‘FROM A FINANCIAL POINT OF VIEW THE BEST WAY TO GO UP IS THROUGH THE PLAY OFFS’
PORT Vale will earn around £500,000 more in central payments from the Premier League and EFL as a League One club than they received in League Two.
But although welcome, chief executive Colin Garlick says the money isn’t a ‘windfall’ as such because the player wage bill will rise and they are also spending off the pitch.
He says the money will help the club grow but points out that owners Carol and Kevin Shanahan have already invested heavily in Vale, not least when they invested more than £1m extra to get the club through the 2021/22 season played behind closed doors.
Money spent includes making sure 72-year-old Vale Park complies with safety regulations while plans include improving the training facilities and investing in staff and the academy in the belief that, as the first-team improves, there has to be the infrastructure behind it to match. That has started to pay off with, for example, the appointment of the club’s first director of football David Flitcroft, in February 2021, before manager Darrell Clarke led the club to promotion last season. Garlick, below, said: “I think you have to look at everything Carol and Kevin have done in the three years they have been here, bearing in mind we have the difficulty of covid when nobody was coming in and so capacity didn’t matter in that sense. “There is a lot of stuff that has gone on, a lot of money that has been spent on compliance and improvements The PA system, for one example. “People don’t see that but there are significant amounts of money being spent. “Under the ownership of Carol and Kevin we have invested in players on the pitch, in the management structure to support the players, in staffing….from commercially to the facilities to regulatory things, there has been so much spent in all areas on the business.
“It has not just been, ‘let’s go and get success on the pitch, we will plough money into the playing budget’.
“This has been about improving all areas of the business and we have made so much progress in the three years.
“That’s a relatively short time, especially when you take out the 15 or 18 months of covid when the season was called to a halt in the March then we went through the whole of the following season behind closed doors.
“Achieving community club of the year in 2020/21 on the back of all this in what is three years of ownership and the progress we have made is unbelievable really.
“There is still some work to be done and it is ongoing because this is a big stadium and a hell of a stadium to maintain, but the resource has gone in to be able to do that.”
Vale will profit from larger attendances next season, not least away support with Sheffield Wednesday, Derby and Bolton all coming to Burslem.
The club also made money from going up through the play-offs. Garlick added: “If you are going to go up then, from a financial point of view, the way to do it is through the play-offs. From the semi-finalists point of view, the takings from each of the four games goes into the pot that goes off into the Football League. So much goes into the pot and the remainder is split equally between the four teams.
“The final follows pretty much the same pattern. Wembley Stadium has to be paid for staging an event like that, the Football League pool takes it out and then there is a percentage of that that comes to the clubs that was split equally between ourselves and our opponents Mansfield.
“It is good money that wasn’t budgeted for at the start of the year and there are spin offs from that in terms of the commercial side of things.
“We saw in the shop before the build up to the semi-final and the final, the merchandise and people wanting to go to Wembley.
“We sold more than 17,000 tickets for Wembley. Also, for the playoff semi-final we had here, with hospitality, and the crowd we had, that increased money and turnover which is positive.
“But people can get carried away about the amount of money we are making. There are significant costs with putting on a game like the semifinal.”