Question Self Sufficiency

[WightShrimper]

As you will see, I am a newbie to forum posting. In the glorious past I have been happy just keeping up on games, results and news as it happened, but the only good thing ,from my point of view, about the last year is that I have felt the desire to bond with fellow fans (as well as vent my spleen!) on various forums.
Anyway, to point. I replied to a thread where I said that football clubs are too tied up with external business and that we suffer when those unrelated businesses are in trouble. This made me wonder if any clubs can be totally self-sustaining through ticket sales, advertising, media and commerce. If we started off with a clean sheet, could we make it work better next time round or would we still be reliant on the deep pockets of others?

 

[Interpol Shrimper]

Ask Ron, he'll go into great detail about how Yeovil & Exeter do things right.
Shame he doesn't practice what he preaches ;)

 

[Firestorm]

We most certainly can't, not in the past 15 years at least.

Owning your own ground certainly helps,

For every 1000 per week paid to players 151 tickets (at 15 quid a ticket) will need to be sold for each home league game (assuming lower divisions)

a 20 man squad at 1k per week will therefore require an average league attendance of 3,020 (an thats on an average ticket price of 15 Quid and Considering a seaso at 300 works out at 13 quid that might well be a generous figure)

Advertising, merchandising, sponsorship etc would then have go into paying the manager, coaching staff, bills, stewarding, pitch maintenance + plus the other costs associated with the wages (NI , injury insurance etc) , admin staff, ticketing , player registrations etc etc

 

[Firestorm]

Perhaps this is a question Elstree could cast light on , as he has been in contact with the consortium and Self sufficiency is one of their buzzwords i would imagine he has seen their figures explaining how they would acheive it

 

[Napster]

Perhaps this is a question Elstree could cast light on , as he has been in contact with the consortium and Self sufficiency is one of their buzzwords i would imagine he has seen their figures explaining how they would acheive it

he seems to have disappeared.

 

[Tangled up in Blue]

he seems to have disappeared.

On holiday? :unsure:

 

[Jam_Man]

Ask Ron, he'll go into great detail about how Yeovil & Exeter do things right.
Shame he doesn't practice what he preaches ;)

If he did everyone would have complained.

"Wheres the warchest ron?"

We demand more than the Yeovil & Exeter supports unfortunately and if thats the ambition we have we will have to rely on more than ticket sales.

Anyway you are misquoting him, what he actually said was they stayed up on their budget so we should have on ours...

 

[Interpol Shrimper]

If he did everyone would have complained.

"Wheres the warchest ron?"

We demand more than the Yeovil & Exeter supports unfortunately and if thats the ambition we have we will have to rely on more than ticket sales.

Anyway you are misquoting him, what he actually said was they stayed up on their budget so we should have on ours...

You call it misquote, I call it trying to unravel the spin...;)

 

[Jam_Man]

You call it misquote, I call it trying to unravel the spin...;)

You spin more than him :)

 

[EastStandBlue]

Perhaps this is a question Elstree could cast light on , as he has been in contact with the consortium and Self sufficiency is one of their buzzwords i would imagine he has seen their figures explaining how they would acheive it

You could try, I'm still waiting for a response...

Self-sufficiency is a dirty word in football because, without substantial non-football related revenue, it's pretty much infeasible if you want to remain competitive in whichever league you occupy. With the advent of player power and expansive wages, clubs continually have to push boundaries which, in truth, is fine if you have a Sugar Daddy with a ream of blank cheques to throw at you.

It's a catch 22 situation. If you want to compete and get more people through the doors, you have to spend or speculate to accumulate. However, if you want to remain frugal and keep your costs sustainable, then it'll ultimately lead to a fall in attendances as those around you speculate above you for success. This is exactly what happened to us in the Championship. If you take those around us as to who we were fighting relegation with (Leeds, Luton, Colchester, Hull, Barnsley, QPR) they were all living far, far beyond their means, far more than we were, in an attempt to stave off the drop.

This is why I'm so intrigued as to how the Consortium plan to make us self sufficient. It'll ultimately lead to expenditure cuts, which would restrict the calibre of footballer we could tempt to the club, which would in turn drive away the "glory hunters" who only come when we're doing well. We could cut costs elsewhere, i.e. the Youth development programme as has happened in the past, but that would be extremely regressive given the success Ricky Duncan has achieved over the last 5 or so years. The only possible way to do so would be to vastly increase non-football related revenue streams which, with the Consortium in charge, RM would almost certainly keep from FF unless a contract is drawn up.

 

[Mick]

We could cut costs elsewhere, i.e. the Youth development programme as has happened in the past, but that would be extremely regressive given the success Ricky Duncan has achieved over the last 5 or so years.

I'm not sure the "success" of our Youth set-up isn't a bit of a myth.

It would be interesting to see a sort of "profit and loss" account of those 5 years.

 

[EastStandBlue]

When I spoke to Duncan last year, he was very aware of the fact that the success of a Centre of Excellence isn't just defined by the number/calibre of players developed for the first team, but also encompasses the Centre providing for the club in the financial sense as well as creating links with other, local football clubs.

Ignoring winning the Puma Alliance (as hardly any progressed through to the seniors, but that's football), If you take Moussa, Herd, O'Keefe and Crawford as the four who are now in the senior side, that's cost us a fair sum in bringing four senior squad players in. Although it's not immediate income (apart from the relatively low fees we received for them) if the likes of Medi Abalimba, Femi Orenuga and Michael N'goo (Liverpool being very excited about the latter) progress well, then we're also set for graduated income as to their success.

That isn't to mention the links we've established with Premier League clubs such as Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and *spit* West Ham through the waves we've made in youth development circles.

Personally, Given the relatively low maintenance costs, I'd argue that the CoE can't be labelled anything other than a success, albeit a minor one.