Sustainabilty is the key word for me, and on the crowds Gainsborough are getting the playing budget is clearly not sustanable. Alarm bells should be ringing if the Chairman is having to subsidise the club to such a high level. Everyone remembers Max Griggs putting in huge investment at Rushden & Diamonds. He built them a new ground and I recall he also built additional facilities like a conference centre in order to bring in extra income. The club in fairness had a decent fanbase and a decent population within their catchment area and if I'm correct were averaging crowds of around 2,500. As I recall Griggs left them with the ground and debt free, and where are they now? Any chairman (or fan for that matter) should see their demise as a warning of the madness of bank rolling promotion and the flaws of this model.
To my mind you have to build your club from the ground up, like a business, and only ever pay a sensible percentage of your income after taking account of your costs. Pretty simple stuff really, but all too rare in football these days from the premiership right down to the lower levels of Non League. Its a lazy way to run a club, to just throw money at it and hope for the best and often leads to problems down the line. It should follow that if you want to increase your budget and thus chances of success you should be trying to build your club first by increasing attendences, selling more merchandise etc. Some will say you can achieve this by winning games, I agree to an extent, the product must be good. However you will only end up with the fair weather fans, who will desert you as soon as the money and results inevitably dry up. To me you try to build your fanbase by engaging with community over time via initiatives and kids tickets in schools, family offers etc. Thats what got me interested when I was young. Its a much slower burner I admit, but ultimately you will have a stronger fanbase that have a real emotional bond with the club. As your fan base increases you can justifiably increase your budget and the key thing, it is sustainable.
My main concerns for Gainsborough, as many of their fans have already informed us, they have a catchment area of approx 20,000 as opposed to Boston's 65,000. Clearly it is going to be more difficult for them to attract the crowds required for a sustainable push. Their fans tell us their attendence to population figures compare favourably to other clubs. That would suggest to me that they are unlikely to attract many more fans. Put simply, the catchment area is just too small to support the level of football they aspire to. When we then hear rumours they are paying figures like £500 per week for Jones you have to think they are living well beyond their means. The fact that Jones has been given a two year contract is also concerning as they are now presumably locked into paying this salary until June 2014. With the Chairman saying publicly he plans to stand down at the end of the season and reduce funding, it seems strange then to lock the club into paying high wages in the future. You dont have to be a genius to work out they are being subsidised to a considerable level. Mr Swann may be able to sustain this for a few seasons, but how long can this realistacally continue? If he is a businessman surely he will soon be looking for some return on his investment. You Gainsborough fans can keep burying your heads in the sand, but we've heard it all before here and we very nearly lost our club. And before you say Peter Swann is differnet, he loves the club etc etc, the Malkinson family owned this club for decades. But it hasn't stopped them upping our rent massively and refusing to extend our lease.
