Originally Posted by
Emmet Malone in the Irish Times
Cork City can't make numbers add up
Emmet Malone
On Soccer: Such are the economics of the Eircom League. It won't have come as a surprise to many when the demise of Cork City's challenge for a second successful league title coincided with the first rumours of belt tightening down around Turner's Cross.
Still, the warning issued by the club's chairman, Brian Lennox, last week that City could be out of business within 12 months until backers willing to provide substantial investment come forward is a stark reminder of just how fleeting the good times can be in a league where very few budget for the bad times.
Word has it Lennox, having previously been a member of a broader consortium for five years during which time he served as vice-chairman, had put somewhere between €350,000 and €400,000 into the development of the club over the first four years of his term as owner although there is speculation he recouped a portion of that figure after last year's exceptionally good season.
Reaching the Setanta Cup final and performing creditably in Europe again will have boosted the financial position but a run of costly draws in the late summer effectively killed off City's hopes of defending the title.
The upshot, of course, was that crowds and, in turn, income fell, and so, despite still being embroiled in battle to qualify for next season's Uefa Cup, the team has found itself playing in front of less than 3,000 people of late.
Manager Damien Richardson is just one of many people at or near to the club who feels the biggest problem has not been the drop in attendances but rather the failure to adequately develop other aspects of revenue generation.
He remains broadly optimistic that imbalance can be addressed as long as the progress made in recent seasons on the pitch isn't squandered and he is adamant a return to part-time professionalism, as has been suggested might be necessary, would be a disaster.
At present there is a strong, full-time first team set-up with a core of very talented players, as well as developed and successful under-21 and under-18 structures, all of which have strong management teams. All of this, however, has come at a significant price with the cost of running the club having risen from around €1.5 million when Lennox took over to somewhere between €2 and €2.5 million this year.
Some of the detail on the financial side is interesting with Lennox revealing for instance that the club has effectively had to write off some €300,000 it was owed for match sponsorships and advertisingbut, for the most part, it all sounds like standard fare for one of the country's biggest clubs.
What will cause some concern throughout the league, though, is the fact that despite having a lower wage bill than a couple of their rivals, having a more clearly defined catchment area - one that encompasses a population of around 250,000, and probably the largest support of any club in the country - successive owners have proved incapable of making the numbers add up for the club.
But then the situation is not unprecedented. Both Cork Celtic and Cork Hibernians went out of business within short periods of achieving considerable success.
It may be hard at first glance to imagine Cork City going the same way any time soon and impossible to envisage Cork without a presence at the highest level of the Irish game but the reality is that the club, which doesn't own its own ground or, for that matter, very much else, is a rather fragile organisation and Lennox, entirely understandably, has made it clear he can no longer carry the burden of keeping it intact alone.
Matters will not be helped in the short term at least, he feels, by the changes being advocated by the FAI which intends to reduce to two thirds the proportion of revenue a club may spend on wages. Lennox puts Cork City's current figure at something below 80 per cent and that of many other clubs at comfortably over four fifths.
The key problem, he feels, is that the transition period of two years before the new rules are applied is too short to allow clubs to address the problem by raising additional revenue with the result they will instead have to cut wage bills, and thus either the numbers or quality of players they employ.
City have already discovered the cost of letting popular players leave without replacing them and the next few weeks may be critical in deciding whether the squad is further weakened during the coming close season, or the early signs of decline are halted and they seek to bounce back for next season.
Hopeful rumours suggests that the property developer Owen O'Callaghan is about to get involved although so far he has gently played down the speculation.
His pockets would certainly be deep enough to enable the club to challenge for more trophies. However what would be more interesting would be whether somebody from a line of work that has been something of a sure thing for the past couple of decades could actually make a sustainable success of a business where a willingness to lose considerable amounts of money has been widely seen as both necessary and, in the eyes of the supporters at least, hugely desirable.
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