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Post by 61666 on Jan 29, 2023 9:19:19 GMT
The suggestion seems to be that our player budget is around £750k a year. If so, spread over 30+ players that works out at an average of only £25k per player a year. Some will get more, but not exactly big bucks and you'd think most would want a second income from somewhere to top this up. If we only had 20 or so players to fund, then their slice of the pie goes up by £10k on average - quite a difference. I wonder what other clubs pay, on average? We hear about certain players on six figure salaries, but what are the norms in NL/NLS, I wonder? Managers too. My own experience, from education, is that a headteacher salary is closely linked to the size of the school. Presume it is the same in other walks of life, though in football things get skewed, especially if there are sugar daddy owners. The obvious question remains - if we cannot/will not pay the going rate, is it any wonder that we struggle in the NL?
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Post by steveh21 on Jan 29, 2023 9:25:32 GMT
I was told £900,000 by a v reliable source.
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Post by jdl on Jan 29, 2023 13:32:44 GMT
Staff costs are always much higher than their simple salaries. When I was involved in estimating budgets where staff costs were involved, the rule of thumb was to add at least 25% to raw salaries.
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Post by jdl on Jan 29, 2023 14:10:42 GMT
If we take our current average gate (just over 2,250), multiply it by the number of home games (23) and assume an average entrance fee of £15 (I've no idea what it actually is, so this is just a guess), you get an annual gate income of around £776k. If you then add 50% to this to cover pitch earnings, sponsorship, food and drink sales, etc (another guess), you get a total income of about £1.165m.
So a playing budget of £900k would leave £265k to run the club (staff salaries, electricity, maintenance, contribution to budget for expected costs (eg new pitch), match-day costs, insurance, etc, etc). But this doesn't seem enough to me (again, a guess, as I simply don't have the data to make any sort of estimate). I'm not disputing Steve's figure, £900k sounds about right to me, so I can only assume my estimate of income is too low - maybe it's closer to twice gate income (£1.5m)?
But, however you look at the clubs finances, the answer is the same - it's tight. I would suggest this means two things:
1) It's unlikely that we can support a 'true' full-time squad (where all players get a good enough salary, so they don't need second jobs), so competing with the larger (ex-EFL) NL clubs on players' salaries isn't really possible.
2) We are heavily reliant on good gates - it's the one part of our income we can (relatively) easily increase, but it's also the one part of our income that's very vulnerable to lack of success on the pitch. And (obviously) if we have to reduce entrance prices (eg dropping down to the NS), this income is reduced.
So, there’s the quandary of all lower league football clubs in a nutshell – you need good gates, but you only get good gates if you’re playing well. And, to play well, you need the money to afford good players and management – so you need good gates….
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Post by steveh21 on Jan 29, 2023 19:02:30 GMT
If we take our current average gate (just over 2,250), multiply it by the number of home games (23) and assume an average entrance fee of £15 (I've no idea what it actually is, so this is just a guess), you get an annual gate income of around £776k. If you then add 50% to this to cover pitch earnings, sponsorship, food and drink sales, etc (another guess), you get a total income of about £1.165m. So a playing budget of £900k would leave £265k to run the club (staff salaries, electricity, maintenance, contribution to budget for expected costs (eg new pitch), match-day costs, insurance, etc, etc). But this doesn't seem enough to me (again, a guess, as I simply don't have the data to make any sort of estimate). I'm not disputing Steve's figure, £900k sounds about right to me, so I can only assume my estimate of income is too low - maybe it's closer to twice gate income (£1.5m)? But, however you look at the clubs finances, the answer is the same - it's tight. I would suggest this means two things: 1) It's unlikely that we can support a 'true' full-time squad (where all players get a good enough salary, so they don't need second jobs), so competing with the larger (ex-EFL) NL clubs on players' salaries isn't really possible. 2) We are heavily reliant on good gates - it's the one part of our income we can (relatively) easily increase, but it's also the one part of our income that's very vulnerable to lack of success on the pitch. And (obviously) if we have to reduce entrance prices (eg dropping down to the NS), this income is reduced. So, there’s the quandary of all lower league football clubs in a nutshell – you need good gates, but you only get good gates if you’re playing well. And, to play well, you need the money to afford good players and management – so you need good gates…. ..but u do not have to be full-time in NL football if u cannot afford to be.
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Post by jdl on Jan 30, 2023 10:57:34 GMT
If we take our current average gate (just over 2,250), multiply it by the number of home games (23) and assume an average entrance fee of £15 (I've no idea what it actually is, so this is just a guess), you get an annual gate income of around £776k. If you then add 50% to this to cover pitch earnings, sponsorship, food and drink sales, etc (another guess), you get a total income of about £1.165m. So a playing budget of £900k would leave £265k to run the club (staff salaries, electricity, maintenance, contribution to budget for expected costs (eg new pitch), match-day costs, insurance, etc, etc). But this doesn't seem enough to me (again, a guess, as I simply don't have the data to make any sort of estimate). I'm not disputing Steve's figure, £900k sounds about right to me, so I can only assume my estimate of income is too low - maybe it's closer to twice gate income (£1.5m)? But, however you look at the clubs finances, the answer is the same - it's tight. I would suggest this means two things: 1) It's unlikely that we can support a 'true' full-time squad (where all players get a good enough salary, so they don't need second jobs), so competing with the larger (ex-EFL) NL clubs on players' salaries isn't really possible. 2) We are heavily reliant on good gates - it's the one part of our income we can (relatively) easily increase, but it's also the one part of our income that's very vulnerable to lack of success on the pitch. And (obviously) if we have to reduce entrance prices (eg dropping down to the NS), this income is reduced. So, there’s the quandary of all lower league football clubs in a nutshell – you need good gates, but you only get good gates if you’re playing well. And, to play well, you need the money to afford good players and management – so you need good gates…. ..but u do not have to be full-time in NL football if u cannot afford to be. I deliberately avoided the 'full-time/part-time' debate as I think it's pretty pointless. We've discussed this to death on here, and couldn't even agree on the definitions! I don't think we've ever actually had a 'full-time' squad - in terms of paying all players a good enough wage to live on without having to take second jobs. What we have is simply day-time training. The key to a club's prosperity is the two 'M's - money and management. The manager recruits the players and runs the team, the club gives him the money to do it. How much money there is, obviously affects how well the manager can do his job. If the club can pay enough players enough money to not need a full-time job, and therefore be able to train during the day, then they do that, if they can't, they don't. There's no real choice - you do the best you can on the budget you've got. Whether we call this 'daytime training' or 'full-time' is semantics. One club's 'full-time' might be another's 'part-time'. I'm pretty certain the average Premier player wouldn't regard us as a 'full-time' club. And I'm equally certain that the average Isthmian Premier player wouldn't regard any NL side as 'part-time'. The labels are irrelevant, what matters is how much money you've got and how you spend it. In our case, we have more money than many NL clubs (at least in terms of revenue) and a great deal more than many NS clubs. We spent that money well last season, we pissed it away this one.
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