Turbulence (then calm sailing, then turbulence) thread.

[Gratis]

That's the cost of doing business. It's always been the cost of doing business. It'll still be the cost of doing business if they move half our games to North Sydney too.

But look at the incomes. 80% of supporters live on the Central Coast. Moving games from the Central Coast dilutes the association with the region and dilutes their commitment. If they're half as likely to support the side because half the games are gone, then we've just wiped out 40% of the supporter base. Even if the people of northern Sydney are twice as keen to support the club, that means we will have had a net drop of 20% in supporter numbers.

It's gambling your base in the hope that they'll be replaced by people who will be willing to support someone else's team who brings half a season's worth of games to a patently unsuitable venue. It's stupid. It was stupid when we were playing one game at NSO. It's stupid with us playing one at NSO and one in Brookvale. It will be worse if we move more.

I get that we're making losses. This is *not* the way to fix that.

I was saying something similar when this first came up, the seeking of a few extra numbers at the risk of losing the base is lunacy

at this point I'll accept a few games elsewhere (but I don't think it'll work anyway, why would n.syd folk embrace a central Coast team, called the central coast mariners, wholesale and in great numbers again and again. it'll end up being a failed experiment I think).
but should this turnout out to be lubing us up for an eventual relocation I'll turn my back on the a-league altogether like a spurned and betrayed lover. I'll always follow the national team of course though. unless they relocate to the northern beaches of Antarctica.
in truth I think they will remain on the coast, they're pretty heavily invested here

 

[Jaundice]

That'd be all well and good if the lemon that is the Central Coast had been squeezed dry. I don't believe for a second that it has been.

Im hopeful our lemons lie in the next generation of coasties and maybe an influx of sydneysiders that bring a football culture with them.

The mariners have laid a lot of groundwork here with our kids as has football in general I believe. Im really positive about soccers future I just hope our beloved mariners can sail out this stormy era until its sunny days.

 

[dibo]

At best it will make us viable, at worst its his last throw of the dice. I also have my doubts on the venture like everyone else, Im very disappointed its had to come to this.

The solutions that no one really has the answers for could take years too implement or see results. Perhaps Mr Charlesworth doesn't have the bank balance or inclination to throw good money after bad in the gamble.

The assumption that this is the *only* solution is bullshit.

Market to the 300,000 people of the Central Coast. We have a deep vein of support, deeper than most areas. And yet we *know* we don't reach everyone. For a start, we *used* to average over 12,000. For seconds, *every* time we play at home, after the game someone in the street in Gosford will ask if the Mariners are playing, or who they are playing, or what the result is. That means they care, but not enough or they don't know enough to get to the game.

Market to them. Have them *at least* know if we're playing!

The council areas of Hunters Hill, Ku-ring-gai, Lane Cove, Manly, Mosman, North Sydney, Pittwater, Ryde, Warringah, Willoughby have between 878,000 people. The vast majority of them will lean towards Sydney FC or Western Sydney Wanderers right now. We're hoping to pick up scraps. It's a huge gamble. It's putting off refinancing your business loan to instead pop the contents of your cheque account on black.

 

[dibo]

in truth I think they will remain on the coast, they're pretty heavily invested here

I'm thinking this as well - our commitment to the club will likely outlast Charlesworth. The only question is how much damage is done in the meantime, and whether it's irretrievable by the time he's done.

 

[Jaundice]

We averaged 12,738 in 07-08 when the league had its highest average. It was also Brisbane's, Adelaide's and Wellingtons best year, With its second highest average attendance for Victory, Smurfs and Jets according to A league Wikipedia.

Australia was on a massive high after our 06 world cup success, the bandwagon came and went, some stayed on.

 

[Wombat]

Im hopeful our lemons lie in the next generation of coasties and maybe an influx of sydneysiders that bring a football culture with them.

The mariners have laid a lot of groundwork here with our kids as has football in general I believe. Im really positive about soccers future I just hope our beloved mariners can sail out this stormy era until its sunny days.

I went to the twilight markets at Lisarow Public school last week. About 8 to 10 young lads were rampaging around fighting each other and battling it out with throw downs (pop pops). Every single kid had a Football jersey on and were talking about Footy (one kid had a Suarez top on and was kopping some abuse). This is the future of the country. It's now cool for the kids to be into Football and not the NRL.
The future for us is bright but we haven't helped ourselfs by selling all our best players and signing non league replacements.
Treat the fans with respect.

 

[sydmariner]

That's the cost of doing business. It's always been the cost of doing business. It'll still be the cost of doing business if they move half our games to North Sydney too.

But look at the incomes. 80% of supporters live on the Central Coast. Moving games from the Central Coast dilutes the association with the region and dilutes their commitment. If they're half as likely to support the side because half the games are gone, then we've just wiped out 40% of the supporter base. Even if the people of northern Sydney are twice as keen to support the club, that means we will have had a net drop of 20% in supporter numbers.

It's gambling your base in the hope that they'll be replaced by people who will be willing to support someone else's team who brings half a season's worth of games to a patently unsuitable venue. It's stupid. It was stupid when we were playing one game at NSO. It's stupid with us playing one at NSO and one in Brookvale. It will be worse if we move more.

I get that we're making losses. This is *not* the way to fix that.

wasn't it supposed to be a 1 off community fixture last season like other clubs have done in the past

 

[sydmariner]

For seconds, *every* time we play at home, after the game someone in the street in Gosford will ask if the Mariners are playing, or who they are playing, or what the result is. That means they care, but not enough or they don't know enough to get to the game

i get asked that almost every time on the train back from the game & sometimes in the street as well

 

[Bladesman]

We all keep talking about the changes in players and coach as being the issue but a lot of the problems are also in the off field side of the club. Since Lyall Gorman left as CEO we have really started to struggle with those things, the current CEO seems to be having a shocker so maybe it is that side of things that is destabilising the football side as well. You only have to look at the issues with merchandising, memberships and sponsorships to see how bad things are there. Throw in the issues with CCF, add in the moved games then compound with the start to the season we have had.

I for one only renewed memberships very late and they were lucky to get that with the moving of the 2 games, the season after Canberra I didn't renew in protest. Out of the group I go with which used to be 14 regular plus up to 18 with casuals we have been at 10 all season and the ones that are missing are the hardcore football fans who have always played and followed football. They have been disfranchised by the way the club is being run, lack of community engagement and also the CCF side of things.

 

[dibo]

Mick posted this on the Sydney forum in reply to a query about how the club can cost so much to run if the stadium costs are just $7500 a game (as confirmed by Lawrie to Captain Awesome on Twitter):

Match day operations are quite expensive. Road closures, police etc have to be paid for.

A number of years ago I did an operational match day plan as part of my Uni post grad studies and costs are around $150000 for one match day alone.

The issue isn't crowd numbers. It's the piss poor effort they make towards corporate sponsorship and merchandise. There are a litany of pissed off sponsors because of how poorly they have been treated. On top of this sponsors don't get followed up from season to season and they drop off when a fifteen minute meeting might have made them continue.

I know of sponsors that had to chase their invoice just to pay. How many sponsors didn't get invoiced?

Merchandise has been complete rubbish the last few seasons. Kappa replica kits have been totally unwearable to anyone larger than a medium, and the web site shop hardly works and has a limited range.

Marketing to the local community has been un imaginative and the relationship with the local association has been a disaster, mostly the fault of the Mariners.

Add to this a large increase in ticket prices this season and time slots (Sunday 5pm) that are totally unsuitable to families and you can see why there is a revenue decrease.

Instead of the club making a constant dig at the community for the crowd figures and threatening to go to North Sydney for more games it should have a good hard look at its own operations, get its shit together and make a proper effort to engage the local football instead of pissing it off at every opportunity.

 

[nearlyyellow]

Mick posted this on the Sydney forum in reply to a query about how the club can cost so much to run if the stadium costs are just $7500 a game (as confirmed by Lawrie to Captain Awesome on Twitter):

marinermick on that forum said: "costs are around $150000 for one match day alone"
I have no doubt that marinermick did a brilliant post grad thesis, however on the face of it I can't totally accept this costing because there is insufficient detail.

What sport? - not spelt out, but we *can* presume it was Association Football and not cricket for instance?
What venue? - costs for each venue are bound to be different, variables such as street closures, what venue costs are or are not charged as part of the ground rental eg. scoreboard, electricity, cleaning etc. and the size of the ground and it's location.
What teams? - Some teams require more overheads eg. police and security presence
What day? - Day of week will affect numbers attending and this will flow on to affect other costs.
What time of day? - see previous point.

So I'm sorry but I just can't accept the cost of $150,000 on face value without further clarification.
But I totally agree with his comments on marketing inadequacies.

 

[midfielder]

Just on the marniermick post above..

To me it seems he is mostly right on the marking side, on the cost factor of $150,000 if you add security to the stadium hire it still seems a tad on the hire side ...

However what his posts does show is the club could do a lot more locally and has annoyed many locals and like someone said above we do miss Gorman .... BUT it lays to rest the belief we have some sorta of special deal on stadium hire.

 

[adz]

Adding to all that about sponsors etc, a small (large...) rant about how much more we could be helping out as supporters, but the Mariners don't seem to want to be bothered with it.

Late last year we organised a very successful "Retro Round" - basically wear your old Marinators gear and chat about earlier seasons. Also a good excuse for the people with boxes of Marinators gear in storage to have a chance to get rid of it

Anyway we went to the club a couple of months in advance with our ideas, to have a couple of (former/current?) players and coaching staff, speak before the game and pack out the Scenic Lounge for this.

After weeks and weeks of chasing the club, who apparently loved the idea, we were constantly hitting a brick wall; nobody was actually contacting anyone asking for availability or anything, we were getting nowhere.

In the end we had to go via the Official Supporters Club, as we knew they had personal links with the one and only Lawrie McKinna; at very short notice Lawrie was contacted and he brought in Robbie Slater, Andre Gumprecht, Paul O'Grady. Graham Arnold had just announced he was heading overseas and he was there too!

Full house - with more outside who couldn't get into the room...


So all went well and the weeks of chasing ended up being worth it. Lawrie enjoyed it so much he said he was keen to do more.

But then, and this might sound petty, there was zero recognition for our efforts in putting this together. CCMOSC got thanked, and I thought at the time fair enough, maybe the speakers hadn't heard of our site that has been supporting the Mariners from the beginning?

And then there was total silence from the club. Not that I expect to be lavished with praise, but some sort of recognition for putting on an awesome event, with the view to doing more like it (not just pre-game at home either, looking at events at interstate games, local venues for away games, off-season shindigs) would have been nice.

I think that we have a lot to offer but it seems like the club either wants us to do the whole lot ourselves, or they don't want us to do anything at all. It's really hard to tell because we had zero feedback.

So at the end of the day it doesn't really seem worth the effort.

/rant

 

[dibo]

Maybe part of the problem is the lack of alignment generally.

Support sorta sits in a few different places between three places:

• this online community - including a lot of the original Marinators
• the Yellow Army, which is much more Facebook and Twitter driven
• the Official Supporters Club

There isn't one voice. It'd be good if there were.

When "Coastie Boys" split off and did their own thing deliberately excluding many people who had contributed for a long time, that did a lot of damage. The Yellow Army / CCMFans divergence has also been unhelpful. It's simply hard to organise "the fans" because it's not a single group. It's not quite the People's Front of Judea, the Judean People's Front, the Judean Popular People's Front, the Campaign for a Free Galilee, and the Popular Front of Judea, but you get my point.

The interests of football on the Central Coast aren't really aligned either. CCMFC and International Football School are sorta working over here and CCF is working over there. The end result is that it feels like we are all on different pages. I really do get the feeling that CCF has felt burnt by a number of interactions with CCMFC, and there are far too many stories going around about things not being delivered or paid to think it's all bunkum.

It might take a bit of an investment, but running strong community engagement programs with CCF should be a no brainer, and it shouldn't cost the earth. We have 12,500 players or so between 25 or so clubs - they've got their own volunteer networks, it can all come together if we want it to. And even if they spent $100k on building up a big community program, they would surely stand some chance of getting that back. Get another 500 members signed up and we're in business. And the word of mouth marketing value of having thousands of kids talking up whichever player was at their training sessions etc. is definitely worth something.

Add to this CCF and CCMFC pairing up on the Women's and Men's NPL programs and using them as a basis for presences in the NYL and W-League is surely a no-brainer. Again, it's not something that happens for free, but it's part of expanding the reach and building depth in the relationship with football on the coast.

All the forces are there, but they're all milling about in different directions. Get all the troops marching in the same direction and we look like something to be reckoned with.

 

[nearlyyellow]

So what we need is an all powerful omnipotent person to draw it all together, like the Mayor?

 

[dibo]

A few of us have been around long enough that we remember the fun and games when we took games to Canberra - http://www.ccmfans.net/community/threads/mariners-sell-supporters-short-again.2345/

My position has been consistent all these years. As for many of the other participants in the discussion - well, a lot aren't here anymore. Who knows if they're even supporting the club anymore.

The damage it did was real and lasting. And we're doing it again.

 

[adz]

Maybe part of the problem is the lack of alignment generally.

Support sorta sits in a few different places between three places:

• this online community - including a lot of the original Marinators
• the Yellow Army, which is much more Facebook and Twitter driven
• the Official Supporters Club

You could probably add Central Coast Mariners members to this list

There isn't one voice. It'd be good if there were.
...
All the forces are there, but they're all milling about in different directions. Get all the troops marching in the same direction and we look like something to be reckoned with.

I kinda disagree, kinda agree with this.

I think in the early days when the site was marinators.net it was pretty confusing. It was pretty common to hear questions about who the Marinators are... are they all the fans? Or just the fans behind the goals? Some people said everyone, all inclusive, etc. But then you got people who sit in other parts of the grounds who said they'd rather not be a "Marinator".

I like that with the Yellow Army it's pretty clearly defined now as the noisy bunch in bay 16. And this site is more focused on the Mariners on/off field happenings rather than bitching about what chant is offending the parents of small kids, or the people who don't actually have their own kids but think the parents of small kids would be offended. Or bitching about the what colour t-shirt the capo is wearing, or what style wig is appropriate attire for a Saturday evening clash.

So I think it's fine that we have CCMFans and Yellow Army separate, and I don't think it would hurt if more fan communities popped up - as we sure don't cover 100% of Mariners fans or potential Mariners fans between us.

That was the disagree bit... the agree bit is we could probably do more to combine forces when approaching the club. But as said before I don't even know if that's what they want. All indications so far have been that it's not.

 

[midfielder]

Just in support of what some have indicated and Dibo and ADZ have explained above if I may add a couple of personal experiences and if Biki Girls is out there when you believed you had the ear of the club BG you may find this interesting]

Three years ago I tried to sponsor the club in a small way via my accounting practice, offer services essentially ... after maybe 6 or more phone calls I finally received a meeting with the the head of marketing who told me after being about 40 minutes late to our meeting and staff chasing him down he saw no way they could use my services, I accepted this as true.

Next a client briefly on the Coast and a marketing God some say ... via me offered did they want anything done or looked at for free ... no response... he is back overseas now and was on the Coast for about 5 weeks.

Next and back to my offer to sponsor at the fans forum I think last year in the CCLC or could have been early this year ... I met the new CEO explained what had happened and he said to me that is shocking give me your details and I will get back to you, I also went up and had a quick chat to Mike Charleswoth and told him the same story he told the CEO make sure you get in touch with this guy ... tis funny I am still waiting on the call ...

I guess what hurts [if hurts is the right word] is 3 times I have offered mine or someone else's help and have never once had even a reply aside from when I forced a meeting which I was kept waiting for and quickly told no thanks..

Just sharing my own experience ...

 

[Leigh]

I have no doubt that marinermick did a brilliant post grad thesis, however on the face of it I can't totally accept this costing because there is insufficient detail.

What sport? - not spelt out, but we *can* presume it was Association Football and not cricket for instance?
What venue? - costs for each venue are bound to be different, variables such as street closures, what venue costs are or are not charged as part of the ground rental eg. scoreboard, electricity, cleaning etc. and the size of the ground and it's location.
What teams? - Some teams require more overheads eg. police and security presence
What day? - Day of week will affect numbers attending and this will flow on to affect other costs.
What time of day? - see previous point.

So I'm sorry but I just can't accept the cost of $150,000 on face value without further clarification.
But I totally agree with his comments on marketing inadequacies.

Can tell you security would cost around $85 per hour, and police are normally 1.5x whatever security cost. There is a minimum of 3 hours for the normal security guards, although a few do 5-6 hours for setup etc. Police would have a minimum of 4 hours probably. And there would be around 30-50 security and 12-20 police. Just to give you a rough estimate of staffing.

Then you add the cost of bar staff, food stall staff, cleaners pre/during/post game, stadium management and help staff, fireworks staff. etc.

Just for staffing.

 

[sydmariner]

I like that with the Yellow Army it's pretty clearly defined now as the noisy bunch in bay 16.

i assume that includes cheeseguuy