Julia Chapman: Winning Titles, Controlled Spending & The Henry Pollock Effect | The Northampton Saints Story (Ep110)

24:09Julia Chapman:And we have, I would just say, punched above our weight in that respect in previous years where we haven't been spending near the top in terms of the salary cap, but we have finished near the top or top in terms of performance. I don't necessarily think that's sustainable or a reasonable thing to expect us to be able to sustain for the long term. So I think if you want to, you know, finish top four consistently, you probably need to be spending top four consistently and that is a challenge for a club that doesn't have the deepest pockets and so our academy pathway is critically important for us in terms of how we manage that player life cycle and being able to identify that talent early is really important to us and you will have seen players like well Henry Pollock when he first came into the squad, Archie McParlane, Edo Todoro, players like that that have come up through our academy and had their opportunities really, really early on with the senior squad.

25:06Julia Chapman:One of the things we talk about with our academy is that it's less important for the academy itself to be successful in winning things. And obviously we like to win things and we did win the academy league title last season. But what's more important is those players get the opportunity to develop, to make mistakes and to learn what it means to be in a professional environment. so we will always choose a squad to maximise those player development opportunities over the squad that we think is going to win the academy game. The other thing we want to be judged on as an academy is the experience that those young people have because not everybody is going to get a contract but we want everybody to have got something out of working with us so what they say about us if they haven't got a contract is almost more important than those that do.

26:00And you have a Bedford relationship as well, correct?

26:02Julia Chapman:Yeah, we have a really important relationship with Bedford and they're an excellent club. They have a really strong business model and one of the few, if not the only club that is actually profitable and sustainable. Our relationship with them is really important in terms of providing our academy players with some proper competitive game time. And it works really well because their style of play and we have a a strong kind of coaching link up with them is very similar to Saints. So we can send players there, you know, they can perform for Bedford, they can get really important experience playing a very similar style.

26:36Julia Chapman:And then when we're ready to bring them in, they're sort of ready to step into that senior environment straight away. For you to be able to spend more or to do more, you obviously want to make more money. Profitability, as we've mentioned, I am sure is a key aim. in the model how are you addressing those conversations around profitability where where do you see as those key opportunities to try and achieve that i suppose there's kind of three things three levers that we can pull um one is doing the things we already do and the best possible way that we can to optimize them one is being innovative and coming up with new ideas or building on things that we already do well and to drive more revenue and the third lever is investment.

27:23Julia Chapman:So if I talk about the first one, so the most obvious one there is ticketing. So we have been seeing an increasing number of sellouts. We've consistently sold out every Prem game this season and for the last part of last season. So if you're already selling out, how do you make more money from ticketing whilst at the same time making sure our prices are affordable and that our supporters can still come and watch us? So - A good problem to have. Yeah, and it is a great problem to have. And I think we look at where do we have opportunities? So where are we perhaps giving away discounts or tickets that we don't need to?

27:59Julia Chapman:Where are we having empty seats because a season ticket holder hasn't been able to come to that game? And we can encourage them to sell that ticket on. And then there's a bum on the seat and that person is hopefully buying a drink and buying some food. How can we sell out the games that we're not currently selling out? And a good example of that would be the Prem Cup, although we have actually had a pretty good record on selling that game this season as well. But that's one of the things that Prem are looking to reinvigorate that competition and give that a strong new identity. So that's an opportunity for us and all the clubs.

28:33Do you have an exchange at the moment where a season ticket holder can go back into the club, put their ticket on?

28:38Julia Chapman:Yeah, so our ticketing platform supports resale. So you can just go on and sell it on to another supporter if you can't come. And how's the hospitality? and like should we say the the nice like the tear up how's that been performing for you how's that been managed has it been yeah i mean that that's also been performing really strongly um and i know when i when i joined the club nearly 10 years ago um the market trend was we were told that hospitality boxes were no longer sort of the thing that people wanted and they were much more into shared spaces and casual dining and street food offers and all of those sorts of things and we consistently sell out every single one of our hospitality boxes every season and again so that's an area where investment would help because we are probably ripe for a bit of an upgrade in one or two of our hospitality areas and we've introduced something called the gardens grill which is a marquee um that we put up on one of our training pitches which is and it's a it's a really high end offer and it's proven really really popular the garden grill the gardens grill yeah you should Probably come and check that out.

29:37That sounds delicious. What about, you say innovation. We hear innovation a lot. And it must be challenging when you do, you know, you sit down and write, you go, innovation. How are we going to do it? And then actually putting some of that into practice.

29:53Julia Chapman:Yeah. Have you got any examples of some of the things that you've been able to implement that you see as moving the needle for you individually, I guess? So this Lead Like a Saint programme, I think, has got a lot of potential. So this is working with a learning and development professional, but setting that experience in the high performance environment. So giving that real kind of behind the scenes access and then also access to some of our players, coaches and staff internally within the organisation. And that's where I think as a professional sports club, we can create something that isn't readily available in the market.

30:31Julia Chapman:and it's almost a money can buy but a money can't buy type of experience. So that's one area that we've innovated. I think another area is how we can commercialise our content. So we rank very, very highly in terms of our content creation. I think we've got a great team, very innovative, very creative and our reach and our engagement and our followership is amongst the highest in the league. so I think there's an opportunity to commercialise that. On that, what's the difference in the content team today between what it was when you walked through the door 10 years ago? I mean it has grown significantly.

31:12Julia Chapman:It's still a small team I hasten to add but it's grown significantly from a team of one to a team of sort of four or five. We have a videographer who has just been accepted into the performance environment to the extent that he's almost sort of just part of the furniture in the nicest possible way. But that means the quality of content that he can get in terms of behind-the-scenes access. And then when you couple that with the sort of creative brains that we've got in that team, we do put some really special things out there, I think. Do you find the brand's commercial partners, I don't want to say demand, but do you find that they are keen and they want to have more of that content to be able to leverage, to be able to be a part of, maybe to include in some of their packages?

31:54Julia Chapman:Yeah, definitely. And that actually forms part of the packages that we will talk to them about when we're talking about the partnership rights that they're entitled to. And some will want a lot more editorial control over their own content, rightly so. And some will be a lot more open to our kind of crazy ideas and working with us on what we think might resonate with their customers. You were asking me about innovative things that we were doing. Yes. I think I probably should have included that. Okay, perfect. I want to know about innovative things. Tell me. So yeah, tell me. So one of the other things that we're doing, which we think is quite innovative and will be a first in UK sport, I think, is we are creating a memorial garden or a columbarium in our fan village, which is where our supporters will be able to inter ashes of their loved ones for 50 years at the stadium.

32:46Julia Chapman:There are a couple of stadiums in Europe and in America where they have this facility, but as far as I'm aware, it will be a first in the UK. and I think there were 560 niches where you put the ashes of the loved one and then it sits in a discreet garden inside our stadium. People will be able to come and visit and they can be there for 50 years. What did you like about this? Why do you reckon you're the pioneer of this? It sounds like a brilliant initiative. Yeah, and I think it is something of a risk because it does depend very much on whether there's an appetite for this in that sort of location, which is somewhat untested at the moment.

33:30Julia Chapman:It could be a revenue driver for the club, but also we get a lot of requests from supporters asking if they can spread their ashes on the pitch or under the pitch. And we're not obviously able to say yes to those things. And I was talking earlier about the sort of deep engagement that some of our supporters have with the club. So we wanted to offer this, and I guess we'll see whether there's an appetite for it. Third pillar, investment. Tell us about, firstly, I guess before we have investment, should have mentioned it when looking at the structure of the club but I'm assuming everything really today is owner funded.

34:04So what I mean by that is club makes losses really, it's the ownership that has to support the club financially and make sure that everything keeps ticking over and that's obviously a very common model in a lot of sport. how um how's the ownership structure and and where are those opportunities for investment

34:21Julia Chapman:most prominent so i think in terms of the funding of the club so for a period of probably 15 16 years from when we became a plc in 2000 through to around 2015-16 the club was profitable and self-sustainable so it is only relatively recently in the last 10 years that the club has been loss making and we've still got positive P &L reserves on our balance sheet which is quite unusual amongst the clubs and then and so in terms of funding I mean absolutely our current owners you know were the ones that put the initial investment into the club back when we became professional but over the years we haven't had to rely on regular injections of cash from our shareholders to support those losses but I think certainly in my time with the club so the The CVC investment into the league was one of, that was a key cash injection for the club at the time.

35:16Julia Chapman:Unfortunately, we did burn through quite a bit of that during COVID. You're not aware. But then the loans from DCMS were really important for keeping the clubs alive and sustainable through that period. So that was another really important injection of cash at that time. We actually had a donation from a private benefactor that funded the construction of our indoor training centre. so our indoor pitch which was fantastic for the club and then we issued some new shares last year and we have actually just recently had a new investor and a new minority investor invest in the club so we've issued some more shares recently and so we have had to rely on a number of one-off cash injections but they haven't all been sort of going back to the owners um you know for that top up so if if we've had that now and we're that's a really exciting thing i should probably say to bring new investors in and new fresh capital and new ideas I'd assume that come with that for the club are great.

36:14Investment moving forward, is there more that you want to bring into the club? How are the current ownership group looking at and where it can be best put to use?

36:24Julia Chapman:I mean certainly we could go faster if we could invest in the stadium and we have a master plan for the site, for the development of the site. And we've got quite a lot of facilities that are not revenue generating facilities. So for example, you know, some of the performance areas, so offices, changing rooms, gym, medical facilities, they're currently housed inside of one of our stands, where you might normally expect to find hospitality or C &E spaces or bars. We would like to be able to move those out into their own self-contained facility next to our high performance centre, and then we can redevelop those spaces as commercial revenue generating spaces.

37:03Julia Chapman:But that will take a sizable amount of investment. So, you know, we're hoping we'll be able to do that in stages. But, you know, if we could accelerate that, that would be fantastic. Have you got planning challenges with the stadium? If I say at capacity, you know, are you restricted in what you could actually do to build onto it? So, yes, I think if you're talking about adding seating capacity or hospitality capacity, we're probably up against the boundaries of where we can get to development wise. We're pushing the boundaries literally yes at the moment. And also I think you know you have to I think you have to exhaust the opportunities within your footprint that you've got before you start thinking about expansion because that can be a very expensive thing to do and if you're not confident on getting the return it could not be the right thing to do and I still think we've got opportunities to optimize what we've got without having to actually increase our capacity.

37:56Julia Chapman:I talked about the pitch earlier that, you know, that would be another area that, you know, if we could invest in something that was more durable, that would open up the door to being able to use it for other types of events and be a bit more versatile in that space. But the pitch is really good at the moment. It's a great pitch. And we have a fantastic rounds team who have been in despair over this period of rainfall that we've had. But that's a great example, right? So we had the England versus as well as under 20's Six Nations game at the stadium, which is great for us. It's great for bringing another sort of audience into the stadium.

38:30Julia Chapman:But it just fell on one of the wettest weekends at the end of the wettest month of the wettest spring. You know, so it does present challenges because then you're trying to get that pitch back into good condition for your own game a couple of weeks later. And it's difficult. It's those one off things, isn't it? Well, the acts of God, you can't really, you can't get to everything. I guess everyone was building up to that looking, this is going to be brilliant. Yeah. And then on the day, I mean, we had some spectacular sort of slides and sprays of water, but it didn't do the pitch any good. I talked about, you know, the different ways that we, sports now approaches content.

39:05How do you think the current like media setup of the league is with, you know, what you kind of get, I guess, centrally and then opportunities that you have to build on that OTT involvement?

39:15Julia Chapman:So I think we've got an eye on YouTube because that's an area we think we could exploit in terms of content engagement of again of a perhaps a different or new audience and also potentially commercialize I think we do well as an individual club and our rankings sort of compared to you know in the in the league standings support that I think there's probably more that can be done at league level in terms of rather than it being club by club and individual players is telling that story as a league and as a collective and the media deal is the single biggest revenue driver at league level and then sort of central partnerships deals would come after that.

39:53Do you have any involvement in it?

39:54Julia Chapman:No, not directly, no. I think that the thing that drives the value of the media deal is the audience. And so we've all got a part to play in growing that audience and bringing that audience to the sport. We know that there's a massive drop-off between the number of people that engage with international rugby and the number of people that engage with club rugby. And of those people engaging with club rugby, the number is even smaller that are willing to actually pay for a subscription to watch it so one of the challenges the sport has is if it's always behind a paywall how do you bring new people in so growing the audience reducing the price that people have to pay I think that sort of is the goal on the media side finding new ways to commercialise it when Tom Harrison was sitting here it was just before the Six Nations started and we were talking about the adverts for the first time being put in the games and I don't know about you you know I found it really interesting because our default you know maybe in this country I can say you know we don't want that kind of interruption in in our broadcasting and branding but if we're really looking at you know rugby there are some times in a game where the setting of a scrum even with the advert from Samsung and a Virgin I was watching it and you know they hadn't even begun to set the scrum by the time And the 20 second advert had gone in.

41:15But it actually allowed ITV to commercialise that moment, which made them able to go and spend that little bit more money on the deal, which meant that we can still turn on our TV and see that rugby. Which, despite some of the criticism to me, was actually like, we have to be more open to this type of thing, because all we really want to do is create an accessible environment for fans to engage with this content.

41:39Julia Chapman:Yeah, and I think, you know, I saw some of the criticism of that. But like you say, it was over so quickly and it's such a great opportunity. And, you know, it has huge commercial value. And I think if we were in America, we probably wouldn't have even batted an eyelid at that. Tell me about the women's game and the club. It's been such an amazing few years where we've really seen the development of women's rugby become far more mainstream. We've had brilliant England exposure. How's it for you at club level? well I suppose the first thing to say is that we were one of the venues for the women's rugby world cup over the summer and that was absolutely fantastic for the club and for the town more broadly and we've actually just seen the economic impact report and I think the figure was 48 million pounds of economic value that that tournament brought to Northampton which is incredible 48 million pounds yeah wow and we saw through our gates at least half of the people that came to the stadium hadn't been to the stadium before and around a third of people had never watched a women's game of rugby before so real big opportunity to bring a new audience into the sport and into the women's game.

42:54Julia Chapman:We have got a women's rugby partnership with Loughborough University so Loughborough Lightning is our women's team and I think the partnership model works really well for the club because it means that we can benefit from the fantastic facilities and sporting capability that they have at Loughborough University and the pipeline of players that they can bring in, the quality of their facilities, the coaching and the support that they get at the same time as having a stadium where they can play their games, meets all the criteria for being on television and the support that we can provide them. So we generally, as part of that partnership, we generally drive the commercial side and Loughborough University drive the performance side.

43:32How do you operate it as a business?

43:33Julia Chapman:So Northampton Saints is a shareholder in the PWR. And so there are distributions from the league which go across to Loughborough to support the recruitment of the players and the running of the performance side. And then on top of that, we bring in commercial income. So we have the match day income and also commercial partnerships. So for the first time, we've got three commercial partners exclusively linked to the women's game, of which we share the revenue with Loughborough University. Have you seen it really be taken up in the community level? We're talking about younger girls coming in and being a part of the club and wanting to associate with rugby more.

44:13Have you actually seen that?

44:14Julia Chapman:Yeah, definitely. And we have a dedicated women and girls lead in our community department. We do a lot of delivery with local schools and coaching camps. And our girls' residential camp has sold out consistently for the last two seasons since we launched that. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's really growing. It's amazing. And the data that you were able to pull, you know, and get access to from the World Cup, are you able to use that and build it into part of your strategy to, are you looking at this now as a really important viable part of the business development side of the club, from a participation side of a club, from a community side of a club?

44:51This is a key part of the strategy moving forward.

44:53Julia Chapman:Yeah. So this, our women's team is a key part of the strategy and I think if you're talking about opportunities as well if we're sitting here saying you know we're selling out so many of the men's games but on the women's side we've got 14 ,000 empty seats still then that's a massive opportunity for the club and also I think you know we've got some great personalities within the women's games so we saw when Bristol signed Ilona Meyer and you know how their social following and the level of interest in the game increased and we've seen how Ellie Kildun's following has you know she's been a really key face over that World Cup campaign and now that she's back in club rugby and that follows through.

45:28Julia Chapman:Sadia Kabea won the player of the tournament and she's a Luffer Lightning player. And I think that those female players are really keen and eager to embrace that whole followship side of it. I think that's a real opportunity to bring supporters into whether they want to watch men, women or just rugby more broadly. You talked about rugby's great challenge which is such a strong international audience and then a struggle to convert that consistently to the club game. Calendar was something that came up all the time. And now the calendar has started to align so that clubs aren't losing their players to international fixtures.

46:09It may seem like a really stupid question with an obvious answer, but just from your perspective, how important has that been to you?

46:17Julia Chapman:I think it's one of the most important things, that de-conflicting of the calendar. As you say, supporters want to come and watch their big name players. They want to watch them play for their countries and then they want to come and watch them play for the clubs. It's also important from a player welfare point of view that when the clubs aren't under pressure to try and bring people back quicker than they're ready, they need to get their rest, they need to get their time off because rugby is a very punishing sport. so the calendar can't be too heavy in terms of the playing load. How much of an influence of a say when all of these discussions again were going on?

46:58Was this something that was communicated to you via the Prem? Were individual clubs involved in the discussions around calendar alignment and actually making the move?

47:07Julia Chapman:So I think Prem take the lead on this. So they'll have the conversations with England and with EPCR around the other competitions and where we fit in. They will then consult with the clubs in terms of there might be two or three different options for the season. I would say that whilst we're consulted by, you know, that there's a relatively small room for manoeuvre that Prem have within the other constraints around the calendar. So we do, you know, we're very engaged. We provide feedback and there's iterations. But there are probably things that are outside of our control and also outside of Prem's control when it comes to the calendar.

47:41Julia Chapman:and I think that's going to be an important consideration when it comes to expanding the league in the future is if that does happen making sure that happens in a way that it doesn't undo all that good work of of de-conflicting the calendar. Looking at you making the the jump to CEO how's it how's it been for you now being in charge of the broader business? I had made something of a interim jump I suppose from from being pure finance into being chief operating officer. So I was pretty heavily involved in a lot of what was going on on the commercial and operational side of the club already. So I think the biggest leap has probably been on the performance side.

48:20Julia Chapman:And I think also just in terms of workload and the breadth of your remit and the number of balls you have to try and keep in the air at one time. And I think my sort of mindset is very much try and keep focused on the things that are really going to move the dial and the things that are really important and you just have to be comfortable with dropping a few things I think is the reality and just make sure they're not the important ones yeah and I guess building the team around you that's you know you just have complete trust in to own their areas yeah and the most important thing that I do is recruit great people and have great people around me and I think we've got an excellent team on you know both the commercial and the performance side of the club and so you know my biggest focus is very much on enabling those people to do their jobs and making sure they've got what they need from me and making sure we've got you know alignment on the strategic direction and the big things that we're trying to achieve as a club well i think i joked with you off there at the beginning but as i was just doing you know some of the notes for this i was just writing a few things down i went strong attendances own the stadium stable ownership elite academy competitive team great financial performance in the context oh but it you know it does it does seem like everything and everything that you know you're just saying you've just told us this is a club in really good shape this is this is something that has huge opportunity there's a lot to be excited about moving forward now it's about capitalization you know making sure that you can fully grasp all of this and put it into something meaningful both on the pitch and and in the business.

49:53Julia Chapman:Yeah I mean it is exciting I think I know I joked with you before we started recording that I was offered the job just after we'd won the prem and I really debated is this the best time or the worst time to take on this position because you know the biggest question is how do you sustain that level of success for the long term because we don't want to be up there one year and down the next we want to keep that performance going for the long term and this season particularly has been a season where we've had a very a lot of retention activity so we had a lot of our senior you know high profile players but also a number of our coaching group were out of contract at the end of this season so I guess my biggest challenge for this was how do you keep that together so that we can continue with that level of performance and success but also the culture that we've created at the club.

50:47Julia Chapman:We're really delighted on the recruitment activity that we've done so we have been able to announce renewals for you know a large number of our key players and also our senior coaching group which I'm delighted about but we also know and we're very conscious that you can't keep the same group together forever and part of the conversations that the coaches have and you know we talk about is how do you know when the right time is to let a player go and in order to enable those new players coming through the pathway to have their opportunity and so it's not about keeping it set in stone forever it's how do you continue to evolve it but keep that level of high performance in place.

51:30So if now what nearly two years after you probably were asking yourself that question do you think it has it been a good time to take over?

51:40Julia Chapman:I'm pretty happy so far. And look, if we are to go by the table right now, hopefully come the end of the season, you will have just continued that success and that championship, that Prem title comes back. You can't go by the table at this stage of the season. You're saying don't get carried away. I am saying there's a fair way still to go. Is that a hard thing actually in all seriousness? You know, when performance is going really well, keeping yourself grounded, level, stable, not letting yourself get influenced too much by emotion, such a big challenge in sport. Yeah, it's the hope that kills you.

52:20I don't even want to ask anything else. Let's end on that. Julia, it's been really, really great to have you. Thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on everything that you and the club are achieving. It's really exciting to see.

52:31Julia Chapman:Well, thank you for the opportunity to talk to you. I've enjoyed it. I love doing that. Past and present, this is a proper look at the world of club rugby in England. There is a lot of noise around what closing the league will do and how it changes the business of clubs like Northampton. But before we even look at that, it's great to understand where the clubs are and where they've come from. A huge thank you to Julia for joining us and I hope you enjoyed the show. Now, if you want to see more from today's show, you can do so by going to YouTube or any of our other social channels across Instagram and TikTok.

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