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Regular Brentford contributor, and Financial Services Training Specialist, Cris Glascow, looks at how the new stadium green light impacts on our club’s growth forecast.

The picture accompanying this piece paints a thousand words. Taken at Griffin Park in 1938, just before the players came out to face Preston North End in an FA Cup Quarter Final, it shows a segment of the nearly 40,000 crowd, and almost as many hats, packed into our beloved stadium ready to enjoy the latest Brentford fare. Little did those eager faces know that they were witnessing a club at its heights and, with the Second World War looming on the horizon, one that was about to embark upon a steady decline. In recent times, however, the club’s fall from grace has thankfully been arrested by a band of extremely committed supporters, players, staff – not to mention the extraordinary backing of one Matthew Benham.

Thankfully, Eric Pickles in Westminster looked through the excellent plans of the Lionel Road development and gave them his ‘ample’ blessing, meaning that by 2016, the Bees should be the proud custodians of a shiny new 20,000 seater stadium complete with all mod cons and er… 20,000 supporters? Therein lies a dilemma – one that has been discussed already on Beesotted. Do we have any practical solutions to it, or are we just going to have to be content with inhabiting a beautiful, but rather empty-looking new ground? Will having only 7,000 regular fans actually matter to the long-term prosperity of the club?

Maybe there are other avenues that could be explored alongside the initiative to build the number of fans visiting on matchdays. I shall briefly look at the fan issue before discussing other revenue generating possibilities.

In my brief research, I encountered a number of very uplifting stories about initially small clubs achieving enormous relative success. In many cases, the catalyst was a single benefactor, but once the club in question had been stabilised financially, its ability to progress was compounded by a few good, practical financial strategies. These seemed to work not just in the UK but also overseas. They included:

  • “Cut your cloth accordingly” i.e. if the ground is sustainable with a weekly average of say, 12,000 for home games, then that must be the immediate target to which Brentford FC aspires. It is one that, with some success on the pitch, we already know is achievable, as a crowd of near this level has been seen at some recent big games. Inventive ideas to attract new fans especially from the local highly competitive area must be stepped up. In addition, rewarding loyalty will be key. The two will go hand in hand with new support as Brentford encourage people to move away from the clubs they currently ‘casually’  follow. Many ideas from this perspective have already been covered in previous articles, so I will now look at a few other areas where revenue may be generated.
  • Using the stadium as much as possible for other sporting events. The prospect of working with another local club would certainly generate extra revenue. How that turns to profit would depend very much upon the support that Brentford and said other club give to the project. It could be a match that either turns out to be heavenly or hellish depending upon the recent examples you consider. It should be on the agenda for consideration at the very least especially with rugby clubs such as Harlequins so nearby. I personally find this idea far more appealing than sharing with another local Football League club (I wont stoop so low as to mention their names).
  • Using the stadium as a constant source of revenue. In other words, just because you build a football ground, it doesn’t mean that it should be unoccupied most of the time. To this end, consider filling up as many “holes” as they can to bring in a constant revenue stream. Providing the stadium infrastructure to support office suites and communal conference facilities is an obvious way for the club to generate funds. Using grounds these days for such practices is much more accepted as the norm compared to even 10 years ago and would give a club like Brentford, constant financial backing.
  • Merchandise. We can only convince so many people at the moment that walking down Brentford High Street in a garish yellow and blue striped away shirt is a good idea. Having said that, merchandise sales can generate excellent profit margins as delusional fans like me throw all ideas of value for money out of our minds in a quest to look like Harlee Dean (or at least his much older, rather podgy brother). How then does Brentford FC achieve a high level of compound growth with its merchandise? I am about to make this all sound incredibly easy but, with the right exposure and persuasion, people will buy your product. If it does what they anticipate it will (in this case provide a positive and entertaining experience), a certain amount of loyalty to the club will develop and that loyalty will hopefully spread out to the individual’s family and friends even if they live far from the club itself. The idea of global expansion has already been successfully tried and tested by the bigger English football clubs in worldwide markets. I am not saying we should have a permanent Chinese representative (why not?) like Liverpool or Manchester United, but we could make more use of our existing connections. There are a number of people where I live in the south-west of England that support the Bees, and I am sure that is the case around the country or even the rest of the world. It should be the business that reaches out to its clients in whatever way necessary – not the other way around.
  • From the above point, once the club has achieved a wider catchment, its ability to sell “all things Brentford” becomes more straightforward. Hence individuals and groups would be prepared to pay for access to the club’s facilities or its staff including players in order to enjoy another facet of the Brentford “experience”.

We all want to see New GP fill up to its capacity each week, but for that to happen, we will undoubtedly need to have the club running as dynamically off the pitch as upon it. Mathew Benham and Mark Warburton have assembled an amazingly talented group of coaches, players and advisors – that needs to be replicated in the Griffin Park offices over the next, critical phase in the club’s history. I would hope that plans are already drawn up – these would make fascinating reading and should be shared if at all possible.

I have touched on just a couple of ideas above, and I am sure there are many more that will be worth discussing in the weeks and months to come, before we finally say a tearful farewell to our beloved current home.

Cris Glascow
@glascowtraining

 

Please feel free to share any ideas and thoughts you may have regarding this topic below.