Mariners vs Wellington at NSO - Game Talk

[midfielder]

Dibo

I hope your right regarding how FFA will stand up for the Coast ... my gut tells me maybe not ...

There was also a recent bid for Heart by a Chinese group that got knocked back ... over 9 million ... so there could be buyers out there...

 

[midfielder]

Moving games to pay the rent .... Nix's have been doing it for a while so it is not unheard of...

 

[localpom]

From purely a business view NSO makes sense .... rule with your heart or brain... from the heart we should stay at Gosford...

I think MC has two maybe three irons in the fire with this announcement ...

First to pressure council into leasing us the stadium rights at a price we can afford rather than what council wants..

Second a plan to move some of the smaller crowd games ... ie Nix, PG, Heart with derby matches at Gosford ..

Third get NSO for a very cheap price ..

Back of the envelope stuff ...

Say wages of staff and players ..... 3.7 m
Travel & Accommodation ............ .8 m ... i.e 20 away games including pre-season at 40K per match
Other Costs, office staff phones etc .1.2 m
Promotion ....................................... .4 m
Other stuff left out .............................5m

Total pre stadium Hire ................. 6.6m

less FFA income ............................ 2.4
Less Sponsors Income ....................0.5
Less Shirt Sales................................0.3

Total before stadium hire ............. 3.4 m

Stadium Hire + Security ................ ????

13 matches with 12, 000 per match at $ 20.00 per ticket .... 3.1 million
13 matches with 14, 000 per match at $ 20.00 per ticket ... 3.6 million


Gosford say average

13 matches with 10, 000 per match at $ 15.00 per ticket ... say 2 m...

The gist of it as I see it is to lift the derby games attendances to over 12 k full ticket paying folk...

If I was to take a guess it is to force the council to providing the stadium very cheaply ... then we would get the revenue from beer coffee & pie sales .....

The problem with this and what MC is proposing is that we football fans think with our heart not our heads. This would piss me off and i will go off and be miserable for a while. Same as everyone else i have talked to. As a novelty,to grow our supporter base and as a goodwill to our North Shore fans a game a year is fine. Reality is that that we football fans have to identify with our team otherwise it won't work. There is an emotional attachment involved that has to be factored in. People might rock up for a few games at NSO initially just to watch a game of football but will they be there in the rain and blistering sun,week in week out over the course of a season? I doubt it, not for a team that isn't theirs anyway. Just my thoughts.

 

[dibo]

Nix aren't moving games to their neighbours' backyard - they don't have neighbours. They also don't move 6 per year.

As for crowds, just based on the fact that last year we had one home game each for our biggest drawcards - WSW, SFC, Victory and Newcastle - and this year we have two, our crowds will take a natural upswing (all other things being equal).

Our true average is going to be somewhere between this year and last, so probably a smidge over 10k.

The problem with this and what MC is proposing is that we football fans think with our heart not our heads. This would piss me off and i will go off and be miserable for a while. Same as everyone else i have talked to. As a novelty,to grow our supporter base and as a goodwill to our North Shore fans a game a year is fine. Reality is that that we football fans have to identify with our team otherwise it won't work. There is an emotional attachment involved that has to be factored in. People might rock up for a few games at NSO initially just to watch a game of football but will they be there in the rain and blistering sun,week in week out over the course of a season? I doubt it, not for a team that isn't theirs anyway. Just my thoughts.

Exactly. If the team's part time at both locations, why should the fans truly care at either location? It's not really their team.

 

[true believer]

well i'll say it again .we sold our arse to the liberal party last election (remember)
WHAT ARE THEY GUNNA DO FOR US ? SHOW US THE MONEY . OR DID WE GET STOOGED .

 

[rbakersmith]

Mariners committed to the Coast
Tuesday, 26 November 2013 11:00 AM
Central Coast Mariners wish to refute speculation in this morning’s media suggesting the Club is seeking to relocate to the North Sydney region in the coming years.

The Club’s owners – including majority shareholder Mr Michael Charlesworth – have injected over $15 million into the Club as well as the Club’s Tuggerah-based Centre of Excellence over the past year, and as such the Central Coast will remain the home of the reigning Hyundai A-League Champions.

Indeed, Mr Charlesworth is investing in the Club’s Centre of Excellence with the aim of Central Coast being home to the premier sports training facility in the country, and one day being the official training base of Australia’s men's and women's national football teams.

While the Mariners’ commitment to the Coast is unwavering, recent analysis of the Club’s Membership base highlighted that approximately 20 per cent of the Club’s Members currently reside in Sydney’s northern suburbs. As such, the Club already views Sydney’s northern suburbs as an extension of Mariner territory, and is working closely with the Northern Suburbs Football Association to ensure the players, officials, volunteers, and supporters of the region have a Hyundai A-League team to call their own.

Central Coast Mariners will play its Hyundai A-League 2013/14 round 6 match against Wellington Phoenix at North Sydney Oval on Thursday 19 December. The Club wishes to engage with more supporters from Sydney’s northern suburbs in order to encourage them to routinely make the short trip up the M1 Motorway to watch the Mariners in action.

The Club will study the off-field success of its game against Wellington Phoenix in late 2013 and early 2014, before making any decision or commitment to play further matches at North Sydney Oval in the future.

http://www.footballaustralia.com.au...display/Mariners-committed-to-the-Coast/79046

 

[dibo]

Good. Our future is bright on the Central Coast.

As I posted in the expansion thread:

Leaving aside other variables (and assuming the numbers are solid - for all I know a man in the street could make these numbers up and mentioned them at a football function), this is very important.

13500 x $18 x 13 home games = $3,159,000.

So assuming all other spending stays the same, they only need to hit $8.3 million and the only change is the TV distribution, we go from needing a crowd of 13,500 to 10,936.

That makes a huge difference to the economics of the league last year's numbers, and a break-even of 13,500 yields the following:

A break even of 10,936 looks very different:

The weakness here is that not every club has the same cost base. We run pretty lean (I gather) but others may run leaner. Others spend more either by choice or necessity.

We won't earn as much off-field as the big city clubs either, so it's pretty hard to offer a cast-iron guide, so bearing these pretty massive (and knowingly flawed) assumptions of equal cost and revenue bases in mind, you can take these illustrative figures with an appropriately-sized grain of salt.

So what happens when our crowds jump *and* we get TV money?

Taking the averages of our crowds for each visiting team, and multiplying them by 1 or 2 depending on how many home games we have against them, you get an average crowd of just over 11,000 - a jump of about 1,200 or about 13% on last year.

Averaging out the two you wind up with about 10,500, and that's probably a realistic long-term average. The thing is that now, that's not a bleeding millions proposition.



Using the back of envelope calculations from before (expecting the break-even crowd to drop because of the new TV money), that means we go from a nearly $1m deficit to a break-even position (you can barely call that a surplus or a deficit when you're spending $8m per year - it's in the margin of error).

When we get to a position of no longer having a massive structural deficit, so things like investing in marketing no longer seem like a ridiculous extravagance - we're in a position to try spending to grow.

These are back-of-envelope things, but they're intended to provide some guide as to a realistic business scenario.

 

[Gratis]

I'd cope with a handful of games in north syd a year but that'd be about it. any official move, or the majority of games move or there's a change of name etc. then I'll be one very unhappy chappy

 

[localpom]

http://www.footballaustralia.com.au...display/Mariners-committed-to-the-Coast/79046

Thats good news, i still think we will be looking to play the odd game at NSO which i don't have a problem with. When the odd game becomes 4 or 5 a year is when issues will arise.

 

[adz]

This doesn't take into account corporate/sponsorship? I would have thought $1m sponsorship for a team in a national competition, let alone one as successful as the Mariners, would be fairly minor?

A quick click through here I counted 14 players sponsored, at $10k/each (unless there's some freebies and discounts handed out) that's $140k.

Match day sponsorship is another $10k per game, not sure if they have sold that for every home game but that could be another $100k.

Then there's the corporate boxes/suites, they only have per head/per game pricing but it's $170-$185 (non-premium and premium games) for 12-18 in a suite... say $30k for the season per suite.

It can quickly add up to quite a bit...

 

[priorpeter]

http://www.footballaustralia.com.au...display/Mariners-committed-to-the-Coast/79046

That does f**k all to refute it.

 

[dibo]

Charlesworth's quotes were these:

''I think what's more important is that there's a market in North Sydney that I believe is hungry for a professional sporting identity,'' Mariners owner Mike Charlesworth said. ''It's just difficult, as we all know, building a sustainable model with your club based in a relatively small community like Gosford.''

''One of the things I really need to do coming in as new owner is to look at all possibilities and build a sustainable long-term future,'' Charlesworth said. ''It's not sustainable, the losses that we're making exceeding $1 million a year. It's not sustainable for the Central Coast or for any particular owner, certainly not myself. So something has got to change and if it doesn't change their won't be a Central Coast Mariners, full stop. Finito.

''We have to make this work because that's the alternative, there is no football club, full stop, unless we do something. So that means a lot of work on the Central Coast and a lot of work in other regions.''

I'm fine with the fact that he's a dickhead whose mouth runs away with him when he's on the phone to a journo, but when in the cool light of morning a statement comes out from the club hosing down relocation talk then it's more encouraging. Someone's got in his ear and told him to put away his copy of "Operation: North Sydney" because it ain't gonna happen.

 

[midfielder]

Wonders aloud if we have allowed another """reporter"""' to get us upset...

What was the basic of the original story ... TBH the cannon and the brass band ideas by MC are long term ideas that will in time help to build crowds...

On the idea of having a Northern Sydney fan base ... given 20% of members and arguably our crowd are from this area ... this is an asset and something that any CEO would be looking to both protect and expand ...

How this is achieved is for better minds than me ... however if this base grew to say 30% of our total then having one or two games in their back yard is something I could live with... especially matches against low drawing teams on the coast ... say Nix's & PG ...

 

[eenfish]

If I was reading right, according to my ticket for the Nix game, we've only sold just over 300 tickets for the game at North Sydney.

And if pressure is on saying that if we get a really good turn out then they will move game, then they could be wide of the mark. That said, a game against the Nix, a crowd of 5,000 will be classed as a success I reckon.

 

[Ancient Mariner]

I look forward to one or two games a year at NSO plus the majority at Bluetongue.

The club will never have NSO as a main venue, it is just not good enough for a football ground.

It makes sense to expand the supporter base and if a couple of games at NSO achieves this then I am all for it.

It is about time everyone realised that the Central Coast is not just Gosford but covers the area between Nobby's Head and North Head.

It is about time we claimed all this area.

A couple of final words from me on this topic.

Mariners will always be based on the Coast. Get over the paranoia.

CCM can not stand still if it wants to be successful. It must grow.

If one or two games are played in Sydney's Northern Suburbs to increase our fan base, good.

Instead of being parochial, come along and make it a success. If it works and we gain more fans, it will not take them long to realise that Bluetongue is easier to get to than they realise.

 

[dibo]

Wonders aloud if we have allowed another """reporter"""' to get us upset...

The reporter didn't make up those quotes.

It is about time everyone realised that the Central Coast is not just Gosford but covers the area between Nobby's Head and North Head.

It is about time we claimed all this area.

HA! Nice try pal.

 

[eenfish]

I go to university at the Lindfield campus for UTS. When I say I used to drive down from Gosford people were wide eyed, like "wow thats so far". Now I live in Stanmore, it takes nearly as long to drive accounting in traffic but nobody bats an eye. From what I've gotten, people who are born and bread north shore perceived the central coast as a lot further away than it really is.

 

[rbakersmith]

From what I've gotten, people who are born and bread north shore perceived the central coast as a lot further away than it really is.

It's all that driving they would have to do at 130 110 up the F3.

 

[priorpeter]

I go to university at the Lindfield campus for UTS. When I say I used to drive down from Gosford people were wide eyed, like "wow thats so far". Now I live in Stanmore, it takes nearly as long to drive accounting in traffic but nobody bats an eye. From what I've gotten, people who are born and bread north shore perceived the central coast as a lot further away than it really is.

Takes me less time to get to work (in Chatswood) than it does for people from, say, Jannali. Same situation.

 

[sydmariner]

Charlesworth out? Then who comes in - the Russians that we keep hearing about? SMFC, who would move us to Lakeside in a heartbeat?

I would dearly love to have the Mariners play every home game in Gosford, even though I only live 10 minutes from NSO. But if it doesn't make financial sense to do that, then the club - and the fans - have to be open to other options.

If it comes down to a choice between a team with a Bluetongue/NSO split and no team at all on the Coast, you know what I'm going to choose any day of the week.

Whatabout those Asians we were hereing about