More relocation chat/brawling

[adz]

I think this deserves its own thread; Simon Fisher from the Yellow Army interviewed Mariners Acting GM, Tracy Southern, and covered the North Sydney drama, stadium rights, and touched on some of the financial aspects of the club.

https://soundcloud.com/yellowarmypodcast/yellow-army-podcast-episode-7

I've typed it out as best I could...


Regarding North Sydney

We always have a community round every year, and rather than going to Bathurst or Dubbo or Canberra, it seemed much more sensible to go within driving distance of the Central Coast, which is our home and remaining our home.

We have no intention of going to North Sydney for any more than one, maximum two games next season or any other season. I'd like to reiterate that we are the Central Coast Mariners, not the North Sydney Mariners and we are based on the Central Coast, we have the Center of Excellence on the Central Coast and our owner Mike Charlesworth has invested heavily on the Central Coast.

Obviously want every game to be a success, we want all the fans and members to support us and the team in every game that we play, and the one in North Sydney is no exception.

The idea behind it is really to do with the fans that we have on the North Shore coming more often to the Central Coast.

We're about to announce some new directors and our directors are from the Central Coast, and one director is from the Northern Suburbs Football Association. So it's really important to us that those directors know about football, those directors know about grass roots football, and those directors are about the Central Coast, and bringing the games and the players to play on the Central Coast.

A fan boycott of the game?

If there are 5,000, if there are 10,000, if there are 15,000 which is capacity for North Sydney, it won't make any difference to what we're doing next year, but will make a difference is that our team and the boys want to feel supported, I think that's what it's all about.

For the fans that don't want to go, that's a shame, I hope you change your mind and I hope you come and support the team.

A little bit of a target for Bluetongue games...

10-15 thousand, 10-12 thousand every game at Bluetongue would be fantastic, not just for the economics, but also for the support. I've been going for years, way before I came to work for the Mariners and I've never had so much fun to be honest; with the band, and the pirate, and the cannon, and the admiral, and people are much more vocal, and it's really good fun now.

It is a commercial reality that we have to make it sustainable, and everybody knows that last year the club was in a lot of trouble, and the person that came and sorted out all that trouble was Mike Charlesworth, if it wasn't for thim we wouldn't have a club right now. So he isn't the baddie here, he's the goodie, and we're just trying to look at all the ways that we can posibly find, to make it sustainable, but to make it sustainable as the Central Coast Mariners.

Poor crowd on Friday

If you look at the last round every club had a poor showing. I don't know if it's horrendous timing of the year or it didn't rain everywhere; you can't build a business model based on the weather. You could blame it on a miserable Friday Night in Gosford after a lot of our fans are likely to be commuters, are they likely to come out? I don't know. There's a lot of our members that didn't come last Friday. It could just be busy before Christmas, who knows, everyone could have a completely different reason.

Back on North Sydney

We're going to North Sydney for this one game, there's a possibility, slim, possibility that we might go for two games. There isn't any likelihood that we could go for any more than that because of the state of the stadium, and we wouldn't be permitted to.

I don't understand where it came from, but the only thing I can think of as to why is because North Sydney Council are looking to redevelop that stadium. If you look at the minutes and the agendas which are a matter of public record for North Sydney Council, you will see that they are planning to redevelop the stadium, and they're planning to redevelop it for all sport, football is sort of an afterthought really. It's really going to be redeveloped for all the other sports, but of course they want to include the ability to be A-League ready. We're talking years and years and even if they did build something amazing, it wouldn't be as good as Bluetongue, it's nightmare parking, it's difficult to get there, it's not something that we'd do more than once or twice.

It's certainly winding up a lot of Sydney fans, which is always entertaining, and I think it would be fun to give it to them at the game this week, to say that even people who live within 8 miles of Sydney don't want to go and watch Sydney, they want to come and watch the Champions play. And that's really what it's about for us at North Sydney; it's about taking the Champions to North Sydney, to give them a bit of football like they used to have with Northern Spirit in that ground, just for a bit of fun, just for a one off because we couldn't play at Bluetongue, because of Carols by Candlelight.

About difficulties the club face, and how they communicate them with fans

It's harder to find sponsors that want to invest what other clubs get, but it's not impossible. We could do a whole lot more and we are going to, and it just takes time to turn these things around and I'm already starting to do that. In terms of being transparent, I don't know if any of the club have come on to do a podcast before but as you know I only met you last week and here I am on a podcast. I'm really open and I want to be very clear that anything I know I will share, because this is our team together. We can't do it without you and you can't do it without us. It has to be a team, just like on the pitch.

And finally, stadium rights

We are talking with council who have decided to run it themselves, which is great, because we think they're probably the best people to do that, we just don't know what their proposal is going to be, and the lease for the current person runs out in February so we're looking forward to working with council to secure our games at Bluetongue. The ball is in their court somewhat; we're waiting to discuss and to look at their business plan and hope that we fit into that really strongly, and I'm sure we will because they're a great supporter of ours, and both Gosford and Wyong councils are very important to us but Gosford in particular because of the stadium.

Council asked for an expression of interest, which we put one in, so we said yes we'd like to run it and we'd like to run it like this, and so did a couple of other people, and when council got those expressions of interest they reviewed them and decided that they really would rather be more specific about what they were looking for. So the second stage is that they asked for a tender, where they could specifically ask we want you to deliver x-y-z, and we want you to pay for this-that and the other. When we looked at that we felt that those terms were too high and too expensive so we didn't put in a tender. So the confusion comes in yes we put in an expression of interest, no we didn't put in a tender, because we felt we couldn't meet those costs that council wanted to achieve.

There was one tender and it was what we term non-conforming; so they said they'd like to run it so basically what they did is they repeated what they said in their expression of interest I imagine, and council decided they weren't able to accept that, so they went to the market and no one in the market, no one in Australia, or anywhere else, could meet the terms that they requested. My understanding is from the minutes of their council meetings, is that they decided to write their own business plan and run it, which we're really excited about because we know what a strong supporter council is of the Mariners and of the Central Coast and we think it could be great.

It's a great interview, have a listen if you get a minute.


Any thoughts on all that?

 

[Gratis]

firstly, extremely high levels of kudos fire typing all that out.
secondly, quite pleasing to hear (read) most of that

 

[dibo]

Good quotes, for me that calms the savage beast a lot. It actually clears a lot of stuff up; it fills gaps where previously we had guesswork.

MC would do well to stay off the phone to journos and let TS handle media if she's going to be able to communicate that well - he's obviously a passionate bloke but he's clearly not a fan of diplomacy...

 

[BrisRecky]

i listened to the poddy and initially I was thinking she was pres of the Charlesworth fan club...BUT...the more that was stated, the more i thought tracy was making good sense and spouting a flood of logic

 

[FFC Mariner]

Absolute credit to her for facing the music.

 

[neverwozza]

Thanks for typing that out adz and as mentioned above MC should really watch what he says to the media in future.

 

[adz]

Massive fan of Tracy after this. Everything was explained very clearly and it's something we haven't had in the past.
It's not like we've been asking for their 11 secret herbs and spices either, just a little bit more info on what's happening.

Could argue that quotes in the media have been taken out of context (journos picking bits and pieces out and spinning something completely different to the actual intent? Who woulda thunk it!) but then again there are so many ways to get the actual message out there these days, and they haven't exactly been used all that well.

Let's hope this continues!

 

[midfielder]

To Simon Fisher, ADZ, and YA in general ... farking well done...

I feel much better now...

 

[dibo]

Let's just home that MC and TS are on the same page.

 

[midfielder]

Let's just home that MC and TS are on the same page.

You seem very suspicious and doubting ... not only on this issue but in MC in general and his plans .. when he was talking of issues with the CCA you argued he was wrong...

Without MC there would be no team ... does that mean we bend over and take whatever ... No ... equally we should not jump to conclusions and assume his thoughts... what he has done with the band, the mascots, the cannon , and the cannon hand out coming into the ground are all good moves...

I went to the three forums and he was at each answering all questions asked and appeared very much focused on getting the CC to work..

Tracy said the journalist did not report what he said correctly ... why she has no idea ... seems to me papers want net hits and articles they can do follow up articles about ... to assume MC has not been taken out of context or the article is subjective would fly in the face of reporting recently...

My reading of the Tea Leafs is MC wants to make the Mariners work and is going to push, shake & prod every point .... seeing if it works or could be better ... he is not the go quietly into the night type person nor is he a Clive Palmer ... nor is he a TB type who has been in football for yonks and works from existing knowledge ... Essentially he is his own person and has his way of doing things ...

Not saying in MC we trust ... but "Let's just home that MC and TS are on the same page" he would have appointed her I assume... so either Tracy is telling the truth or not telling the truth, covering for her boss ... Or maybe Tracy is saying what MC thinks ... I doubt very much she would have said what she said if it they where not on the same page ...

 

[dibo]

Rumour and innuendo dear boy - all may not be as it seems.

Bold prediction time.

Charlesworth will seek to shift a minimum of 3 games to NSO next year.

Someone should ask him if he has broken off talks with NSC..............

Remember what the quotes from MC were in the first place:

''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.''

Do you think there wasn't a reason to try it on with NSO? Do you think he's just forgotten about that? Do you think we should forget these words?

We know they're accurate because if you were misquoted about whether you're going to move your football club away from 80% of your support base to try to grow the other 20% then you'd set the record straight.

The stuff with CCF, with CCMA, with FNSW indicates a pattern of behaviour. He's impulsive and when he goes in, he goes in windmill punching.

TS obviously has her head screwed on, she's looking after the business she's running (which in the immediate term means looking after today's customers). MC appears to be trying to look after what the business will be in the future, and doesn't necessarily see Gosford alone being big enough.

You know what would be really smart?

He could take on an aggressive pro-growth, pro-development stance on the Central Coast to make the Coast bigger and stronger and a more viable base in the long term.

He could be seen as a standard bearer for the local Chamber of Commerce, driving an aggressive pro-growth agenda.

Instead of backgrounding journos on moves to North Sydney, he could spend his time belting all three levels of government around to invest in the region's future prosperity.

He'll build up local goodwill while he does his bit to build the local economy and community.

If successful, he'll be part of creating a bigger Central Coast that's big enough to make the Mariners sustainable.

The Mariners are a standard bearer for the area. The Mariners' owner can be a standard bearer for local business.

 

[FFC Mariner]

We ARE the Central Coast

There's your slogan. Own the brand, own the region.

Invoice is in the mail Pokes. Usual rates

 

[Pokes]

2 steps ahead of you, Thurbs

 

[sydmariner]

To north sydney oval CENTRAL COAST MARINERS SAYS NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[midfielder]

2 steps ahead of you, Thurbs

Would love to see this sign on all major entry points off the F3 ... OK M whatever .... and as the train comes into Woy Woy station ...

 

[Big Al]

What about one on the pacific Hwy at Artarmon when you jump on to the cahill express way or when you come off the F3 at Wahroonga

 

[Yellow Army Podcast]

After the interview we talked to Tracy for a another 5 minutes or so.
She mentioned that we could ask fans if they had any questions that we could present to her for answering next we speak.
We hadn't got around to it, so I guess now is as a good a time as any.

Are there any questions you'd like us to ask Tracy Southern?

Phil.

 

[dru]

This is the comment that concerned me the most.

There's a lot of our members that didn't come last Friday. It could just be busy before Christmas, who knows, everyone could have a completely different reason.

And not that our members didn't turn up, but they haven't started to find out why or if it is one off. Life happens, but if you start to see some members consistently not turning up or a round where a lot less members turned you would expect them to try and find out why it has happened.

 

[true believer]

... nor is he a TB type

um what ?

 

[sydmariner]

They were advertising the game in yesterday's daily telegraph