Corporate hospitality in St. Helens? Does the club pay people to attend?

I don't know how it is in the home end but I've been to every Wigan game at Langtree Park as well as the World Cup game last year and I've always found the queues for food and drink to be a nightmare, far worse than any game I've been to at any ground in fact. A relatively minor issue I know but I bet they are throwing away a fair bit of money there with people not buying anything because they don't want to miss a fair chunk of the match queuing up

Wigan's 2013 accounts are now available and given a Challenge Cup and Grand Final double on top of £940,000 of transfer fees received a profit of £108k does not look great. Take out the transfer cash received (Tomkins and Hock) and turnover remain pretty much as was yet costs have increased by circa £900k.

There is a note that "Directors do not expect the 2014 year to be profitable due to the clubs[sic] increasing commitment to expand its online TV opportunity, branding expansion and Community activity and to the rising costs of player wages and development." With the 2014 financial year as good as over has this investment been noticeable?

If I owned an RL club I'd make every effort to reinvest as much of the club's operating profit as possible and build the club, whilst still posting a modest/small profit. In fact, as a fan, I'd be disappointed if we were reporting huge profits at the expense of investment.

I've every faith that the club's "commitment to expand" will reap benefits long term. Hell, a few weeks touring round NZ/Aus can't have been cheap, that's the cost of being a successful club.

In all the posts on this topic no mention has been made of the income from SKY Television. If in the future, for any reason, that income became no longer available, I doubt if any of the clubs would be making a profit.

Hardly exclusive to LP that problem I find it is the case at many grounds.

The big issue there is staff training and retention. There is a huge turnover of staff and to be honest given it is around 2 or 3 hours of work every fortnight for about a dozen times a year I can understand why it would be difficult to find people willing to do it and stick with it for any length of time. It maybe slightly different at a club that share with the football as they will get more regular shifts.

At Salford last season the staff on the concession stalls seemed to have a lack of basic English and appeared to struggle with sterling as a currency!

To the chap that scoffed at the corporate hospitality I know that British Gas are one blue chip business that regularly use the venue for staff training and such like. I went to a wedding in the summer and it was excellent. I cannot comment on match day VIP stuff as not experienced it.

Whereas I have, and often, hence my comments. Also, I see that you only mentioned my "scoffing" and conveniently forgot the bit where I said Saints were in an enviable position. Unless you meant another scoffer, of course?

Anyone else worried about the English Rugby Union salary cap going up to £5.5 million next season with extra provision for signing "marquee players" outside the cap? Can only see this as bad news for RL in this country

I did mean someone else so don't take it to heart! This is a reasoned debate on the whole.

I imagine Deano G will be on here soon talking about wigans unsustainable business that relies on trophies and selling your best players to break even?

If not then this thread he started almost looks like an ill thought out pop at Saints, which surely wasn't the purpose of it, it would be so out of character for him. . . .

I'll ignore the ad hominem part of your post.

I don't want to duck the question of Wigan's sustainability (though clearly this is a separate question from whether Saints is a sustainable business). You'll have to wait though, I haven't had the chance yet to read Wigan's accounts (or Saints' in any detail). When I have I will let you have my thoughts in more detail.

Historically (and at the time I posted Wigan's latest accounts weren't available) Wigan has been run sustainably. If it isn't now being run sustainably then I would be worried. Looking at the headline info as reported, it doesn't look great. If Wigan's financial performance is deterioriating then I would be critical of that. Having said this, the headline info for Wigan doesn't look anywhere near as bad as headline results at Saints, I think a degree of perspective is required...!!! A £2.4m loss on turnover of £5.4m is, on the face of it, a very poor result compared with what is being reported about Wigan's position.

I don't think many, if any, RL clubs are particularly well run as businesses. Wigan's revenue is low for a club with such a big supporter base and profit and I have pointed this out before on this board (just because things were sustainable didn't mean there wasn't room for improvement!). If you had read my posts on this you would have seen that I am sceptical about the the deal with the stadium company, Wigan's turnover looks too low for us to be getting all the match day revenue. On the plus side though Wigan has a low cost base because it doesn't need to pay to maintain and update the stadium.

Saints seem to have high costs and a similar sized turnover to Wigan at the moment. Your directors obviously believe that this will be rectified in the next few years, but on the face of it this looks a big task (I'll comment more when I've had the chance to read the accounts). Hopefully costs can be brought down and revenue increased, though if your primary source of new revenue is hospitality/conferencing from my experience this is not a high margin business area so you would need to do a very substantial amount of business there to get the net contribution needed to meet losses elsewhere at the club. The new TV deal will help to some extent, but if in 2 or 3 years time Saints were to get to a point where it was only losing say 300k a year that would be an impressive achievement from where it is now.

As long as the Saints board are able and willing to continue backing the club (or if Wigan is not being run sustainably but is able to drawn on IL's financial support) it could be said that this doesn't matter, but tell that to the fans of the club that dominated the early years of SL. Wigan and Saints are not so special that what happened to Bradford couldn't happen to our clubs.

I will do, but you're talking here about the creditors of the club not whether the club is being run consistently at a profit.

If what you're saying is correct then there may be a change of ownership at the club in 2018, but that is a different question from whether its revenue exceeds its costs each year. Good to hear though that there is someone waiting in the wings (presumably with cash available to help the club) who is ready to step in.

We don't have that at Wigan (as far as I am aware), though the financial position is much better in both trading terms and in terms of the amount of debt owed to shareholders (the debt of the Wigan club to IL is a fraction of the debt owed to Saints directors).

At the risk of going off topic and derailing a thread I started... what would be the reaction of Saints fans to a takeover by Mike Coleman?

As has been said, Most of Saints costs will still extraordinarily come from the stadium, the cladding, the catering etc. All these are ironed out very easily with a few extra mill borrowed it's like paying off a mortgage in a couple of years, the numbers take a major hit while you do but your all the better for it after.

As for Coleman, I'm glad there's a succession plan in place. As sad as it will be for McManus to go, who is a club legend on equal standing of the likes of KC, I trust his judgement on his successor - and I'd imagine he'll stay on for life in some capacity. As for Coleman, he certainly has the money, what he does with it only time will tell...