Numbers didn’t add up for loss-making ladies

PArAgON INTerIOrS, an office design firm based in Nottingham, was recently named one of the ‘1,000 Companies To Inspire Britain’ by the London Stock exchange. Around the same time it won the ‘Sunday Times Best Company To Work For’ in the category for businesses with less than 250 staff. ‘I just love employing people and giving them an opportunity to grow,’ said chief executive officer Alan Hardy, a view that will be met with derision in some quarters, Hardy being the man who has just wound up Notts County Ladies football team, two days before the start of the Women’s Super League season. ‘Thanks Notts County,’ tweeted midfielder Danielle Buet. ‘Been left jobless and homeless.’ County’s demise may have an impact on the national team too, with four members of Mark Sampson’s england squad now out of work. As someone who loves being an employer, one imagines this was not a decision Hardy — the new owner of Notts County’s teams, male and female — took lightly. His statement encapsulated the gulf between the ambition for women’s football in this country and the economic reality. The women’s league, you will notice, is already ‘Super’. The england team are branded ‘Lionesses’ and the FA take every opportunity to promote them commercially. Yet when Hardy set out his reasons for folding Notts County Ladies, a different picture emerged. ‘Continuing would have been little short of financial suicide,’ he explained. ‘When I took over the club, HMrC and other creditors had in excess of £350,000 of unpaid liabilities. Additionally, I was extremely concerned that to operate Notts County Ladies for the current season was going to cost us approximately £500,000 — a figure principally made up of player and coaching salaries. Our total projected incoming revenue from attendances and sponsorship was £28,000.’ Buet remained unimpressed. ‘Apparently we cost too much,’ she added. Well, to be blunt, yes they did — £472,000 too much, at a club that already owed £350,000 to the government and others. What should Hardy have done? Carried on blithely down this road to financial oblivion? A football club is not a charity. It is not taxed like one, it cannot file accounts like one. Yet women’s football exists in conflicting states: professionalism and a hard commercial sell on one hand, the indulgence of giant losses without economic reckoning on the other. Sheik Mansour can afford this dichotomy at Manchester City; Notts County cannot. When creditors come calling Notts County are very much in the real world. The previous chairman, ray Trew, took over with the club having been served two winding-up petitions by HMrC for £500,000; Hardy came in with the club £350,000 in arrears and under a transfer embargo. How can any owner marry that with the fantasy of wearing a £472,000 deficit, to keep a dream alive? The projected loss for the Ladies team would equate to the last signing of significance made by the club: Kasper Schmeichel, from Manchester City, in 2009. The total transfer expenditure by Notts County since that date probably does not amount to £472,000. Viewed dispassionately, this is simply an overplayed hand. The pitch is that Women’s Super League attendances are ‘rocketing’ — in real terms this represents a rise in average attendances of 52, from 1,076 to 1,128, and a 50 per cent boom in gates at Manchester City accounts for most of that. Notts County? Last season, crowds fell by 17 per cent to below the national average, from 1,324 to 1,100. How, in that climate, can Hardy push on? However inspirational his companies, the numbers have to add up. If Paragon Interiors lost £472,000 annually, it would not be part of the best 1,000 anything. It would close. That’s the reality.