Owner Ali Pour agrees to meet Glentoran Supporters Union as fears over 'plummeting' season ticket sales and attendances are at the top of the agenda

The GSU – comprising of 17 supporter clubs – wrote a letter to Mr Pour last month outlining that communication between the club and supporters is “very poor” and that people entrusted to deliver on his investment “have struggled to do so”.

They further stated that if the meeting didn’t occur then season ticket sales and attendances would “plummet next season”.

After having no response from the Glentoran owner – who took the reins of the club in 2019 – the GSU released the following statement on Thursday (April 18).

It read: “In our previous statement the Glentoran Supporters Union announced we would be writing to Ali Pour in order to request a face to face meeting with some representatives of supporters clubs, to discuss the current issues we believe exist at Glentoran, how Ali Pour planned to address these issues and what direction our club was heading in.

“Given we understand Ali Pour is no doubt a busy man, we gave him the courtesy of 30 days' right to reply. To date we have received no response.

“Prior to posting, we made contact with a representative from Glentoran in order to obtain a postal and/or email address for the letter to be sent to. We were informed that no one at Glentoran, with the exception of East No 1 board members, holds this information.

“Therefore it was a speculative effort posting the letter to our majority shareholder, as we were completely in the dark as to whether he would receive it.

“We posted a copy of the letter addressed to him to the Oval and a copy to a business address of his listed on Companies House. Therefore due to a lack of response we are left with no other option than to publish the letter in public domain, via social media and the local media.

"Whilst we hoped to avoid this and still hold out for a response, our hope is that by doing so it will bring the letter to Mr Pour’s attention and we can at least receive a response to acknowledge he has seen and is considering the correspondence.”

However, less than two hours after posting the above statement, the GSU confirmed that a meeting will now take place – with a date yet to be confirmed.