Chief Executive on planning for Huddersfield Town’s future
- Chief Executive Mark Devlin discusses Coronavirus effects on budgets
- Senior Management Team working hard to get through COVID-19 pandemic
- Watch the full interview below on #HTTV
Huddersfield Town’s Chief Executive Mark Devlin explained how the Club is currently working through the COVID-19 pandemic.
As explained last week, Devlin explained how the current situation will change the future of football and he detailed how Coronavirus immediately changed the budgets and finances of the Terriers.
“We’d already started to work on a budget and weren’t far off having a budget ready to go into the new season and to get signed off by the shareholders; that’s had to be completely re-worked.
“It’s now working on a number of scenarios. It was initially working on perhaps playing football again by June with crowds, that looks like it was never going to happen, then it was June without crowds, then it was maybe September.
“Now some of the advice we are given is that we are unlikely to have crowds into a Stadium much before December; that takes away a huge amount of our revenue.
“This is the challenge; how do you continue to a business like a football club when there’s no money coming in but you still have salaries to pay, costs to meet and you want to make sure this club, that’s been around for so long, is fit enough and lean enough to come out of the other side.”
Devlin detailed how difficult the next few months will be for the Football Club.
“I’ve been working with the Senior Management Team on what we need to do and what actions we need to take.
“This is going to be a really tough eight-month period, but it’s important that we all work really hard to meet the challenge, which I’m sure we will do.
“One thing I will say about the Club is that we have some quality individuals in the organisation. The Club is very lucky to have really good staff; they understand the serious nature of what we are facing.
“We want to make sure we do what we have to do to bring the Club through this crisis.”
Town’s Chief Executive thanked the Club’s supporters for their continued backing as the he tries to plan for the future.
“The word is completely overused these days, but it is completely unprecedented. You couldn’t have budgeted for this.
“You can budget for highs and lows, but what’s really difficult to budget for is completely having your revenue streams dry up overnight.
“Fortunately, we still have fans, and we are really grateful to them, renewing their Season Cards even though we can’t yet tell them when next season will start and what it’ll look like; that’s what loyal football fans do because they want to support their football club.
“Fans are still buying merchandise too, so we have a little bit of money coming in, but as you can imagine it’s nothing compared to what the Club needs to run properly.
“What we are focusing on at the moment is the next 6-8 months and what we need to do. If certain things fall into place come early 2021, hopefully fans will be able to come into the Stadium.
“Will we be able to have a full Stadium, or will the Government say we can only have 50% capacity, we just don’t know those details yet.
“We are working blind. There’s completely uncertainty, but despite that we are working really hard to pull the Club through this really testing period, so they have a club that they can still support that’s in good shape going into the next calendar year.”
Watch the full interview below on #HTTV!
