There's a difference to our financial baseline though. Our break-even crowd will be lower now, as TV grants are much greater.
08/09: 10,465 - when Jedi left
09/10: 7,430 - our worst ever squad and our worst ever season
10/11: 7,713 - Arnie's first year, when we recovered from an awful season to make the GF
11/12: 9,607 - when we won the league
12/13: 9,921 - when we won the championship
13/14: 9,502 YTD (counting NSO) - when we're a little bit on the slide, but we have 3 derbies to come, and I'd expect each of them to draw better than 10k. If we average better than 11,826, we will go better than 10k by the end of the year for the first time in 5 years. If you take NSO out, we're averaging 9,777 and we need just 10,744 to crack 10k for the year.
14/15: we're going to be rebuilding *and* we won't have home two derbies against each of the other NSW teams.
For what it's worth, if you take out the Fridays (which are an unmitigated disaster for us) and NSO (which is an aberration anyway) then we're averaging 10,730.
If you work from my assumption that the Fridays and NSO were disasters and so replace the crowds we got then our non-derby, non-NYE average (8,653), we're running at 10,163.
I posted some stuff
ages back working from some assumptions about cost of running a club, tv money and extrapolating break-even crowds.
On my (*very* back of the envelope) calculations, the break-even crowd might have fallen by as much as 30%, so while a bad year might give us a loss, it might not be catastrophic because we're less crowd-reliant.
We also have a bigger sponsorship profile, which will take further pressure off the gate. Even if our performance is down, our national exposure is *up* compared to that time because the league's exposure is up.
FWIW, I think we'd run a loss this year unless we crack nearly 11k average, but we're not going to average 15k for the three remaining games so that's not going to happen.
