CAST board meetings took place in April, May and June. Board members in attendance for at least one meeting: Heather McKinlay, Heather Alderson, Richard Wiseman, Nigel Kleinfeld, Paul Breen, Stuart Court, Jade Hannan, Bob Munro, Sam White, Alex Whitmore
Key areas covered were as follows:
Club Relationship
We noted the departure of Ed Warrick and appointment of Tony Brown as interim CFO. We have received positive feedback concerning Tony Brown from fans at his past clubs. We will seek a meeting in due course. We continue to have concerns at the lack of CEO, while appreciating that the club is working on filling the role. We noted the appointment of Hannah Darnbrough as the new Head of Retail and Licensing.
We met with the club’s fan engagement team of Hannah Jacobs and James Bell, sharing CAST background and overview and discussed a pipeline of shared initiatives. We are also in contact concerning the review and update of the club’s Fan Engagement Plan. The club has now confirmed that Hannah Jacobs is the appointed Supporter Liaison Officer (SLO).
CAST clarified for our own purposes that “Fan Engagement” is a broad term and we need to be clear on the distinction between “fan consultation” (such as via the Advisory Board, Supporters’ Forum and CAST) and “fan experience” which relates more to matchday activities, entertainment and atmosphere.
A meeting took place with the club’s new Head of Marketing, Chris Samson, where we again shared CAST background plus recent survey results. CAST has subsequently shared insight on why Charlton is the “original community club”.
We continue to engage with the club on the Charlton Women’s team (CAWFC), looking at longer term opportunities to grow attendances and engagement, building on the momentum of promotion. We have raised this as a potential initiative at the Advisory Board, alongside the need to focus on growing midweek attendances for men’s matches.
We attended and contributed to the Supporters’ Forum in April. Minutes are here: https://cdn.charltonafc.com/sites/default/files/2026-04/Charlton%20Athletic%20Supporter%20Forum%20April%2016%202026.pdf
We have provided input to the Advisory Board on the club’s development of a membership scheme and a number of other matters.
We have requested to meet with Gavin Carter, and he has provisionally agreed to do so in July.
CAST Initiatives
We reviewed key updates on our Activity Log.
We sent six copies of the Addicks’ Sticker Book to the training ground given the enthusiastic response of the players who viewed the book. We supplied a further five to the Charlton Athletic Museum. No stock remains at the printers.
We are progressing creative development for the Norman Barker Memorial and are in close contact with the club on this.
We hosted a successful online Q&A with Greg Miller and Joe Francis of CAFC Academy, plus young player and recent winner of the Steve Clarke Award, Ed Thomas.
We have scheduled a “Meet the Experts” pre-season panel for 12 August. Registration will launch in mid July.
We received 1200+ responses to CAST’s annual survey, published the results on fan attitudes and intentions and shared these with the club. The word cloud from the survey illustrates this article and highlights answers to the question: "If you had to use one word to describe Charlton Athletic Football Club, what would it be?"
We asked questions in the survey specifically about CAST and reviewed the results at the June board meeting:
92% of CAST members and 66% of non-members (22% don’t know) agree that CAST does a good job of engaging with the club on behalf of fans. CAST members value liaison with the club’s directors/ senior management and communication of information. There was little consensus on what CAST could do better but more visibility, ticket price campaigning, Valley ownership campaigning, recruiting younger fans and being more forceful were mentioned.
Reasons for not joining: Only 11% of non-members said CAST didn’t represent them. 25% hadn’t got round to it, 17% didn’t know enough about CAST and 32% said they were not the kind to join things.
We took heart from these findings as demonstrating that CAST’s mandate extends across the fanbase. We agreed that we need to raise CAST visibility and make joining simpler. We will do more to improve social media output (esp TikTok and Facebook). We will investigate ways to make payment as easy as possible. While the membership cost of £5 annually is not a barrier - inertia is.
Football Supporters Association (FSA) & External Relationships
We attended FSA structured dialogue meeting with the FA and the minutes are here: https://thefsa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/FA-x-FSA-STRUCTURED-DIALOGUE-31-03-26.pdf
We reviewed the motions put forward for the FSA AGM and agreed how we would vote. Two CAST board members attended the AGM and the motion proposed by CAST passed unanimously on the day. The report of the meeting is here: https://www.castrust.org/2026/06/cast-motion-passed-unanimously/
The second round of consultation on the Independent Football Regulator’s licensing regime has now closed and we await their report in response. The IFR has begun provisional licensing of clubs. This includes requirements on the governance and senior management structure at clubs and we discussed whether CAFC is presently likely to achieve these with the absence of a CEO. The IFR is clear that it is not about a “one size fits all” approach.
We attended Royal Borough of Greenwich Safety Advisory Group meetings alongside the club and the Metropolitan Police’s Independent Advisory Group alongside representatives from supporters trusts and fan groups from other London clubs.
If you are not already one of the nearly 2500 Addicks who are members of CAST you can join here for just £5 per year:
https://www.castrust.org/join/?v=7885444af42e