Originally Posted by
El-Pietro
I think you are mixing up a few seasons here. We had a good start to the 2018 season and attendances remained high. 2017: 4,559. 2018 4,245, though there was talk at the itme of the crowds being inflated by non attending season ticket holders.
We faltered in the middle/second half of 2018 and had a poor showing in Europe (though I think the bye in round 2 did more harm than good, and if we had lost to Legia, won against an unseeded team in the second round and then lost to Rosenborg things would look rosier than they did with the bye). Despite the standard of play starting to drop in the second half of 2018 we still reached the FAI Cup final and probably put in our best performance of the four finals but fell short.
In 2019 our recruitment was awful. We had a reduced budget but it was still relatively high, but the players brought in clearly were not of the necessary standard. Caulfield was let go after a disastrous start, and in hindsight many people wonder if that was the right choice, more so outside the club than in, but things got really toxic on and off the field and even his most diehard fans started to question him. ON the field things were not going well. By the time Caulfield was let go we had 13 points from 14 games and no wins in 8. Including a loss away to UCD and a draw at home to Finn Harps. Crowds were poor and our budgets relied on attendances. I don' tknow what the average attendance was when Caulfield left but we ended the season with an average of 2,505.
As for our budgets, the idea was that we wouldn't spend above our means but in reality it seems we set aggressive budgets trying to keep up with Dundalk that relied heavily on large attendances, once those attedances fell away we were in trouble. Questions at AGMS on these budgets were sort of waved off. Add to that the unexpected tax issue and we ended up with the 650k debt figure reported in February. There is a lot of anger among FORAS members that we have allowed ourselves to get into the position we are in today. We were proud of what we thought was a sustainable model but it seems that it was not as sustainable as thought and there are not lots of questons about governance and how a board was able to set such high budgets. The question now though is, if the sale goes through, what purpose does FORAS serve.