Joe Gorman, Exeter City CEO: ‘The Club with 4700 Owners!’ (Ep65)

0:00So we are fan owned, we have 4 ,700 fan owners. You're talking to a complete diverse range of individuals. Some have brilliant business experience, others have absolutely no interest in spending X amount on a designer. Their general attitude will be spend that on the pitch. We talk about sustainability in football all the time, yet we're talking about sustainability in the context of losing money. The bit I fear is wage inflation. You compare last year's average wage budget in the league was around 4 million. this year it's 6.2 probably because there's other owners there trying to compete one of the very first conversations I had with our academy director is how do you develop players for the first team he's like we don't we develop premier league players and it clicks in your mind and go okay I get it now the ex-city first team is a step on their journey I get frustrated where you get patted on the head of well done you're well run club you're not a threat to us there's a mentality shift with us where actually we want to compete and I think that helps just generally of driving the club forward.

1:27the business make sense. Punching above their weight for many years, the club sits in League One alongside mega-rich teams like Birmingham and Wrexham and are more than competitive while doing so. But how does a club owned by 4 ,700 fans paying£24 a year compete at the top level? How have they turned a£5 million investment into the academy into a£20 million return? And why is Joe adamant this is a club here to be the best football team, not just a pat on the head and applaud for doing things unusually well. It's a truly unique model. This is a truly unique conversation. We're delighted to welcome Joe to the business of sport.

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2:41They are trusted by winning owners, athletes and agents in the Premier League, WSL, NBA, NFL, PGA Tour and Olympic sport. Orico's evidence base supports hyper-personalized training and nutrition suggestions, helping accelerate recovery, optimize performance, and prolong careers. You can get in contact to find out more on humans at orico.ai, that's O-R-R-E-C-O dot A-I, and the link is also in the bio below. So talk to them before your competition does. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Business of Sport. No, thank you for having me. So I'm very excited for this. This is my university football club.

3:20So I feel like I know a bit more about Exeter City than I do many of the conversations that we have. But I want to get straight into what I would say is the most interesting part about this conversation, which is actually the ownership model and the structure of the club. Can you give us a little bit of indication of how the business of Exeter is actually set up? So we are fan owned. So we have 4 ,700 trust members or fan owners. They pay minimum£24 a year. Out of those 4 ,700, you'll get a board of trustees. So there's 12 trustees. Each year, there is an election. So three of those trustees will tend to either come off and three more come on.

4:02to be up for election you have to write a manifesto and that can effectively be something as simple as i'm going to make sure the pasties are warm on a saturday to i want to change the way we run the football club or our view on green sustainable energy all those kind of bits it can literally be really vast and then those members will vote for those trustees to come in so the three trustees the board basically so 12 trustees of the board and then out of that are three of those are then elected to the club board so on the club board you'll have three trustees so effectively your fan representatives and then you'll have three non-exec directors that can vote and a chair and then we've got some associate directors as well that are kind of there for subject matter expertise 24 pounds a year 24 pounds a year yeah pretty great deal to be part of honestly so that generates 100 grand a year so 100 grand a year will come across from the supporters trust into the club and that's effectively goes into our revenue line and we'll use whatever that amount of money can come into the cost base they also fund other different projects so we for example last year we bought the freehold to our training ground and that was funded via a loan between the club and the supporters trust how much does that type of thing cost you to we actually we got an incredible deal with that so basically a friend of the club So we were renting at Friend of the Club.

5:27Unfortunately, she passed away. Part of her will was that she wanted the club to buy the land. So now we own freehold to the training ground. We also bought part of our stadium, which was also another loan from Supporters Trust to club. And the idea, so currently Supporters Trust own 58 % of the club. And we've got some kind of silent individuals that don't, they probably don't even realise they've got shares in Exeter City. So we're trying to get to... How could that happen? How do you mean? Well, so basically just historically, during each of the kind of transactions, you've basically got these kind of leftover shares, effectively.

6:04And the trust have been trying to kind of mop up the shares from individuals right into them. There's a few in estates and things like that. So they're trying to get to their ultimate aim is to get to 75 % ownership. Part of the loans between Sports Trust and Club mean we'll probably convert those to equity at some point. And this is probably something that's come in. So I joined the club 18 months ago. And as the chief financial officer, probably things that they've never really kind of thought about before. Actually, it probably kind of mirrors the transition in terms of being supporter owned, but ran by effectively volunteers to a more kind of professional.

6:45We're employing people for skill sets now. And these are the kind of natural transitions you'd expect to happen. So I mean, everyone will go, here we go again. Normally we sit on here and the biggest topic for discussion in a football club ownership piece is the reliance on owner financing. Yeah. And the need for people to dip into their own pockets to support and prop up these clubs. I'm guessing you can't do that in the same way. So how do you create a business model that works for you where you don't have to rely on that funding, but you can still perform and achieve on the football pitch? Yeah, so it gets more and more difficult, I think, each year.

7:25So like I said, we have 100 grand from the supporters trust. So again, going back 18 months, we were very risk averse. So if the kind of business I came into was cost prudent, they would take probably the path of less risk, which meant they built up incredible cash reserves. But we were sat with quite a bit in the bank and no real treasury management. So even kind of basic interest rates or bonds or savings accounts, those kind of things just weren't happening. So what we do now is forecast was only ever really 12 months in. So we've now rolled out kind of five-year forecasts. We will look at cash.

8:04The way we make decisions are, okay, if nothing happens, if we don't sell a player, if we carry on with the operational loss, we lose roughly one and a half million pound a year operationally. So if everything was true and we didn't sell a player or we didn't get any contingent payments in, when do we run out of cash? So what's our kind of drop dead date? And then based on that, we'll create a cash runway. So then if we sell a player, that cash runway extends. If we need to put more money into the playing budget, which we consistently have to do, that cash runway gets shorter. and then it's going back to board and supporters trust going are you comfortable with this runway if we then to make a business decision so again go back to the cost prudency it also meant we wouldn't spend 20 grand to make 50 whereas now i think that's what me and the the previous ceo to me a guy called jeremy tipper came in and kind of i've always been very growth mindset invest to make money back so do we we can do this project now or maybe we need to start looking at asset financing and those kind of bits that's a big shift in mentality yeah and generally people don't like change so how did you get them comfortable with the idea that you're going to be spending before you see a return so the it was it's still a journey we're still on it now i've got a chief operating officer that is still very prudent but it's being able to smell opportunities it's all about people so that the whole business is about getting the right people in the right places we've now been able to have the conversations that then allow us to make a decision and then we have a club trust agreement so there's parameters that the club can work within so if we need to go above above that certain spending limit we need to go to trust and get approval so we have to have a really good business case and you're also then not talking to potentially business-minded people.

9:59So it's, why would you spend, for example, we're going through a process now bringing LED boards in. So why would you spend 250 grand on LED boards? Why don't you just go buy a striker? And actually it's kind of giving that business case, okay, 250, we get a return on that. This is how much we'll generate. It makes the business grow. Our revenue growth has been really good within the 18 months. Me and Jeremy were in the business. Jeremy's now exited the business and I kind of transitioned into CEO six months ago. So it's moving people's mindsets, but also allowing an environment where you're allowed to get things wrong.

10:31So that cash runway, it does allow for failure as long as we kind of learn from failure. We won't ever innovate if we don't kind of take some calculated risks. Do you think this model makes everyone within the club a little bit more conscious about making every pound spent go a little bit further? That iconic former guest Charlie Metham seen in Sunderland Till I Die when he walks in and he just explains the finances to the team. And the main point is football clubs generally do have a mentality of the people in the clubs where it's not my money, it'll be covered and people are very profligate.

11:03But in this model, you can't be. So while it may be a problem in some ways, does it create much better efficiencies so that you're actually able to go and do good business in football, which as we know, it's quite hard to achieve? Yeah, definitely. I think the other kind of element of that it also allows us to like ticket price we're quite high for League One but I think we've got so many invested stakeholders that you probably do get away with a little bit more than maybe other clubs do what is the ticket price? our match day price would be£27 our season ticket's£515 really? adult yeah so we're very high but we're we've got standing and seated so that would be the seated price and then standings about$350 for a season ticket.

11:48Okay. But the fans? I think the fans accept it because we're fan-owned. So it's not like a high net worth individual is taking the money out of your pocket. They kind of understand that this is the environment we're competing in. So I probably do need to pay a little bit more for my ticket price season ticket. But we'll do things like, I think this is the bit that's really important in terms of that relationship between club and owner, fan. not an forest game we didn't inflate ticket prices and that's the club knowing that it's unbudgeted income it's also an incredible event where we will get brilliant press coverage there's a business decision there where we go actually would we pay x for the coverage we'll get by not raising ticket prices so fa cup nottingham forest at home you take them to extra time as well so yeah last year it would have been replay so yeah but like what does that do for your bottom line And how much difference does that make?

12:44Yeah, that was kind of quarter of a million pounds for one off game. Because we were on telly. We brought LED boards in just for the game. So we also obviously sold out. And then food and beverage on the back of it. So you kind of quarter of a million for that game roughly. But the best thing about it was, you know, I couldn't have written a script for ITV to have talked about our football club in the way they did. In what way? In just every message that we'd want to get across in terms of fan ownership, sustainable doing it differently all those messages came across so that for me was worth probably a bit more than the loss revenue that we would have got because we'd have sold out anyway even if we'd put the ticket prices up by 10 pound probably so what's annual turnover how much are you making a year so we turn over between seven and eight million that's kind of split between 30 percent of that would be central revenue gates would be about two million commercial revenue probably a million.

13:41Retail, retail is really interesting actually, it's about 600 grand, but 80 % of that is done through a club shop online. So again, you look at these little bits and you go, I've never worked in a business where bricks and mortar shops outweigh online sales. So that again, you go, okay, that's a growth area. What can we do about that? And then we've got kind of obviously you get central academy funding and stuff like that. So that's roughly our breakdown. What are the budgets that you set on, I guess, mostly on a player side, right? Because that's where a huge amount of the expense goes yeah that's probably 45 of our cost base is player budget so we do we're third lowest budget in league one so we're three and a half this year and then that kind of again this is this is probably one of the bits where not for maybe a frustration actually is gary and the football staff could outperform playing budget and still get relegated because they could finish fourth and bottom outperform your playing budget and obviously bottom four go down so he is constantly outperforming his budget we finished 13th last year and we i do a i look at a metric of kind of if if you're so say we're third lowest so if we finished 22nd that would be our if every if everybody's money went to the same the same length so everybody spends a pound and that's where you get to we're about i think we're one pound 30 this year so where we where we are currently is we we would have to spend one pound 30 for our pound to actually get that in terms of pounds spent on playing budget shrewsbury very own liam dooley turned around and said it almost becomes a bit of a kpi a little competition within the league to outperform your budget absolutely and and that's the thing we have to outperform our budget to stay up yeah yeah and it's it's it's one of those where you wish sometimes on a saturday afternoon at five o 'clock you wish you could give context so like when we're playing a Birmingham or we play Wrexham this Saturday so when we're playing them you know you're playing against a team that's probably four times your budget.

15:41Are you hosting some A-listers? I don't know actually I think we've got some the documentary people have definitely been in touch so I don't know whether the A-listers are down or not and again it's these moments where kind of you go to stuff okay what are we going to how do we take advantage of this what do we move into what what doors does this open for us and that's the great thing about league one and the and to be fair EFL commercial deals we were at the EFL conference and had kind of CBS coming over and I think I was texting our technical director going okay we need to sign an American player or these kind of things and it makes you think slightly differently and again this I think this goes back into one of the biggest drivers for us is again not relying on that owner we we have to be so smart on what markets we would go into or things that we do because we're competing against these huge institutions effectively.

16:32And it makes you realize how well you're doing sometimes when you're kind of going and talking to these other clubs. I always compare it to public, it's almost public service and private sector. My previous life I did insolvencies. So public sector are probably not very commercial because they don't need to be, as private sector, you have to generate money or otherwise you don't have a job. So it's that kind of mentality and that's probably a similar mentality to how I view Exeter City. It'd be very easy to be resentful for a lot of teams in the league when you do have something like a Wrexham, like a Birmingham, making a huge amount of money, being able to spend in ways you can't.

17:09This year, looking at League One, the teams are huge. There are some massive clubs in there. How is that competitive balance at the moment? Do you fear that the gap is getting bigger and bigger? where it is making it harder for a club like you without the spending power, without the structures to go and implement massive strategic shift? Yeah, I can see the benefit of having them in the league. The bit I fear is then wage inflation. So you compare last year's average wage budget in the league was around 4 million. This year it's 6.2. And you take the big clubs out and it's 5.5. So wage inflation's going up anyway, probably because there's other owners there trying to compete.

17:45Everything's the same. The pool of players hasn't changed. So until you've got a world where, and to be fair, this is probably one of the bits that I, I don't know whether I probably stand slightly different to other, I guess, other football clubs in terms of we talk about sustainability in football all the time. Yet we're talking about sustainability in football in the context of losing money. So that is just not sustainable. and I think sustainability has almost become a bit of a buzzword for just if we say that fans will like that so we're going to say we're sustainable but then again the kind of the other side of my brain is going I'm fundamentally like a capitalist and would like investment into football and I completely get in terms of EFL we'll need investment constant owners coming into that cycle Is the Wrexham and Birmingham participation the rising tide lifting all boats and the extent where it does You've talked about CBS being in conferences.

18:42Let's face it, you're not directly necessarily getting the benefits of Wrexham and Birmingham succeeding in the way they are, but what you are getting is an increased exposure and eyeballs in places you maybe wouldn't have done, which is so important to developing a club, right? And that's exactly it. So now it's up to us to take advantage of it. And that's what I try and reiterate to the staff all the time, is we could sit there and complain that we increase our playing budget and we don't move up places in the league. Or we could smell the opportunity. I'm talking about smelling the opportunity before.

19:12What can we do? Because from my mind, we talk about Wrexham and Birmingham. Our model is completely different to all other 92 football clubs, Wimbledon probably slightly closer to us. So why can't we sell that? So who are we engaging with? What employee-owned companies are we engaging with? What companies that have the similar values to us are we engaging with? We don't take gambling sponsorship yet. Currently, we don't really shout about taking gambling sponsorship and it probably looks like we just can't get it. whereas actually let's stand up for what we are. Let's be loud about what we are.

19:50Let's do shows like this that kind of highlight the club we are and that hopefully then attracts other businesses, national brands to want to get involved with us because we're almost an antithesis to what football is. It's hard to differentiate yourself in this environment, right? Exactly. Everyone's kind of the same in many ways. Exactly. The difference is players and position. Yeah, exactly that. But we have a genuine USP that we can sell or try and commercialise commercialise. And I go back to when the CBS guys came back, Green Bay Packers. So again, kind of member-owned, fan-owned. Does CBS open up a door for us to go and talk to Green Bay Packers?

20:28Or there's loads of kind of football clubs in the US, the European model in terms of 50 plus, 50 plus one ownership. This is the age-old challenge between the business side that goes on and running that efficiently and also then the performance on the pitch. How's it been going on the pitch this season because again you seem to be let's face it outperforming your budget but at the same time you know it's it's difficult to continue doing that yeah absolutely so we're i think we're doing okay what we the last two seasons what we've tended to do is get off to a really quick start so everybody kind of talking start talking playoffs and things like that and you kind of you know it's you know at some point we'll go through a dip i think when i joined we didn't win for 100 days correlation yeah well maybe and then there was a there was that to be fair it was great for me it was straight into the fire of like okay this is what this is what it is and we've gone for a slightly sticky period to this year and then we after the forest game we sent the the players went to La Manga because we basically went through a state a period of and this again goes back into the football and that and the way we design our squads is we lost Tristan Crammer to got recalled to Brentford sold to Millwall Tristan Crammer pre-season was effectively sent back by Bristol Rovers.

21:41So we've taken a player, developed him for Brentford. Brentford have then sold him, but we've lost probably our best player. We had a couple of injuries in defence. We ended up, what was going to be a quiet new transfer window, we sold Milly Alley on the three days before the window closed. So what was going to be a quiet transfer window became, I think we signed nine players, I think, in the end. So we had a group of squad that we needed to get back together really quickly so we do mainly due to the fa cup run the thing we had a bit of spare funds we sent them to you know quick as we're getting people together is putting them together so sent them to the manga for four days and we've not been beaten since so hopefully that's the key anyone listening who wants to turn their form around yeah there's also that but then again you take that context of being fan owned in and it's like why are they going on holiday they're not one for x amount of games i I guess it's those decisions that you make in terms of those elements of it.

22:36If you lose a player like that on loan, that it has a serious markup on the club that you loan them to, how do they influence your decision making? Because them just being able to recall and then sell halfway through a season where you've probably got that player in to rely on him for a full season, that's a problem. I think there's a twofold to it. One, we will now get players because they know we develop players. We had a similar instance last year where we took Will Sinasalo from Villa. he was on loan the previous season to Burton wasn't getting a game, was on the bench he was probably not kind of on Villa's radar so we'd take him on loan and then in that summer after he wins all our Player of the Year awards that summer they sell him to Celtic so we're now starting to get a reputation of developing loan players as well and we play a style of football that suits that deliberately it's a possession based style so we'll get hopefully good quality loans people are starting to recognise that we're really good at developing loan players for them.

23:33We go into it eyes open, so there will always be kind of a recall clause in January, but the thing that you probably need to get a bit better at is when a Tristan Kramer goes, we've got a list of 10 players underneath that that will go, okay, we'll just go get him. Or the flip side of that is we've got a really good relationship with Brentford where they will realise what they're doing in terms of taking our kind of best defender out of our team. So there's probably an element of us being able to get, we got Ryan Travitt and Tony Ugane on loan for the rest of the season as well, who were two really good, well thought of Brentford.

24:08Did that relationship stem from Olly Watkins? Or was that already there? Yeah, yeah. So we've got some, yeah, there was a relationship there with Brentford. But we'll do, we kind of go and, Marcus will go around clubs, Marcus and Gary will go around clubs in the summer and pitch. But we've got tangible evidence now of us being able to go, okay, look what we did with Wilson and Salo, look what we've done with Tristan Kramer, send us your best loan players. So do you take a loan structure, a loan approach to recruitment as a result of an ownership structure that you have that maybe doesn't allow you significant outlay in transfers like other clubs can?

24:43Yeah, so we'll do our structure effectively or our squad makeup is effectively youth players. So obviously you're paying less for a first, second year scholar than you are for an experienced professional. So that makes up a bulk of our, probably between three and five of our squad. And then we'll take five loans and we get quite good loan rates. So it allows us to invest in other players. And then we'll have kind of three probably cultural players. So more experienced, higher level, been there, done it. But they set the kind of tone. They're almost your kind of like coaches winning the thing. And then what the other bit that we're starting to develop is investing in players.

25:21So we bought Mili Ali 30th of January 2024 for five figures, sold him 30th of January 2025 for well into seven figures. So that make up in one year, there's not much better ROI for that. And then we also, previous year, we sold Sam Nonde for, bought him for six figures, sold him for seven figures. We quite often talk about that as the football lottery. Yeah. And what we mean by that is you run an academy system or you run a loan structure and one day you may get a return that is significant and gives you an injection of money that you may not have been able to account for. But actually this isn't the football lottery for you, is it?

25:59That's a very clear strategic objective to improve the business of Exeter, the club. Yeah. So we picture ourselves as kind of an opportunity club, whether that is players, whether that's youth. And then the youth specifically, we are Cat 3 Academy. so you get x amount of funding for being a category three academy but we will we staff it as almost like we're a cat two academy so i think we're i think we're maybe an analyst off being what a cat two academy would be a staffing levels and we so over i think it's the last 11 years we've invested five million pounds into our academy but that's generated us 20 million in player sales and The bit that I love is the 40, I think it's 46 % of it is up front fees.

26:43So I almost call them like seeds. So we'll sell a player, use Jay Stansfield as an example, sold him at 15 for six figures. He played 10 times for Fulham before he got sold. So we got another six figure in. And then obviously Birmingham buy him and we've got a decent 20 % sell on with that. I mean, Birmingham buy him for a price that is more than the turnover of a lot of clubs in the league, right? Exactly. So the impact for you is when you do that, is that like a 5%, 10 %? Yes, we'll always have, I mean, we're normally 15 % to 20 % sell-ons. And then what we're quite good at is putting contingents in.

27:19So if you play 10 games, we will get 50 grand. If you pay an international appearance, we'll get X. We would normally take a lower fee for more contingents. I remember one of the very first conversations I had with Aaron Pugh, our academy director, is how do you develop players for the first team? He's like, we don't. We develop Premier League players. and it kind of clicks in your mind and go okay I get it now the ex-city first team is just a step on their journey again I mean you could name them Oli Watkins Ethan Ampdo if Leeds get promoted this season we get an amount of money because there's sell-ons there I really saw success because I mean his journey isn't even direct to Leeds and you still have an involvement so he went to Chelsea yeah it's kind of the only time it the only time it ends is when a if he were to leave on a free transfer so it's kind of almost a residual we're almost 20 % of Chelsea's 20 % because the Oli Watkins transfer I think wasn't it initially it was like 2 million or just under for the club but the 20 % odd sell on clause which was when we had Paul Tisdale on the show former manager he said a key reason why the deal with Brentford was so attractive was because of that sell on and that netted when he went to Villa for about 30 million 4 to 5 million pounds for the club so you almost double it so in the because you've developed a player that you back then to go on and be really successful so it and that's a conscious decision.

28:37And also it's not specific to each player. So we might do one where we go, okay, we'll take more up front and those kinds of deals exist as well. It's not like a template and we'll just send that template out. Everyone's looked at completely separately. And so even then, let's say, again, Ollie Watkins' example, if that four to five million comes through the salon, is that then paid to you over the duration of the transfer fee that Villa pay Brentford? So it's a continual influx of that money. Yeah, the most recent one, Jay Stansfield. So I think Tom, the Birmingham owner, came out and said what a great deal it was because it was over seven years.

29:14The fee was back-ended to years six and seven. Drink Chelsea Kool-Aid. Exactly. Well, football, yeah, football and Klarna. But that for us is, so now I'm there with a, so we'll book that profit this year. So I've now got to pay a corporation tax. we run the business to be not loss making so I've not got allowable losses to come and wipe up the profit I'm going to book so I've got a corporation tax bill that is bigger than the money I'm getting in yet kind of two people over here have made a deal so when I'm involved in a deal I would make sure all my liabilities are covered so it's it's kind of it's great for everybody else and Fulham will make losses so the 50 million profit they book in year one they'll just write off losses I've then not got an owner to go to and go okay we know we get an X amount over this seven year period can you basically give us the money front it up so we can go and invest in infrastructure and I think that is purely Chelsea model dripping into League One and that you go back to the question of is Birmingham and Wrexham good I think there's definitely good in them but those kind of player models or transfer models make us almost I mean we'll go out to debt providers and you're looking at okay you can get one million pound up front that you're basically paying another X in interest because of the payment profile back or the amortisation back.

30:35Let's look at how the people around the club then interact with this model. So start with the fans. And I'm paraphrasing, you haven't said this specifically, but a stepping stone type approach as a club may not be what the fans really want the club to be. But there's also a reality to where you are. And if you can keep the performance up, I'm sure they're very happy. From your experience at the club, How have the fans accepted and approached this model? Yeah, I think they are very accepting of it. I think they take longer to turn on performance. They kind of stick with the team a bit longer. There's always a noisy kind of minority that will kind of vocalise an opinion maybe before you want to.

31:13But the big thing for me is that they're educating the opinion. So we'll try and do fans forums where I talk quite openly about the challenges we face, the way the model works. if you take the last two seasons tell Sam Ndombe our kind of star striker the day of the transfer window so Gary goes into a six month period without a striker we do we sell Ameliali our top goalscorer this year and are you tempted to not do those deals? so I I will always call Gary and go are you sure? and this is where Gary's really good like in terms of he completely gets the model of the club so he's like yeah it'll make my job harder but this is the club he's fully aware and buys into that model and that's like he must get a buzz off finding one of those and I think we're the other bit is we don't go through managers as quickly as other clubs and that's a deliberate there's a deliberateness in that in terms of we have to take a long term view yeah but that's very easy to say and a lot of clubs do say it yeah it's actually very hard to stick to when results don't work so to actually do that is quite again unique yeah but again we're really open in terms of how we Gary comes of obviously board meetings every month.

32:22We're very open in terms of what we expect of him. And we're also, I think we're quite cognizant of the fact of the condition he's working in as well. It's the people, the teams he's competing against and he does compete. I think the other bit that's probably been slightly different and obviously I've never experienced a different manager at City, but Gary's a winner and that whole winning mentality, like when you've won, you always want to win. And I think that goes back to a previous question of how do we get staff in that mindset? I think Gary really helps that in terms of we don't want to be little old Exeter City.

32:57I get frustrated where you almost get patted on the head of like, well done, you're a well-run club, but you're not a threat to us. There's a mentality shift with us where actually we want to compete. And I think that helps just generally of driving the club forward. What about to take this club to the next level? Does this model work? Could you operate this model in the championship? Probably not. So there's a bigger picture to that in terms of if we went into the championship, we've got largest standing terrace in the UK. So if we went into the championship, we'd have to change that terrace to safe standing.