Gretna comparisons anger vice-chairman

Jul 10 2008 by Andrew McGilvray, Hamilton Advertiser

HAMILTON Accies vice-chairman Les Gray this week admitted the club doesn’t expect to make a profit from SPL football, but assured fans they won’t collapse like Gretna.

Budgets are in place and every penny is accounted for as Accies prepare to make the step-up, and Gray said any profit beyond expenditure will go towards improving club facilities.

He said: “Running a football club is just like any other business and we’ll have a budget.

“With our projections we know how much income we expect to generate from SPL revenue, via the Setanta TV deal and Clydesdale Bank sponsorship, and we know in advance what these payments are likely to be, based on their ladder system.

“Our Business Club is selling like hotcakes at something like £1250 a head for the season, our corporate hospitality boxes are sold out, and we’re making a lot more from that than we did before.

“Based on all of that, we’ve worked it backwards to what the player budget is going to be.

“If you know what your turnover is going to be, and how much money you can spend on players, and you’re not going to make a loss, then the answer is that we won’t make any money.

“But we won’t lose money by being in the SPL either. It’s a bigger budget, there’s more money coming in, but it’s all spent on the club.

“We’ve been prudent about the contracts we’ve offered players this year to make sure we’re not setting ourselves up for a fall if it goes the wrong way – but you need to take a bit of a gamble on that and speculate.”

Gray added: “We’re in the SPL, we want our players to be treated properly, and they’re now going to be paid what is a fair Premier League wage, but to do that we’ll require as much income as we possible.

“We’re making sure we have a club to be proud of, and that it goes forward instead of being a four-season wonder – that it doesn’t disappear now we’re in the Premier League because, for want of a better phrase, ‘we did a Gretna’.

“I think we’ve all made it clear that we don’t like the comparisons. We are not Gretna, we’re nothing like them.”

Gray moved to allay fears that pay-at-the-gate fans will be frozen out of games because there won’t be tickets available.

He said: “I think that’s very unlikely. We’ll sell season tickets to the tune of 1000 or thereabouts, maybe more, then we’ve got corporate and our sponsorship deals with Setanta and Clydesdale Bank, and our Business Club, which will take it up to somewhere around the 2000-mark, and leave 1300 seats for pay-at-the-gate fans.

“There’s no reason why these guys can’t come in and fill the stadium.”