Flats in the corners, extended corporate/function facilities in a large "West Stand",taking ownership of all the stadium revenue, expanding that stadium revenue, ground share with a rugby club, events through the summer ..... and using that income to fund a club into sustainable Championship (or more level)........ nope can`t see anyways of making money out of it.
Can you explain this to me, as I don't get it.
Presumably you aren't thinking Kassam is going to do any of this for us? So, someone else is going to have to do it. In order to do so, they will have to buy the stadium, build the flats, refurbish the stadium and extend the conference facilities. Is that right so far?
Let's take a (very) conservative figure and say you could do that for £20m, taking into account build costs and Kassam's price for the stadium. Having had a quick look online, commercial loan rates are about 4% and you can get an 80% mortgage. So if someone put down £4m, the loan would be £16m. The interest on that would be £640,000 per year. Of course, you still have to pay off the capital amount. Let's make it easy and say whoever provides the cash is happy to get it back in 20 years. That's another £1m a year to pay back.
As income you then have the rent (or proceeds) from the flats, the rent from the rugby club (shudder), some money from the conference facilities, bits and bobs from catering and advertising and income from events in the summer (maybe a couple of large concerts?). Keeping the club separate, so money from tickets would go as at present to the club.
Let's presume that this is all set up so it is at least no worse for the club than under the current regime (if it is a worse arrangement we might as well start forming the phoenix club now!) - and we have to pay £750,000 a year to play there as now (a guess). That means the profit from the other income would have to be (£1m + £640,000 - £750,000) £890,000 just to service the debt. And that's the profit - you have to account for all the costs (business rates, taxes, staff, maintenance etc) out of the income first. And of course if you wanted to reduce/remove the charge the club has to pay, then you have to find up to another £750,000 per year of income to make it work. If you want to use some of the stadium income to fund the team in addition, that's yet more income to find. Let's say the club is given another £1m a year (which of course is laughably small in Championship terms, and just as an illustration) to bolster the team and pays no rent. That would mean the stadium would have to generate a profit of £2,640,000 per year to fund the team and service the debt.
So we are in a situation where the stadium would have to generate anywhere between £890,000 and £2,640,000 or more per year of (taxed) profit to be sustainable.
Now you can certainly argue with those figures to some degree - but I have tried to underestimate costs, while also making the maths easy! Is it likely that the stadium could generate that amount of profit per year? It seems like a hell of a lot to me. And is the fact that nobody has tried to do it an indication that it is not in fact doable?
As I said - can someone who thinks we can make this work explain to me? I must be missing something!