Getting to know: Matty Davies

I am the lead volunteer for Commercial, Design, Web and Finance as well as one of the Designated Safeguarding Leads.

My role is primary ensuring that we have new merchandise to bring you, suppliers are paid on time, and that we account money for any new equipment for the matchday experience, charity fundraisers and other initiatives, as well as ensuring that our young volunteers are kept safe at all times.

I also meet with the club to discuss new ideas, keep track of website updates and analytics to see where we can introduce or withdraw items and help out on the stall when time allows for it.

Away from DRFC, I am a father of 4 so I don’t get to as many match days as I would like to. I also volunteer as a facilitator for Men’s Mental Health Charity Andy’s Man Club on top of an extremely demanding role as an IT Engineer.

My roots within Black Bank trace back to its formative years, from volunteering with bucket collections outside the ground, to helping set up to Stoke Tifo and the Exeter display. In 2019, I became the lead volunteer and crowd funded, ordered and co-produced the Tifo against Crystal Palace From there, I then focused on doing as much as I could before taking a step back to focus on family life. In 2025, I helped to revive Black Bank and focus more of the behind-the-scenes work.

For me its an escape mechanism - I like to keep myself busy so that I do not get inside my own head.

I love seeing what our hard work leads to especially when we do our displays.

2019 - Crystal Palace at home. Our Second ever Tifo. This is the first one that I took the lead with and myself and one other former volunteer designed, redesigned and produced this alone.

I still recall stapling over 3000 piece of paper together on the Saturday and rounding up as many volunteer as possible on the sunday to create the RTID tifo - made completely worth it when we saw it back on the BBC

The amount of time and effort that it takes to design, redesign and procure. When we do a card tifo, we are talking about over 3500 individual pieces of card - The Rotherham tifo took us in excess of 100hrs to perfect everything.

Procurement isn’t always easy either, we have regulations that we need to follow. UK suppliers know this so drive their prices up, whereas the alternative is importing them from the EU and paying astronomical shipping fees!

I have 2 here.

First - Palace at home in 2019 for leading my first tifo.

Second - Wigan at home in 2026, AKA Black Bank Takeover Day where we came together with the club to design a warm up jersey, were the match ball sponsors.

My earliest Rovers memory is being stood in the Town end in 2005. Rovers were playing Aston Villa and I watched in amazement as my little hometown League side defeated one of the Premiership heavyweights 3-0. From there I was hooked.

Patience. And lots of it.

Do it!

We are a bunch of supporters that want to support the team in the best way possible!