Robert Elstone Joins Truro City as Advisor

Robert Elstone, the former Everton chief executive and Super League executive chairman, has dropped back into football with one of its more remote and intriguing outposts, taking an advisory role at National League South side Truro City.

This is not a marquee Premier League appointment. It is something more curious than that. A man who once helped steer Everton through the upper reaches of English football is now lending his experience to a club recently relegated from the National League and determined to climb straight back.

Truro confirmed that Elstone will work closely with the club’s leadership, offering guidance as they attempt to reset after last season’s drop. The remit is broad: advice, support, structure. In short, a framework for a comeback.

Elstone’s CV carries weight. He arrived at Goodison Park in 2005 as chief operating officer and, four years later, moved into the chief executive’s chair at Everton, a role he held during a period of significant commercial and strategic change for the club. In 2018 he crossed codes, becoming executive chairman of Super League, the body that runs the top tier of English rugby league, before stepping down in 2021 and joining PwC as an advisor.

He has already shown a taste for the lower leagues. Elstone previously advised Stockport County while they were stuck in the National League, a spell that preceded their return to the English Football League. Truro will hope that experience of helping a sleeping club reawaken can be replicated in Cornwall.

Speaking to the club’s website, Elstone made it clear that this is no casual attachment. He talked about being struck by the “clarity of vision and determination” of Truro’s senior management, not just for the first team but for the club’s associated football charity. For a side fighting to re-establish itself, that kind of alignment matters.

He also pointed to the pull of place. After years at the top end of the English game, Elstone described the “uniqueness” of the Cornish club as “compelling” and spoke of “huge potential for success”. It is a long way, in every sense, from the boardrooms of Premier League and Super League powerbrokers, but that seems to be part of the appeal.

Elstone says he plans to work “at all levels of the club” as Truro set about rebuilding. For a team trying to turn relegation into a reset rather than a spiral, the presence of a seasoned operator in the background offers something rare at this level: top-flight know-how in a sixth-tier fight.

Now comes the hard part. Vision, structure, experience — they all help. The question is whether Truro can turn that off-field upgrade into the only currency that really counts: promotion.