OUTLOOK
As shareholders will be aware, football as an industry has gone through a period of consolidation following the turmoil in the summer of 2002. The subsequent fall-out has seen the rationalisation not only of squad sizes, but in the average cost of each individual player dropping.
Furthermore, this rationalisation has led to a number of steps by the Football League to try and avoid such worrying scenarios in the future and, to that extent, discussions over wage capping and fit and proper persons have placed the Football League in the forefront of reconsidering corporate governance in our industry. It is the belief of the Board that this type of re-evaluation will continue in the forthcoming years.
The loss of TV revenue generated by remaining in Division two has led to the establishment of further commercial undertakings to increase the level of revenues generated from this area. However, it has been an uphill battle, particularly in the area of advertising and sponsorship.
Revenues from this area will have remained constant and have not seen the exponential increase that we would have hoped to have seen during the successful run from Christmas through to May 2003.
This lack of revenue has caused the Board to review the structure of our youth system and recommendations were put in place in the summer of 2003 for a number of teams in our schoolboy section to be reduced from five teams to three.
At the AGM in May 2003, the meeting approved the raising of the number of shares available in the company to 100,000,000 and the Board has worked tirelessly to sell these shares on and raise further equity to underwrite the losses during the period. As the season wore on and the team became more successful the number of enquiries for large portions of shares increased.