting worked through the draft terms of reference in small groups, settled the name "Barnsley FC Fan Advisory Board" and agreed its values and objectives. Members were then voted in at the May 2024 meeting. The terms of reference are published on this site.
Boards like this are now part of how professional football is regulated. The Football Governance Act created the Independent Football Regulator (IFR), which runs a licensing scheme for clubs in the top five divisions. To hold its licence a club has to meet conditions on financial sustainability, on who owns and runs it, and on fan engagement. The fan engagement condition means a club must consult its supporters on the matters that concern them most through an elected, independent and representative body, and must protect the club's heritage: its name, badge, colours and home ground cannot change without supporters being consulted.
The Regulator's final guidance, published in July 2026, calls that body the club's "Supporter Fan Representatives", sets three-year terms with a maximum of three terms (which is what Barnsley already had), softens fan sign-off of the club's annual report to "encouraged", and expects each club to publish a fan engagement plan and an annual fan consultation report. The FAB's own comparison of the final guidance against the earlier draft is recorded in the minutes of 4 August 2026, and the club's position that little of substance had changed for Barnsley proved right.
Because Barnsley's FAB predates the Act, most of what the licence requires was already in place. The club has confirmed there has been no change of ownership that would trigger the Regulator's owners' and directors' tests, that the Regulator has appointed a named club contact, and that it will submit its fan engagement plan once the Regulator issues a template. The Chair and the Supporters Trust representative also sit on an EFL-wide fan advisory group, where other clubs' engagement plans are shared; the general view recorded in August 2026 was that Barnsley's process, with its regular meetings and published minutes, compares well with the wider EFL picture.