Was just reading an article on FC which was titled £10k-£20k Deficit and this was a response from Andy Walsh in which they have estimated the crowd attendances they require for the remainder of their home games and i have highlighted in red the actual attendances so far :
situation could have been a lot worse if it was not for the efforts of a lot of people behind the scenes and plans being in place to address any negative impact on agreed budgets. This contingency planning goes on each season but when the winter is as bad as it has been the task is that much more challenging.
The winter and consequential postponements is a major factor as is the poor ongoing economic climate.
We have to be creative and work hard to bring in the revenue we need to run the club and address any shortfalls against budgets when we get hit with such difficulties. We have a limited number of ways to raise revenue especially lodging at Bury, plus we want to keep prices as low as possible on the gate, merchandise, price of beer in the bars etc and we want to avoid 'outright commercialism'.
Games switched to a midweek attract a smaller crowd, games being squashed into a constricted timeframe e.g. three home on the bounce or a run of two games a week and not spread out all have an impact on a number of areas, merchandise sales, pound for the ground, programme sales, sponsorship etc. Individuals only have a limited amount of money to spend from their pay packet and there are competing calls on family finances.
The poor weather has a hidden impact as it also hits our other fundraising events with people more reluctant to come out when the weather is bad and we cannot just postpone events until the weather improves as this again loads the events into an already packed part of the year.
We have constrained costs and the various teams of volunteers on sponsorship, match promotion, web team, programmes, merchandise, PFTG, events etc have all worked hard to address the problem.
We are not alone in suffering these issues every club we talk to is experiencing the same problems with many clubs at our level reporting crowds down by up to 20%.
With no rich backer and co-ownership our response has to be a collective one. As a point of interest a drop of 100 off the average attendance across a season will roughly equate to £10k - £12k loss against budgets and we are running approximately 100 behind our average of the last few seasons. Whilst it is a tough challenge to face last Sunday showed what a focused promotional campaign can achieve we set a target gate of 2,000 tomorrow's match we are aiming for 2,300. There will be some ebb and flows but these are our targets for the remainder of the season:
FEB
Sat 23 Ilkeston 2200 (actual 1,929)
MARCH
Sun 3 N Ferriby 1900 (actual 2,465)
Sat 9 Chorley 2300 ( actual 2031 )
Tues 19 Buxton 1700 (Stalybridge) ( 1501 )
Sat 23 Blyth Sp 2200 ( actual 1730 )
APRIL
Mon 1 Stocksbridge 2200 ( actual 1659 )
Sat 6 Witton 2200 ( actual 1741 )
Tues 9 Kendal 1830
Tues 16 Frickley 1830
Sat 20 Worksop 2900
Tues 23 Ashton 2000
Hit these and we will go a long way to addressing the budget position.
Only achieved or bettered one so far !!!
