Fair Game UK held its annual conference at AFC Wimbledon’s Plough Lane on 21 May. Among the attendees were TOHIF’s Colm Kearns and Dan Kilvington. Fair Game UK is an organisation aimed at ensuring football is governed with fairness, openness and transparency. Their advisory council includes representatives from several professional football clubs up and down the league pyramid.
The conference featured a series of thought-provoking sessions on the governance, fairness and sustainability of football in the UK. Topics discussed included the proposed independent football regulator, the ramifications of the scrapping of FA Cup replays, football’s failing financial model, and online hate in football. Dan Kilvington was one of the featured speakers in this last panel and provided attendees with insights on the problem gathered over the course of the TOHIF project.
Throughout the day, Dan and Colm manned a stall on the TOHIF project, providing interested attendees with badges, business cards, flyers and lively conversation about the issue of online hate in football. They had the opportunity to speak with journalists, activists and club officials on a wide variety of topics related to the issue, such as how ableist abuse is often overlooked, flaws in the structures for reporting abuse, and the difficulties of discerning genuine insights from an enormous dataset.
Fair Game UK provided the TOHIF team with a vital opportunity to meet and network with key stakeholders concerned about the issue of online hate in football. It is likely that many fruitful collaborations will follow from this.