Out of interest does nayone know the running costs of Windy Hill? Its still their training and admin base. Does it cost them $1.8 mil to maintain? Why are PP's running costs so high?

Prez I think you will find that the Collins board when doing the sums on the move were anticipating larger revenue through crowds and the G and at the Dome - We had a few games there last year when two men and a dog turned up - The club would have taken a hit there quite dramatically. I think they looked at the finances of Essendon* and Collingwood and thought they were strong due to playing on the big grounds and pulling in the crowds . If we had a done this 4-5 years earlier it may have paid off but to do it when the club was at its lowest ebb was almost madness in hind sight . And by the state of the books it may have been better to stay at Optus until the on feild results improved .

Another peice of short sightness was the notion that we only got Saturday afternoon games at Optus this meant no Free to air in Melbourne thus limiting the chances to pull in sponsors . These Saturday afternoon games were being telecast to a much wider audience interstate in QLD and NSW and with a bit of thought this avenue could have been used to attract interstate sponsors or even partnerships.


By the way when are you going to get a bowling attack that can dismiss 4 tail enders in a day . Bloody pathetic effort that was

One of the things that IMO has gone wrong is the revenue of the average membership. There is a large difference if the % of people paying $400 + for a membership shifts declines.

When playing at PP there was a high percentage of members who were SC members and SC members with reserved seats.

With the move away from PP a lot of the "value" in the SC membership was eroded and then the Club was stupid enough to give many SC members absolute sheit seats. I am sure that the SC membership is probably close to 50% of what it used to be.

This cost the club big $.

IMO the move away from PP was strategically the correct one. Execution was however very poor and the Club is paying for this now.

ahh, you see, this is where i disagree.

i think our board was incompontent with our move from OO and didnt consider the ramifications at all and got no where near what they should have at the time.

in large part that was due to the vast majority suggesting the old nutshell "we have no currency - we have nothing to bargain with" and all that other tripe that alot of people tried to convince me off, i never thought it then, and i dont think it now.

its all bullshit - we got shafted and shafted badly and anyone that suggests otherwise is mad.

we are now asking for a deal that we should have got when we moved and i wonder how different we would have been if we did get something like what we are asking back then.


for me the board was indeed incompontent and deserves as much blame as elliot does.

we got 2.5 million as a bonus from leaving OO

thats fantastic isnt it.

right - 1.8 in upkeep costs for the first year

right - 1.5 in loss social club revenue due to leaving OO

thats 3.3 million and us in the shit for 700k before we even start to look at it from a yearly point of view.

so for the first year we are 700k in the shit

but from every year we are also 3.3 million in the shit instantly, and that doesnt even include our debt that we are servicing.

and you think the board was compotent for the deal we got from the AFL for our move and consider everything? i say bullshit, they drastically over estimated things and are now paying the price for it. Elliot was buy part 1 of our problems, the current board is part 2.

im treading the danger line of the big "i told you so" and that is not my intention, but we got shafted and shafted hard at the time, was this to bring the club to its knees, no doubt IMO and was indeed payback for all the shit that Elliot had got up to over the year.

what we are asking for now, is what we should have asked for when we first left/dragged from OO.

now consider all that gone.

we have no debt, no upkeep for the ground and we consider the income from our social club, around the 250k a bonus.

so here we are 250k infront before we begin instead of 4 million in the shit.

now lets start looking at other things now that we have close to an extra 4 million in revunue to use. (upkeep as well as no debt) that we can use to invest in other sources of revenue.

Prez - your numbers are wrong

We didnt get 2.5 mill $ to leave optus - we got the money to compensate for broken contracts (I presume for catering, cleaning services and what not). In other words we werent really offered any real $ to leave - It wasnt explained as such at the time of the move but it was mentioned that was how the money went earlier during the year

now we play at a $340 million indoor stadium which is one of the best in the world.