*We recently emailed our members with an update*
Your chance to choose next season’s kit….
As you know, season 2021/22 will be the first in which St Mirren will be owned by its fans…and we are pleased to announce the team will be taking to the field in strips chosen by the fans too.
To help mark the transition to fan ownership, the club board have asked SMISA members to choose next season’s home and away strips from a series of options created by their kit partners Joma. We were delighted to accept that offer and thank our two club directors David Riley and John Needham for helping make it happen.
Joma have presented four options for each of the home and away strips – and you can run the rule over them elsewhere on the SMISA website here.
Then, once you’ve made a note of your favourites, you can vote for them through Very Connect.
Voting will run until Sunday 6 December, and the home/away options with the most votes at that point will be the ones Joma will put into production. The club and Joma wish to keep the winning options under wraps to allow a reveal nearer the point the kits go on sale – so the outcome of the vote won’t be announced until then.
We hope SMISA members picking the strips will become an annual event. There may also be opportunities in future for fans to submit design ideas (which there wasn’t time for this year, due to production timelines).
The SMISA Stadium
As most of you will know by now, St Mirren Park has been renamed The SMISA Stadium for the remainder of the season. The release of this news quickly spread far and wide and details of the arrangement were reported on by a vast number of media organisations both in Scotland and beyond.
We are naturally very appreciative of this gesture which shows how much your contribution is valued by the club.
It also helped mark the start of the countdown to majority fan ownership, which we can now confirm is on track to happen slightly sooner than planned – in summer 2021.
The other benefit is the additional exposure it will bring SMISA between now and then. When Jeff Stelling announces to the nation on Sky Sports that “there’s been a goal at The SMISA Stadium” then we want football fans all across the country to be sufficiently interested to google the name and learn more about SMISA and fan ownership in general.
That can only help as we look to enhance our reputation heading into a pivotal year.
We hope that additional interest will lead to an increase in membership numbers as more St Mirren fans sign up as we get closer to completing our takeover, five years ahead of the initial date of 2026 set in 2016.
We would encourage as many fans as possible to sign up as the more members we have, the stronger we become.
Simply put, the more funds that are in the pot once the buy out of Gordon Scott’s shares has been concluded, the more money there will be to improve the team on the park. And that is something every St Mirren supporter wants to see.
SMISA Business
We are pleased to report that, despite the financial uncertainty caused by the effects of the global pandemic, our member numbers have remained fairly robust, with 1165 still signed up. We remain grateful as always for your contribution.
The SMISA board continues to meet via Zoom every fortnight and speak regularly via other channels on a daily basis. We have recently welcomed two new contributors to the group, Colin Bright (otherwise known as Paisley Panda), who has been co-opted on to the board, and Kenny Lang who is currently involved on a more informal basis.
Colin has replaced Lawrence McCabe who has stepped down from the board. We thank Lawrence for everything he achieved during his time with us and look forward to hopefully working with him again in future on specific projects.
As we get ever closer to becoming majority owners of the club, SMISA also remains in regular dialogue with our partners, Kibble, and will also have representatives on the new joint working sub-committees that are being established by the club for some areas of the business. This will allow SMISA to gain more insight into how things work and to act as a conduit for passing information and views to and from the club board.
As you know we recently carried out a comprehensive survey of SMISA’s members which captured your views on a range of issues and we will use the very useful feedback we received to help us shape SMISA’s future role and operations, including in areas such as membership fees, events and benefits.
We will also be stepping up our communications to members between now and next summer – both in terms of widening awareness of how fan ownership will work and by bringing you more regular updates on SMISA business, such as this one.