SOCCER:DELEGATES REPRESENTING football clubs, leagues and associations from across the country will gather for the FAI's agm today in Wexford where the organisation's increasingly difficult financial position will again be the major issue on the agenda.
Accounts for last year which have been circulated in recent weeks show the association’s borrowing grew by some €50 million last year as payments towards the cost of construction of the Aviva Stadium became due.
One delegate observed yesterday that the figures contained in the accounts “would make you cry”, with total debt shown to have stood at around €76 million at the end of the year – but that figure includes neither the additional €24 million due this year towards the project nor income from the association’s much-trumpeted Vantage Club scheme.
The organisation’s CEO, John Delaney, has said in recent weeks that he would deal with the issue of Vantage Club sales at the agm and after two years of declining to reveal the scale of sales, it is not clear whether he might finally provide figures to the delegates this afternoon.
If so, they are unlikely to be viewed as good news with the thousands of empty seats at the premium level on the night of the Argentina game suggesting that ISG, the company that marketed the tickets, had come up well short of their original sales targets.
At the time the scheme was launched in September of 2008, the company’s chief executive, Andrew Hampel, predicted that all 10,000 of the seats, which range in price from €12,000 to €32,000 for a 10-year period, would be sold by the time the stadium opened for business and suggested that the official estimate of 80 per cent provided to the association was a conservative figure.
Delaney has since cited 60 per cent as the break-even figure and repeatedly expressed confidence that the number would be achieved, “no problem”.
At the Argentina match, though, comfortably less than half of the seats looked to be occupied despite some block bookers – supporters with long standing reservations for ordinary seats – being upgraded due to significant teething problems in the association’s ticket office.
Given the failure of the original pitch to a corporate sector that had fallen on hard times, Hampel and Delaney switched their attention to the game’s grassroots with clubs, originally intended to be beneficiaries of the sales, suddenly targeted as potential buyers.
In March of 2008 incentives were introduced to encourage clubs and supporters to buy with the former getting “free” products from sponsors and the latter being offered soft credit terms. At the time, the ISG executive acknowledged that estimates of sales up to that point of between one and two thousand were “not a million miles away”, but both men insisted the new approach would help total sales hit the magical 6,000 mark by the end of last summer.
Ultimately, 2,000 were to go to clubs which would get €250 back each year in Umbro vouchers and another €250 annually from a sponsor that had not at that stage signed up yet. The recent talk of new national team backer 3 working to grow its market share by working with clubs suggests that they will account for the latter figure.
Another of the benefits flagged with regard to the clubs’ sales, though, was that each club would be entitled to have one child on the pitch for the ceremony staged prior to the game against Argentina and, to judge by the numbers involved that evening, the scheme would not appear to have come anywhere close to realising the sort of sales anticipated with only a couple of hundred kids involved.
All of which leaves the FAI in a tight corner despite having made an operating profit of around €3.5 million last year thanks to two very attractive home games in Croke Park.
There is not, however, any great expectation that Delaney, who recently extended his contract until 2015, will come under pressure from delegates today.
