I was involved.
It stemmed from a letter in the Green 'Un straight after the relegation from the PL. A small group of very different Blades responded, held a meeting and then leafleted outside the ground. The next thing, we hadover 2,000 peopl e wanting to join, which pretty well overwhelmed us. Remember, this was before the internet, and newsletters etc had to be delivered by hand, as we weren't prepared to spend the members' funds on postage in the early days.
BIFA never claimed to be the "Voice of the fans", and it was certainly never recognised as such by the club, quite the opposite in fact, they wouldn't communicate with us. Tony Pritchett, who was in the club's pocket and liked to travel to away games on the team coach, was also extremely hostile to us for "rocking the boat". But from comments we received outside the ground on match days, we seemed to have a broad groundswell of support. It was also extremely democratic.
We were very well aware that we didn't speak for all fans, just the members, and because of this we took decisions such as never criticising the manager no matter what was happening on the pitch. Our gripe was with the way the club was being governed, and we wanted to do something about it, which we did, and got a result. It was clear that Brealey could only take us even further backwards if he stayed because he was worse than skint and the club was massively in debt - remember we once more had a 3 sided ground at the time, and had been reduced to Bassett paying Brian Gayle's transfer fee out of his own pocket. Bassett was clandestinely supportive of us by the way.
Was it ultimately successful? It seemed so at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, I really don't know, that's for others to judge.
