Colchester United Chairman Robbie Cowling has issued the following statement:
I hope everyone is keeping well and enjoying the new season.
The early fixtures have certainly been tough with three consecutive away trips and then our first home fixture against Bolton. However, we’ve had a pleasing start in the league with four points and two clean sheets from our first two games.
In terms of fans watching the game, I think the EFL have created a great product and the revenue it is generating is gratefully received. It’s small amounts of income at the moment but I’m optimistic that more of you will want to follow the team both home and away as you discover just how good the streaming option is.
And remember we are back to the broadcast quality cameras now, not the analysis cameras we had to use for the first two pre-season fixtures.
Streaming Revenues
The way it works currently is that the home team keep all of the revenue for the tickets they sell through their own website and they also get the revenue for the first 500 that buy via the away team. For example: for Saturday’s game against Bolton, we sold 452 iFollow passes, (so we keep all of the revenue from those), and Bolton sold 2252 iFollow passes, (of which we get the revenue from the first 500).
This has put a very new aspect on the revenue that is available to clubs this season. Bolton made more money in gate receipts from our home fixture than we did because they had the revenue from 1,752 iFollow passes whereas we had the revenue from 952 iFollow passes. In normal times, we would have expected about £54,000 in home gate receipts from this fixture but we will receive just shy of £8,000, whereas Bolton would have expected about £600 for the 5% commission we pay them but will have received about £14,000 more than that.
We sold just over 300 streams for the away game against Bradford, so we earnt £0.00 for that away game and I expect that to be the case for every away game this season. So based on twenty three away games, Bolton look set to receive about £345,000 from the streaming of their away games this season whilst we can look forward to approximately £0.00.
Perhaps these facts might help some of you that think we should still be in the Championship understand what we are up against.
Comments
@Ollywozere ?
Surely Colchester should be able to get more than 300 fans to stream an away match and 452 for a home match, seeing that they averaged 3600 last season? Even allowing for fans all living in the same household, you'd expect to sell 1500?
After all the small teams sticking together in this league always seem to get there way to level the playing field against the bigger teams like the wage cap or ending the season early.
Whilst our average away following has never been that high (Unless its an game with attractive appeal) you'd hope thats purely down to costs and time out of people's weekend that it can take to travel to some parts of the country, and that this is a happy medium for those who cant do that anymore... Me being one of those people
Also need to factor in the 'foreign' streams which only pay £7 to watch.
Thanks for your opening post. Really interesting.
So if the trend continues at that rate CUFC revenue for 46 games would be £184,000.
Based on crowd average if our proportion were similar our revenue could be £750,000.
Attending on Saturday made me realise how much I enjoy going.
I do sympathise with clubs' plight at present but some of this doesn’t add up.
Isn't this assuming that Bolton would take 2,252 fans to Colchester. If only 2,252 bothered to pay £10 to watch it in the comfort of their own homes, it may be that far less than that would have paid for tickets, travel, etc to go to Colchester. The highest average away attendance last year was about 1000 (Plymouth) as a comparison. Also, the away end at Colchester only holds 2000 anyway, so not all of these hypothetical Bolton fans would have got in anyway, had they travelled.
Also, if Colchester are at home to Barrow on a Tuesday night and they would possibly have 50 Barrow fans visiting Colchester for the game but if 500 watch it on ifollow wouldn't Colchester be better off then?
50 Barrow fans paying x £20 for a ticket = £1000 (-6% that Barrow get to keep) = £940
if 500 barrow fans choose to watch it on ifollow, then:
500 x £10 ifollow subs = £5000 that Colchester get to keep.
(I acknowledge there’s extra revenue from selling pies and programmes but offset by the cost of stewarding, etc)
Other than Bolton, I think only Cambridge, Southend, Bradford and Orient would bring a significant number of supporters to Colchester. I guess the average number of away fans in league two is about 300-400. Which would mean Colchester are not that out of pocket if enough people are watching the game on ifollow and, having been to the ‘Western Homes Community Stadium’, it’s not the greatest place to get to and from – ifollow is quite an attractive option.
He also complains that he made no money from 300 Southend fans watching ifollow away at Braford but if all 300 of them actually had been able to go he would only make about £360 on 6% commission anyway.
You can’t complain that other clubs are keeping away fans’ revenue but a paragraph later complain that Colchester don’t get to keep theirs.
The only bright side is that there will be more "away" supporters than usual at the games This extra cash is shared equally between clubs with less than 500 away supporters but clubs with large followings can take all the extra above 500 supporters.
The big fish is allowed to eat the medium fish. But the medium fish must share with the little fish.
I don't like that we pay money to a specific club to watch a game. If the premier league or SKY go this way, the big clubs will get enormously more money the smaller ones.
The sound issues are an irritation, but much less so than buffering or picture issues, which I can't complain about with the service, but it seems some have had these.
I would be interested to know our numbers and whether we are maximising the potential which is surely there. The same way as we try to boost crowds, the club ought to be really pushing the service. I don't think it is bad for a tenner.
The simple way monies should be apportioned in my view is if you watch through your club's service, they should get your money.
Not bad when you consider that iFollow was probably never built for such numbers