Hold up a sec.
Tigers have lost $2.7m over the past three years. They're in a market that is deeply established and hugely competitive, with limited new customers that can be brought in, with a business model that's frankly f**ked (three games at this traditional home, three games at this traditional home, four games at this cavern and two games at this cavern). The problem for them is less the losses than the fact that it's going to be bloody hard for them to address them. They've buggered up the club and now they're unlikely to be able to run the Tigers Club at Rozelle, hammering their incomes further. They're in a hole and digging harder still.
We're in a slightly different boat. We're in a market that is essentially new, with *vast* untapped potential in terms of new customers. We're in the establishment/growth phase, where clubs are still setting down roots in their markets.
One of the things that's happening for us (by that I mean all clubs collectively) is that media (and presumably corporate incomes roughly in line with that) are forming a greater slice of our total incomes - the TV deal for example has gone up $600k in the last season, and I've had conversations that indicate that our break even crowd at Bluetongue is now under 10k.
Our crowd average at present is 9,108. For what it's worth, take out the NSO game, we're at 9,305. If you take out NSO *and* the Friday nights against FTA, our average is 9,645. On Fridays we're clearly trading off FTA viewers against crowds. If that's smashing the bottom line around, then it's probably the prime target for the club to hit up NSO (where we can break even on much smaller crowds).
We need 18,135 for the WSW game for our Gosford crowds to average 10k, which now appears to be a break-even number. We drew 17,134 for the Round 1 game, so we're definitely at least an outside chance. Even still, we're not orders of magnitude away from it, even if form, weather and FTA have all conspired against us in different ways.
Given we're now likely to be closer to breaking even, and we've got sponsorship deals set in place for coming years (Bartercard are announced only to the end of this year, but we have Masterfoods and Westinghouse Solar to end of 2014/15, Gosford City Council to the end of 2015/16) we're looking outwardly healthier. Most important of all, our licence is now guaranteed out to 2034 - this gives an incentive to invest knowing that we have security. It means that we're more able to tolerate year to year bumps because there's a longer path marked out.
The club's public messaging has become more disciplined as well - less of Mad Uncle Mick's brainfarts and more of Wise Mr Stalder's sage advice. The club's books could probably do with a year off from Champions League football in 2015, and we can settle in for a slightly more 'normal' year.
Year after year our break-even crowd is dropping and our actual crowds are reasonably stable at over 9k. We've basically got to get through the next 3 years (out to the end of 2017/18) and to the next TV deal, and the earth will move again with expansion of clubs and another improvement to TV revenues to lock us in for the future.
