Brodlach wrote:West are carrying the burden of past presidents/board mis management. Most of the people there seemed to be heading in the same direction and have the club at heart. The proposal sounds promising. They need to start winning on the ground to improve off the ground. for the first time in a while some former players want to come back and play for the club, Porps,Helbig and Willits. Big season for the club.
Does any other SANFL club own their club rooms and land?
What happens to the revenue from the club/pokies/bar, does this remain as the WAFC profit/loss and it's purely the asset that gets sold off?
Good question and that is the difference.
The revenue from the ground and the members is minimal compared to the revenue from off field activities. I guess it depends on if the club retains this or not.
mighty_tiger_79 wrote:Sounds like the SANFL is in trouble financially
But how can this be? Wasn't the selling out of Our Competition to other-league interests supposed to generate enough coin to keep Our Clubs afloat? They told us everything would be blue skies with rainbows and little fuzzy animals frolicking in the sun...
Blues skies and rainbows a long way off. At least the latest Rucci article is more responsible as he details the real financial difficulties the league is going through. David Penberthy too in his article just reminding people what the SANFL does. It's belated, but it's better than nothing. The last few weeks the SANFL has had it's reputation trashed and it's hard to sit back and watch it all unfold. The mountain of leaks from the AFL clubs to their mates in the media is in no small part responsible for the campaign to malign the league. Penberthy has the Port flogs on bigfooty in a rage, good fun to read
Good Sturt man, David Penberthy. Loves the SFC. Without wanting to cause him any embarrassment, I recall both he and Kate Ellis attending the 10 year Bali memorial service a couple of years ago. He was quite emotional during the service. He has a deep respect for what the SANFL means historically. If he's championing the SANFL's cause, you can take it that it's coming from the heart.
Ronnie wrote:Blues skies and rainbows a long way off. At least the latest Rucci article is more responsible as he details the real financial difficulties the league is going through. David Penberthy too in his article just reminding people what the SANFL does. It's belated, but it's better than nothing. The last few weeks the SANFL has had it's reputation trashed and it's hard to sit back and watch it all unfold. The mountain of leaks from the AFL clubs to their mates in the media is in no small part responsible for the campaign to malign the league. Penberthy has the Port flogs on bigfooty in a rage, good fun to read
Penberthy does ar times come across as bit of a flog but geez hes good at stiring up ferals lol.
Read my reply. It is directed at you because you have double standards
Port Adelaide the club that just keep on taking, $16.25 million from the SANFL to bail them out and they still have the nerve to ask for more money from the stadium deal.
Hard to imagine the SANFL going under but you wonder how far the squeeze can go on for. With the Power license sold hopefully that signals the end of more bailouts but the Adelaide Oval attendances won't last. The sale of the lands around Football Park better solve a lot of these issues or the SANFL are going to have to negotiate with the AFL from a position of no strength. You wonder what we'd need to give up in order to get their help.
David Penberthy: Quote: Will SANFL become a compliant vassal of Melbourne’s AFL House?
DAVID PENBERTHY The Advertiser November 27, 2014 9:00PM
IT still has its critics, and they obviously have the right to be critical, but the vast majority of South Australians clearly regard the new Adelaide Oval as one of the best things to have happened in our state.
I am firmly in the latter camp. Forget footy, cricket and the Stones, you would go there to watch two Russians play chess.
The new Oval is also a cash cow. Where there’s cash there is often also a fight, as is now the case between the SANFL and the AFL clubs over the twin issues of board representation on the Stadium Management Authority, and revenue sharing.
Attendances this year told the story. Even while playing frustrating footy, the Crows managed an average home crowd of 48,000. Port, the best story in sport over the past two years and playing the most exciting brand of football, were predicted to have an average home crowd of 36,000, but averaged 44,000.
A lot of people, and a lot of dough. The question being asked is: Where is it all going? As the AFL conducts its stadium review, to which all parties have reached a somewhat laughable confidentiality agreement amid a torrent of leaks, there is a view that it’s the SANFL which is reaping too great a benefit from that revenue.
The purpose of this column is not to explore the arguments around the revenue split, but to record the financial realities facing the SANFL which have been shunted aside.
There was a jaw-dropping revelation made to the nine SANFL league directors at their meeting on Tuesday night. The league directors represent the eight non-AFL SANFL clubs, with the 9th director, former Premier Rob Kerin, representing community football.
SANFL chairman John Olsen told the directors that earlier this year Westpac, the SANFL’s bank of more than 40 years, refused to let the SANFL bank with them any more over fears about its cash flow.
Westpac called in McGrath Nichol, a consulting firm specialising in insolvency issues, to run the ruler over the SANFL. They didn’t like what they saw. Westpac told the SANFL it would have to do its banking elsewhere. The cost of the McGrath Nichol review was $420,000 and the bill for that was passed on to the SANFL, too.
The chief reason for Westpac’s concern was whether the SANFL could meet its cash flow requirements. Unlike SACA, which had its debt wiped clean when it agreed to the Adelaide Oval upgrade, the SANFL remains lumbered with debt due in large part to its previous multi-million dollar bailouts of the formerly shambolic Port Adelaide Football Club.
The SANFL-owned land at Footy Park which has been rezoned may not be sold at a rate high enough or a speed quick enough to cover the cost of servicing that debt.
There is one passage in the report to the directors which helps explain why relations between the SANFL and Port in particular are so frosty. It reads:
“It should be noted that SANFL in May 2014 paid the PAFC a further $1.5m to enable it to repay its AFL creditors and start as an independent club with no more than $500,000 creditors, in other words with a clean slate. This took total PAFC funding from SANFL to $16.25m and increased SANFL debt to approximately $37m.”
So almost half the SANFL’s debt comes from helping Port. In addition, the SANFL is still incurring a cost of about $1.3 million a year to maintain Footy Park for Crows training.
To its credit, the Bendigo Bank stepped up to the plate and has taken on the SANFL as a customer. It is a five-year deal but the local league is still worried about cash flow, particularly given that the annual service fee it pays to the SMA will increase markedly next year.
This year the SANFL paid only eight months of that fee, for a total of $2.1 million; next year it rises to $3.4 million. In addition, the SANFL has also lost all the revenue it once made from catering at Footy Park, with the AFL clubs now enjoying that revenue from the new Oval.
As a lover of the Crows and an admirer of Port, I want nothing more than to see those clubs make as much money as they can from the new Oval.
Equally, we need to respect and remember the heritage of footy in this state, and recognise too that it’s the SANFL which props up regional and community footy, runs the Auskick clinics, created legions of great young players who became the game’s elite.
My suspicion is that this issue is less about any apparent greed on the part of our two AFL clubs, but more a covert desire on the part of those AFL federalists to recast our SANFL as the AFL (SA), in the same way the other non-Victorian states are the compliant vassals of Melbourne’s AFL House.
Thats the best article that has been published yet. SANFL has been in real trouble with its finances which could have been fatal, glad it is now public.
