10k season tickets and a 14k average attendance seems awfully high as a break-even point. we just about scraped 10k season tickets, and again are just about above the 14k at present - and doesnt give much room for potential growth.

I'm just waiting for a certain elderly Wiganer to respond saying it's all a load of tosh and we are financially unstable and have massive risk. Any time now.

I think his point was that 10K season tickets is our break even point, and since were averaging 14K gate, we're well over that so should be ok in terms of income.

No he had it right. Just passing on what I've been told by someone quite senior at the club on the non-playing management side.

It shows really how fine the line is between profit and loss. Saints spend more on backroom people than they do on players.

Compare it to Wigan who have higher gates than this and very low overheads (They pay very low rent, probably a quarter of what London are charged) but still fall into losses.

Truth is, this is the real world economics that clubs are facing. EM was correct when he said it is not sustainable as a league.

McManus said the last season at KR and the year at Widnes was gonna cost him £8m personally to keep the club going. How ever hes hiding this on the clubs balance sheet i dont know. The threat to rugby as a whole is massive unless the clubs can come up with a way to improve turnover by a huge %.

IL has said that we are on course to make some small profits but are operating well under the salary cap limit, or was before Sam Tomkins new deal. Wigan will in no way be interested in raising the cap because we cant afford too so why would any other club be interested in doing so.

I'm glad you mentioned that because I'm pretty sure that both Saints and yourselves have been supporters of raising the cap because we have owners who, like Moran at Wire, can afford to splash some cash around to keep them at the top of the Super League table. Fortunately we have a salary cap that keeps competition (n.b. competition not the sport) alive, as we're seeing yet again this year and the Bulls situation (and Wakey's last year) serve only to highlight just how precarious finances can be if you don't have a post-dream Ebeneezer supporting you.

Is this true? Does McManus really have this kind of money to pump into keeping Saints going? Seems a frightening figure.

He said those words to us at MM last year the first game of the season that was what he had prepared for. He was pretty pished like but he was being very honest on a number of subjects. His opinions on Wire was

That is correct and something that has been widely known in financial circles for sometime, and if you take out Sky monies as income in Super League it would be even worse for clubs.

I can't understand the situation with union when they get so much from Aviva Insurance £20 million for the initial first four seasons sponsorship of their Premiership compared to our Stobart branded trucks, and you can bet Heineken pay a lot more than we get from Carnegie for the Challenge Cup.

Too many Super League clubs do not have the assets of their own grounds which is a problem.

Compared to the backers of such as Chelsea and Manchester City the monies such backers of St Helens, Warrington and London have is just small time! but if they should ever pull out and I can't see either of the three gentleman having endless pockets to throw away (do they appear in the rich list?)

Three pages and the idiot rogues hasn't given us the benefit of his immense knowledge of tax affairs. Must be some kind of record.

The £8 million may not just have been pumped into the running of the club week to week, it may also include capital for the stadium, which maybe repayable under long term loans.

As for Saints who knows if we will make money or not. The problem across the board is that no one wants to admit the basic fundementals of business which is you need people to buy your product.

So everyone is paying over the odds, to compete with everyone else paying over the odds and just racking and stacking the debt, for some future guy to pay off. If you take 10,000 season ticket fans as your basis. With ticket prices of say £150 on average, that is your basic level income. So if Sky was to pick up sticks and pull out tomorrow this is what you would be left with to run your club on.

This gives you £1.5 million. Great that means we are pretty much covering the salary cap with season tickets. But as someone said early we pay more on backroom staff than players, it does not include, other bills, loan repayments (no matter how low the interest, heating, lighting, water, etc etc etc.

Changing the size of the league whilst increasing our share of the SKY pie, does not change the fundementals of our Market Share. We will still have only 10,000 season ticket holders whether there are 14 or 13 teams in the league. Cutting the league is a short term measure which will give a short term boost, but does not address our long term problem of a lack of watchers for the level of money we are paying out.

We have some very rich men on the board.