I dont think it can be too late any time soon, considering we dont even have an offer on the table for WP at the minute!!
Robbo_ wrote:
Precisely!!!
And we never will have an offer on the table when we are insisting on a quality ground closer to the town centre. That criteria will never be met because the cost of land nearer the town centre would make the whole Wincham Village financially untenable.
As such, we will end up staying were we are…going nowhere!!!
Also, with regards maintenance costs at the Marston Arena, I don’t understand the comments that it would cost more?? Surely, with buildings being far more recently built, the maintenance bill would be much much less each year.
Personally i think we are better off where we are than over there.
The maintainance of a bigger facility wouldnt cost as much as our current home? Ok TT, did you take your shoes and socks off to do those sums?! :blink:
I don’t have any shoes…only sandals
This is from someone in the know…
“rates would be more = rateable value higher, electric for the delux floodlights, any R&R on ground more as much bigger, licences etc for social clubs/restaurants etc much bigger, United utility water surface drainage would be huge, I mean huge, they tried charge us £18k this year for the carpark!”
Someone in the know…
Knows all about bills…
Must be your DAD Robbo ?
Ha. No, he is too busy moaning how we dont get the ball wide and put crosses in…
Well ate least we have someone on here talking sense, Robbo’s Dad!! We have to leave the decison on the ground and the club’s future to the board, they know what is on offer, they know the costs. When they say what we should do it is up to the shareholders to say Yes or No.
WHS.
Robbo_ wrote:
I got that impression, however the debate is a valid one!
There remains compelling reasons for considering the option and to at least assess the feasibility. There are two football grounds and clubs in the town, one of the grounds up for sale and the other club looking to sell up and move, this situation is rare and the timing is what presents the opportunity.
There would be increased costs of the upkeep and maintenance of the ground, I accept that, but I believe this can be counterbalanced by increased revenue. The grass grows at the same pace, you only need to open one turnstile if that’s all that is required, the kit gets washed with the same amount of washing powder!
At the moment we barely spend a penny of the upkeep and maintenance of WP other than the volunteered time and materials donated (notwithstanding the excellent pitch collection). We currently face challenges with the floodlights and should we not move from the ground then in the next few years we would need to invest in the ‘refurbishment’ of parts of the ground. Don’t get me wrong I think WP is a great facility for our level and staying put may ultimately be our best option (and certainly moving to what could be a downgraded facility which is as far away from the middle of town as we currently are).
The reason that V*** got in to trouble with the ground was the borrowing to build it (and probably fund the Bentley outside it). Well over £1m on high interest interlocking loans from different providers, plus they went full time and at one stage touched £11k a week on the playing budget, which even up to not that long ago was £7k a week!
I am a firm believer that the Mark Harris school of budgeting is the right approach, your budget is based on your gate receipts. Simples! If you get 300 x £8 one a fortnight then you have £1,200 a week maximum to fund the players and management. For sure this is not a lot of money and there will be clubs around you with benefactors that throw two or three times this at the budget (until they get bored)!
The upkeep of the facility needs funding from ‘other’ revenue, catering, private hire, even rented office space, whatever you can best generate from the site. Interestingly the plastic pitches are not the white elephant that people think, it was more a case of Connett being the elephant. At the moment schools in the area are sending kids by bus to other parts of the county to use plastic pitches during the day time for sports activities, this is based on there being insufficient supply for the number of schools in the area. V*** were awarded significant grants to establish these pitched although circumstance meant they never got the money or the go ahead. The council school contracts for using these facilities during the day time could finance their development (along with grants) and it is one of the more realistic uses of the space (more so than a marina, although there was many a strong rumour regards British Waterways being interested to relocate their Northwich offices there)!
The major major difference with this whole scenario is that we would not have to borrow to potentially gain outright ownership of the ground. We could be debt free with no repayments and have money in the bank, which is frankly a remarkable opportunity (forgetting the size, colour, cost of grass seed, etc). You could be damn sure that your closest rivals would not build a newer, better, separate stadium anywhere else on the town and whether they liked it or not they would become tenants (and provide a huge part of the income required to fund the upkeep). One ground is the only commercial argument that makes sense anyway as with alternating weekend and midweek games, different nights for training, etc the ground who be utilized fully.
Back to the argument of it being too big, no problem, knock the Danebank down, sell the land for commercial development and put small terraced stands at either end of the ground. The point here is not a flippant one, there is scope for consideration on how this might work and an opportunity that may well never present itself again.
The question earlier was would you buy a 10 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 4 garage house. You’re damn right I would if the selling price and what I could do with the investment made good commercial sense. If it was cheap and you could turn into five flats and make 3x your money you would look at it! It needs carefully consideration before accepting or rejecting the idea (and the perspective of “I don’t want to watch us play there” is a minor part of the overall reasoning).
When it comes to upkeep anyway, we need a bigger project for Pritch when he finally hangs up his boots, imagine how much he’d moan about the amount of painting he had to do then 
There is another option with plastic pitches. There are companies that will build the facility and then allow the owner to use it free of charge for a period of time (training?) and then rent out the facility to the local community for the rest of the time which is how they make their money. We then dont need to spend capital on the facility but get the use of it. After a specified period of time we then take over ownership if we want it. Simples.
I have to say we have so many people on here who seem to have a brilliant understanding of high finance that I am surprised they are not millionaires!! Let’s face it, we are not clever enough to work out the financial implications of any move, or staying put for that matter, leave it to the board, they will be taking sound advice I am sure from people who know all about this sort of thing.
WHS.
Agreed WHS, and the board do not seem to be floating the VS as an option - so does that perhaps tell us something?
Connett tried to run the stadium as a seperate company to the football club, and he still couldn’t make it pay. If one of the regions most ruthless business men can’t make it work then i have no idea how we ever could.
Robbo_ wrote:
Give over Robbo, Connett’s failure to ‘make it pay’ is only in line with the other 13 or so businesses he wound up.
The point is he was repaying over £1m plus with interest in addition to other loans on the property and trying to fund £30k plus a month of wages. It’s not hard to see where the problems lay.
WHS, I agree with your confidence in leaving it to the board, I would trust Mark to make good commercial decisions and Graham Shuttleworth’s involvement in the excellent Curzon Ashton ground is more than useful. Incidentally do some research on this, 5 years ago it cost about £3.5m to build and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Marston’s Arena (Although why an earth they need a 4,000 seater stadium when they play in the same league as us hey) 
The Nantwich Ground cost similar money at £3.75m (and was based on the Curzon ground) shows the costs involved in a new build. Do we aspire to own a ground poorer than Curzon and Nantwich, is that where we are as a club? Given the figures above does a ready made ground for £1m sound an attractive proposition?
I wouldn’t claim to have a brilliant understanding of high finance WHS (fortunately we are blessed to have Neil Wilson as our numbers man), but I do manage a business turning over 10’s of millions, selling 10’s of thousands of products into 87 countries. So when it comes to P&L accounting, feasibility, asset management, risk/return and other factors I feel more than happy to argue the point that this an opportunity that should be carefully considered as an option whilst it may exist. The numbers may indeed not add up and one of the biggest factors is getting the timescales to work for all parties. We are not that close to selling up and I imagine that Clydesdale Bank would like to get their money back having had the stadium on the market for 18 months.
I don’t see any available land in the ‘town centre’ that offers a solution (and whilst I am not a property expert either) I would expect town centre land to cost a lot more to purchase than potentially the entire Marston’s Arena. If we were to source land through any deal have do we have the ability (with our over stretched volunteers) to manage a new build project and to what standards? I increasing believe that we either stay where we are (not something I am against) or we look at purchasing a ready made alternative.
Whether Robbo disagrees or Thatched Tavern agrees is really not the point, it’s an option and it should be seriously considered before being ruled out. Strategically in terms of what it may do for the club’s position in the town may be a bigger factor than simply the ground itself.
and just for the record, I have not always been a landlord of a pub. I did work for a bank for 34 years, and since I retired from the pub trade I have become a Property Manager, which is why I had to step away from my administration role for Witton.
The ability to pour a good pint and add up the cost of the round in his head, multi-talented our Jeff as well as being a bloody good bloke.
Rabbit’s logic is swaying me more than Robbo’s at the moment !
WHS - have’nt you given your shares up ?
Under Connett’s tenure, the VS had Vics and United’s reserves as tennants. It had fully staffed bars and restaurants. Connett was charging Vics rent whilst taking much of the match day revenue. He still couldnt break even.
How would we man bars and restaurants when we currently out-source our own social club, and have no staff for our single tea hut next season?
As a club we physically cannot run that facility.
We have to accept the fact that we are not going to be pulling in crowds of anything more than 200 - 300 for the foreseeable future. Our match day income is going to remain limited.
As mentioned earlier, it is not the tending of the pitch that i am concerned about. The other outgoings such as water rates, heating, electricity, increased safety certificate, stewarding, water drainage fees, maintainance of a much larger facility…it all adds up.
Originally we were talking about using the interest on our capital to subsidise a competitive team, but now it is being talked about to cover the shortfall in what we earn compared to the running costs of the VS. We also have to factor in Rabbit’s idea to demolish the Danebank, whioh would obviously reduce our capital and therefore any interest that we earned on it. So now we cant afford to run the stadium OR field a competitive team.
Going back to another point you made Rabbit…maybe Chinkers would still be available when the inevitable happened 10 years down the line!!
Since the day that Vics built that stadium every Wittoner has ridiculed them for it being too big, or unfinished, or a white elephant. But now we seem to think it is the promised land for our football club!!!
Thanks for moral support Eli but this is not a battle between me and Robbo, I love him dearly even when he’s wrong
Robbo cares as much about the future of this football club as anyone could and he is right not to want the wrong decisions made. If we had more people as passionate about Witton as Robbo then we would have a better club.
Again, my point is that this is one of the opportunities and I believe it has many things going for it that should not be overlooked. It needs looking into closely to determine whether it is even a practical and financially viable solution. It may not be. But if it is then there will probably never be a better time.
I would just like ‘fans’ to consider what it may offer rather than dismissing it on grounds of ‘how green it is’ or it being ‘on the wrong side of the canal’. Let’s have a good look at the commercial aspects of it and dismiss it only when we have done so.
Rabbit, if you care to re-read my previous few posts, i dont think you will find any mention of colour etc? My arguments have been purely financial.
Has your Dad pinched your log-in, I’d had a good weekend till your doom and gloom
We are destined to be come a tiny blip on the footballing landscape, whilst the mighty Curzon and Nantwich out flank us. It makes you wonder if on the fateful Bank Holiday Monday whether being a Cod Head was not so bad after all.
I am not proposing we sell the family silver (should there be any) but if we nearly have no future then the current hard work (and everything before it for 125 years was not worth the effort). In which case it will be a slow demise and we’ll be playing the Coachman in 5 years.
We have to be prudent, risk averse and there is nothing wrong with that, but ambition is what drives any football club, otherwise why turn up in August. What is it we want the club to achieve, being beaten to the league title by Mickleover (who) by 22 points!
For anyone now feeling miserable read this superb piece of journalism (and work out why it is we follow football);
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/article-1280497/Patrick-Collins-The-wonder-Blackpool-goes-mere-money.html