I’m not doubting for a minute that the club are losing significant amounts of money due to this crisis, but I’d be interested to see exactly what the figures are in terms of matchday sales. Can a shareholder help with last year’s figures?
If you take the above example – 1,250 ifollow passes is £12,500 (bigger clubs will get a lot more). But the costs of holding a match – police, stewards, other casual matchday staff etc is presumably zero.
As I say, I’m not doubting we’re losing a lot – parking, food, programmes, memorabilia etc are also zero – I’m just interested to know exactly what the figures are.
The accounts are publicly available: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00123622/filing-history
The annual figure for gate receipts is around £1 million.
There will be some costs to putting on games behind closed doors, such as stewards to stop people getting into the stadium area, people to run the ground (lights, cleaning, groundstaff, office staff, etc.) but you would assume fewer costs than a normal game.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think clubs get the full £10 from iFollow, there’s a % for the company that provides the platform.