Apart from one reference from Henry, I dont think anybody has mentioned his remarks in any detail. In the interests of fairness at least, perhaps we should discuss them, in the context of the other threads. For me also, if he has given details of revenues of other clubs, I'd be very interested to read them. It is important to benchmark our situation against others. If anyone could summarise his key points, ideally including the figures, I'd be most interested. Perhaps someone can scan the page?
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09 / 10 Burnley ( Hull and Pompey )
10 / 11 Birmingham / Blackpool ( West Ham )
11 / 12 Blackburn / Bolton ( Wolves )
12/13 QPR / Reading / Wigan
Slater reckons that this is worth £20 Million in extra revenue although I believe this decreases in increments in years 3 and 4.
It would explain why Blackpool can take a chance on Ricardo Fuller and we can't.For all of his injury problems I would maintain he was worth around eight points last season which was the difference between a last day relegation fright like the Spanners and nearly making the play offs. Unfortunately this is what we are up against.
In all seriousness there's nothing in there worth reading. I'm sure people would take what he said as meaning that the club isn't for sale for £40million, but that's not actually what he said. It was the usual "clever" wording where you think he's saying something, but it turns out he's actually not.
I quoted a sentence on a previopus thread a few days ago. Will have a look now to see if I can find it again.
Which is not the same thing as saying the club is not for sale, or that £40million is not what they are looking for.
CHAIRMAN Michael Slater has denied national newspaper reports last week which claimed Charlton were up for sale for £40 million.
The figure was quoted in two Sunday tabloids on August 4 but Mr Slater told the club’s official programme for today’s Championship meeting with Middlesbrough neither story had any foundation.
Mr Slater said: “Contrary to reports in the press, I have not told anyone that the club is for sale for £40m.
“Since our promotion back to the Championship, we have received numerous approaches from people claiming to be interested in buying the club, although, amusingly, none from Turkey, Sweden or Russia, as some journalists and fans mistakenly believe.
“We are endeavouring to run the club on a sensible basis.
“The progress we have made since December 2010 is undeniable.
“But we do not claim to have the only workable business model for running a football club, and the owners feel duty-bound to listen to anyone of substance with a credible plan that might help the club develop more quickly.”
Palace's turnover jumped to £15,022,059 from £12,706,503 in 2011/12 - with the club citing the successful Carling Cup run to the semi-finals as the main reason. If so we might want to look at that as an exceptional event, although you'd think their 2012/13 revenue was fairly buoyant too.
Charlton's revenue in 2012/13 was £11.8m, although a small allowance should be made for the fact we were still charging League One season ticket prices.
What interests me from researching the data (although Slater doesn't mention it), is that Charlton's (League One) match receipts in 2011/12 were comparable (within £1m) or better than three quarters of Championship clubs - including Palace - despite many fewer away fans than in the second tier.
One area in which we do very, very badly is merchandising, so for example we appear to have got £150k profit from Just Sports last year as per VOTV, whereas many Championship clubs are well into seven figures in income.
It's a similar story in other commercial areas, although the data is difficult to isolate.
I don't say, by the way, that this is down to incompetence, there are other explanations, and also I would say that tickets out-performed what might be expected, but it does suggest to me that we're not going to address the club's ability to compete significantly by focusing on selling more tickets, even though it has knock-on benefits for other income.
Surely that isn't a like for like comparison eg merchandising income of £1m may still only generate 15% profit or £150k
Any particular reason why our merchandise sales are so poor?
Question: How many is the minimum number that one could, realistically, call numerous. Two, three or does it have to be more?
Incidentally, I have no problem with public statements being a little biased and/or misleading. We don't, actually, want all our competitors to know what we are planning, nor do those that have been bankrolling the club have to disclose their bottom figure when they are trying to sell something for the top price (be it the club or a player) or the top price they will pay for something (players, again, for example).
All these things are really important if we want to get more money in, and more importantly, turn occasional fans in the STHs. Alot of these things could be happening every week but the focus is on simply getting bodies through the turnstiles.
Have you seen on Brighton pier, they have a dolphin race game where you throw balls in holes to move them. We could have one of these with Charlton players. A football scoring - shooting ball through holes game etc... These things would make it all more enjoyable for kids and they would want to return! At the moment - during a boring game - I often hear - can we go home dad?
That of course is also why it is reasonable for Airman to criticise aspects of the Club's commercial performance. He's not doing it out of 'bitterness'. There is a benchmark. The key question then is, what were Palace doing better than us (other than a Cup run) and what can we learn from that?
I'm sure that if you put that to relevant people they would say that the constraints of the infrastucture, i.e. size of the shop, number and capacity of refreshment outlets, safety certificate restrictions re queues were all limiting factors, but it does got back to the fact that marginal ticket revenue more or less flows straight through to the bottom line, whereas extra spend in other areas is significantly offset by additional cost of sale.
The fact that a good experience encourages a repeat ticket sale I well understand, but with the budgets in League One it may have been tough for managers to address.