Gino Pozzo kicked off the fans forum at the training ground by making the following opening comments.

“This is the second time I have actually had the opportunity to talk to you. The first time I did that through an interview, and now I felt it was another good time to go back with you and have a bit of a change of outcome.

“I don’t like to talk to the press. I don’t like social media. I prefer to have a more private life. I like to dedicate time to my family, and I love football. I really am very passionate about football. I dedicate most of my time to my interests, my passions, which is my family and the football club.

“That keeps my very busy and that’s how life is. I know you don’t get very much contact with me because I don’t have a Twitter account, and I don’t send messages to people every other day.

“But we have people that work for the club that are always there, and that are always there to send a message. And I’m there with them, to set the direction in which I believe the club should be going. My interventions are really more down to when I see something not going in the right direction.

“From the beginning of this adventure, which has taken us very far, we are not going to be now saying what we were going to do from the start, that we were going to rebuild the stadium, we were going to be promoted, that we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that. We prefer to keep a lower profile and let facts speak for us.

“We always saw the potential of this club from the very beginning. But of course what we inherited what a club that had a lot of room for improvements, a lot of opportunities. We had a stadium to develop, we had a squad to start from. But actually we had VAT to pay and that was the first thing we had to do because we were very close to a bigger problem for this club.

“But we actually like working and to keep that stability that the club deserves, in order to keep any programme. Because, yes, we focus very much on the latest result. And we’re all very happy or frustrated with the latest result. But we want to stress the fact that in order to be able to look forward we need to set some solid bases, ones that enable us even in a disappointing season to look to the next season and say ‘ok, we start again, we’re going to improve and we’re going to do better’.

“That requires a lot of work and a lot of planning. And I think that each one of you has been with the club long enough to be able to appreciate the constant improvement to the facilities, to the squad, to every aspect of our club.

“And when we look at all the elements that come into this, they are very important to the future of the club, and I truly think we tick all the boxes.

“The improvement in the stadium has been something necessary to set events for the club to grow. All the commercial staff have been working so intensely, and that has placed us at the very top. We are the club that has increased the commercial revenues the most since 2009.

“We won the best pitch award in the Premier League, the best hospitality in the Premier League. All of that is something that most of the fans are not interested in but it’s important. It’s very important because it’s in the background and the club wants to grow.

“The facilities we have here [training ground] are top, top class. Everything around the club has improved.

“Our mission is to make sure the club continues working and the bases are there for long-term results and long-term commitment.

“We see how the Premier League is developing now. A club like Leicester, who won the league, who won the FA Cup a few years ago, they’ve been relegated. Everton have nearly twice just been able to survive. This is the kind of new environment that we are faced with.

“When we first started this, the kind of comment I was getting is ‘You’ll never make it to the Premier League, and if you make it to the Premier League you’re never gonna have a chance to survive there because the other clubs are too big and too powerful. There is no way’.

“In fact we showed that there is a way. There is a way to go there and to prosper. So I think we certainly can be happy with what we have achieved over the last time.

“Of course, we don’t just want to look backwards at what we have achieved and everything that is here now at the club serves as a base for what we want to do next. Because when we started this 11 years ago we really had a lot of work to do just to establish a base.

“Now we have a very strong base to deal with the future. The group of players that we are assembling now is really a fresh start. It’s a new group that we believe will bring new enthusiasm, a new group that starts with a clean start.

“I think that also we had some very good players who had served well the club over the years, but over time they were not able to give to us what we were asking. And in that sense, that’s football. And sometimes you wonder was it a good idea to keep some of the players so long, would it be better to move them earlier.

“Even the year we got relegated, in the Covid year, we received an offer for Doucoure at the beginning. It was a very important offer and we decided not to sell him. Then we got relegated and you say ‘well, what if’.

“But you have to leave all that. The important thing is that we always done what we felt was in the  best interests, the long-term of interests, of the club. And today, after all that’s happened, we can still look with optimism to what we have next in front of us.

“The club is in a very stable financial position right now, and we have a new group of players. We have a new challenge on top of us and I think we are ready to face that.

“I just wanted to thank you for being here and say this introduction because there are some aspects that I think are important. I know they are not as important as the last game or the next game, but it’s important to know that the club is there and it’s going to be there for a long time.

“And we all want to make it go forward. As I say, when we look at what we have achieved there is a sense of satisfaction for what we have done, but we don’t look backwards. We always look forwards.

“What we have achieved serves as a base to do more.”