Liam Dooley: Shrewsbury Town CEO, ‘How to Work With the Smallest Budget in League One’ (Ep59)

0:00If this money comes into football or into the EFL, we need to make sure that we've got stringent rules in place to make sure less money does go to players because this is no disrespect to the players that are playing the game, but the players aren't getting exponentially better year on year, but the wages continue to rise. I'll get the numbers slightly wrong on this, but revenue within League One has risen by 21 % this year, which on one side is brilliant, but the money going out to players is increased by 58%. And if that continues to happen, it's not a good look for football. It's not a good look for the sustainability of the game long term.

0:32If you look at most football clubs, the majority of the money goes out on player budgets. That's where it's been. We had a head coach where we were spending a lot more money. We achieved a brilliant finish. We got 12th in League One, which for a club that should be town-sized, that was a fantastic position. But at the same time, losing£3.2 million with one owner doesn't have a long-term future. You've got somebody there who wants to put everything they can into supporting the football club, but if you continue to lose money at that rate, you won't have a football club.

0:59Hello and welcome to The Business of Sport, The show that takes you behind the scenes with the industry's leading owners, operators and athletes. Today, we're here with another first-class football league CEO in the studio. Liam Dooley has been in charge of Shrewsbury Town, League One's longest-serving club, since 2023. Operating on the smallest budget in the division, balancing good business with competitive performance is not easy. Shrewsbury have had 10 consecutive years at this level, but are currently bottom of the league having lost their last four games. But with their latest accounts showing that they've halved their annual losses, the business side has impressed.

1:31With a top manager like Gareth Ainsworth in charge on the pitch, the fight is on to escape relegation and attract new investment. We're back again. How do you build great business off the pitch and win on it? We're delighted to welcome Liam to the Business of Sport. But first, some words from our valued partners. Oroco are the leaders in AI for pro sport. Their algorithms help make the invisible visible, providing advanced warning of illness and injury risk for some of the best athletes on the planet. We can all see that the demands of elite sport have never been greater. This intensity results in more injuries, impacting earning power and hurting the fan experience.

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2:49And the link is also in the bio below. So talk to them before your competition does. We're living in a society which increasingly understands the importance of pre-emptive healthcare. You don't need to wait until something goes wrong to take action. So if you're looking for answers or just more information about your health, I'm delighted to introduce you to scan.com. They're the UK's largest medical imaging network, making it easy to access a wide range of scans, including MRIs, CTs and ultrasounds near you. No more time-consuming referral processes and waiting weeks for inflexible appointments, with scan.com you can book online in minutes, have an expert clinician consultation in hours and get your scan in days.

3:31With no waiting lists and next day appointments available at select locations, it's a fully managed service taking you from referral to results in under two weeks. You can take proactive healthcare steps with their range of screenings from breast cancer checks to prostate cancer checks to full body MRI scans. Whether you're an athlete, a weekend warrior or just want answers about your health, scan.com is on your side you can find a link to scan.com in the bio below so take control of your future health today with scan.com Liam it is so good to have you thank you so much for joining us today thank you very much for having me it's been a long couple of days but i'm really happy to be here and it's not often in london so really good to be here and see you both i was going to say fresh off the back of the owners and executives football league conference what's it like when you guys all get together it's really good it's the first time this year it's been this time of the season usually it's right at the end so you know where you stand in terms of promotion relegation and it tends to be congratulating people or commiserating people at the time but this time you've literally been playing each other on Saturday and you've got somebody else this weekend so there's such a good camaraderie amongst the execs that it's strange when you actually put a football match in front of them because you go from being really friendly and really pally to fiercely competing with them at that weekend but you go back to being friends afterwards and just spending time with people that know what it's like to be in the positions really nice to actually bounce ideas off each other but also it's just almost like a counselling session we say you're going through that problem we're going through the same thing and yeah it's good and to be honest there are so many people I know you've had quite a lot of League One CEOs on there and you speak to them and they're so genuine because they're doing this job they're living it breathing it and we're all in the same boat What are the things at the moment like this year that have been a particular kind of relevance?

5:19I think the football governance bill is massive because it's playing out in front of everybody's eyes in terms of the next reading of that is next month. We're hopeful that's going to do the right thing for the EFL and make sure that there is some kind of deal going forward that will mean that the future of football is more shared from a revenue perspective and will help all ships rising high tide. I think that's what we'd like to try and get to. But to make sure there's some debate going off constantly between the Premier League and the EFL, so we can do our own deal. And I think that's what the regulators there to do is try and get us to make our own deal without them actually having to force both parties into a position.

5:59How much do you think is on the Premier League to have a better distribution deal financially, but then also for Football League clubs to be able to leverage their own assets and inventories to be able to make more money? What in your mind is the balance between those two in these discussions? I think it's going to be different for all clubs at that stage. So you look at how do we physically take that money? What would we use it for? What would another club use it for? I think the Premier League are nervous because I think if you look at football clubs in general and the EFL, pretty much everybody is losing money at the moment.

6:29So they're thinking, are we just giving these guys more money to lose more money? That's what we need to try and stop as a collective. And that was discussed at the last on the executive conference last year. And then it's been brought back up this year as to what do we do to get our own house in order so that should the deal happen we are all in a position where everybody can benefit and we don't just throw that money strip straight out the window you said everyone's losing money it's kind of like the very central question of every business of sport but it's still one that we also laid on which is like is a sports club a viable investment or is it just a passion project for very wealthy owners i think it can be if it's run if a sporting organization is run correctly it's got a strategy it's got a model I think it can be a way of making profit in the longer term but I do think there is a little bit of that is the people that own football clubs and it's going away from the model of the butcher baker candlestick maker owning that from a local background it tends to be groups of people that own them now but I do think there's that excitement of sport that means that there's a middle ground somewhere between you want to be competitive you want to have that passion project but at the same time you do want to be as sustainable as you can So I think it's club dependent really.

7:45Do you not think performance is inversely correlated with profit? And what I mean by that is you have to spend if you want to get up there. I think you're absolutely right. The previous Honours and Execs conference, I was chatting away to Nick Craig, who works for the EFL. And he said, look, we can show you the graphs that show where you spend is roughly where you finish. the correlation is so tight in terms of if you've got the lowest budget the chances are you'll finish in 24th position in if you're in one of the EFL leagues it's you get the odd outliers that do really well but they are few and far between it does tend to be the people that spend the most are the ones that have the most success and I think that's that unfortunately will continue to be the way but for clubs like ourselves we've just got to continue to operate as efficiently as we can and hope we've got a good manager a good model a good run of recruitment that means that we can finish and outperform our budget.

8:38And I think outperforming your budget has almost become a key KPI for every club that's in the AFL at the moment. So one thing that, you know, again, we talk about quite a lot, but to me, it's really, really important is you get more money as a club. Let's say a better distribution deal gives you more money. As Harry just highlighted, spend and success, generally the two things everyone thinks to get up, we just need to spend more. So you get more money. What happens to make sure that you don't just go and spend the more money you get on player wages and transfer fees because that currently is a concern right more money just inflates the things that you're currently spending money on it doesn't allow you to actually develop as a business i think two people that you've had on the podcast before spoke really passionately last time around at the hones execs from the charlie method and liam scully but if this money comes into the into football or into the afl we need to make sure that we've got stringent rules in place and there has been and we're in the motion at the moment of putting through more change to try and tighten that to make sure less money does go to players because this is no disrespect to the players that are playing the game but the players aren't getting exponentially better year on year but the wages continue to rise i'll get the numbers slightly wrong on this but one of the facts that we heard today at the conference is revenue of within league one has risen by 21 this year which is on one side is brilliant but the money going out to players is increased by 58 and if that continues to happen it's not a good look for football it's not a good look for the sustainability of the game long term what is driving player wage inflation i think it's you mentioned it is you spend more you you achieve more you get higher than league it's clubs want to compete clubs want to get that extra striker they want to get that extra extra midfield they want to get 20 you've got 20 pros in squad 22 pros 25 pros within your squad if you've got that extra squad depth you think you can pinch an extra few points get you in the playoffs gets you up the league you're always chasing success and you've got behind that you've got fans that want success but they tell you they want to be a sustainable club at the same time so i think the more clubs compete it's like any market there's a scarcity and a demand to everything and the more people want to sign a certain player the more that money goes to the player to the agent and disappears out the game but is it the problem for you as a should we say smaller budget league one club to have a team like a birmingham in the league spending 10 to 15 million i.e more than the turnover of the majority of clubs in that league on a single player while you're competing in that same environment therefore naturally inflating the market that you're operating in if i mean if you look at that particular example of birmingham somebody discussed it yes it's it's rexham and birmingham good for good for league one good for where we are well as it happens we're the only club that have beaten both rexham and and birmingham this season which is definitely unexpected but you look at the league and think well if that's bringing in bigger audiences and part of the conference we've been talking about is the media rights overseas and media rights in america in particular if those people are bringing new eyeballs to the sport then actually it is good for league one it is good for the efl but it does make it difficult and also it must lead to asset price inflation for the all the clubs in the league no yeah but these are not big businesses and i think this is the the interesting part of football they're not huge businesses they are massively valuable brands and community assets and they're far bigger in that sense than they are as a financially generating kind of asset that's probably one of the hard things for someone like you to manage isn't it you've got all this passion and peace on the side but actually the financials to match it are quite hard yeah i mean we've got to turn out 6.9 million pounds that's not a big business in any other area however we've got six and a half thousand fans coming through the gates every week and this is one of the most important things in the life the other difference with football is everybody cares about what's going off at the club it's not like if you run a barber shop or ai companies we talked about earlier people they're brilliant the business is doing well no one's sat there waiting for you to post your results on company's house no one's literally wanted wanted to come in and demand you've done this a certain way how why have you done it how have you done it it's so different that for that amount of stress and that amount of work that goes into it you'd probably want that to be two three times the turnover that you are but you're kind of limited to the area that you're in.

12:51The support of bases tends to be historic and our job is to just incrementally increase that each year if we can, to try and get that turnover to rise. Fans want investment, fans want to see the clubs progress, but you try and every club at the moment we're putting through their early bird season tickets and you start putting the prices up on things and you've got an absolute meltdown on your hands. So it's always a tough balance to make sure that you're trying to increase your revenues in the way that you can, but you're never going to suddenly double your revenue unless you get a really successful player trading model.

13:23And that's why a lot of clubs are going down the director of football style, and that's what Shoebry Town have done, because we realise that making profit from the pitch is one of the ways that you can actually grow that revenue if you start working through, bringing through non-league players, bringing through academy players, and upward trading those players is a way to increase your revenue line. So can you break down that 7 million then? What is attributed in that to media rights and sponsorship and licensing, ticketing, merchandising? So if you look at, so I've got a little bit off-subjected to come back to it.

13:55As a club, when I came in through the door, we lost£3.2 million. We were generating six, spending nine, rough numbers. To get that back to our interview, you've got to break it down and go, well, hang on a minute, how much of that money is on player wages? Well, 74 % of that money was being spent on wages in£2.23. we've dropped that to 67 so 4.4 million pounds of 6.9 was spent on wages player costs everything that goes with it that's not our player wage budget that's if you put everything there that's that's your hotels that's your food for the players that's your kit costs that's everything that bringing that number down is how you make a big difference in making the club as sustainable as you can where you find that is as we mentioned if you start making cuts to that budget your performance in the league does tend to suffer as a result so and are you really going to get the best players be like yes i want to go there when like you've already cut the quality of the chicken you're serving in the canteen and you're not giving them the massages and the hydrotherapy center and the it's true for you for me you've got to get everybody at the club to buy into the culture that we are trying to be sustainable and that's getting the messaging right when people come through the door and we've we've got a head coach at the moment that's come in and understands that we've got Gareth Haynes with Chusby Town at the moment and he's done that at Wickham he's built a career on the fact that he's gone into a club and taken it from a team and built it into a club the same thing he understands the financial situation that we're in and he said let's focus on what we have got versus what we haven't try and build something off the field on the field together that means we can do this on a smaller budget and the belief that that's given the fans but also as an off the field team that you've got a manager that understands it has really helped.

15:38Now, like anybody, we'd love to get more investment into the club. We're working on that at the moment. He'd love that as a manager. We'd love that as a, to be able to start doing future-facing projects rather than what we've tended to do for the last 18 months that I've been there, which is fires every day. So we've got 4.4, which is players. What else is there? So in terms of running a football club, you've got your day-to-day costs, you've got admin, like I mean, you've got overhead, you've got purchases, you've got staff to run the club, you've got to get your lighting on, your electric on, the heating, the whole thing of running a normal business.

16:11You've got to do that day to day, but then you've also got the thing of, right, how do we feed people? How do we get a team on the pitch on a Saturday? So there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. If you look at most football clubs, the majority of the money goes out on player budgets. That's where it's been. We had a head coach where we were spending a lot more money. We achieved a brilliant finish. We got 12th in League One, which is, for a club that should be town-sized, that was a fantastic position, but at the same time losing 3.2 million pounds with one owner doesn't have a long-term future you've got somebody there who wants to put everything they can into supporting the football club but if you continue to lose money at that rate you won't have a football club in a few years time that's that's why we had to make the changes that that we did how are you doing commercially what's the what's the partnership revenue coming through how are you selling selling and packaging the club on that side so we went if from our year that we've just done where We've lost 1.5 from the 3.2.

17:05We've increased our turnover by 600 grand. A lot of that money comes out of ticket sales. So we achieved our high season ticket sales. We achieved good home attendances because we were doing well in the league as well. We'd put the ticket prices up slightly, which we have to do to keep the money coming through the door and keep that growing. How was that? Was that okay with the fans? We do a lot of communicating with our supporters. So part of the things when I joined Shrewsbury Town was I said, we'll tell you what we're doing. We communicate all the time. So we have open letters going out to the fans every 12 weeks, explaining what's just happened, why it happened, but not only that, but what is coming, so that when things happen, we like to think they know what's coming.

17:48They're a part of the journey, and I think if they buy into what the journey is, then you're more likely to keep them on the side. It doesn't always work, but that's what we've tried to do. So even things like Ticket, in a very live example, we are about to do our early bird season tickets in the next couple of weeks. So we've got a, we call it a fan engagement panel, but we have a open Zoom call on Monday where we invite every single supporter can come along. We send a link out and say anybody can jump on. If you'd like to discuss with myself, with the ticketing manager, with our ticketing provider themselves, we're moving to a new system.

18:20Anybody that would like to come and discuss that topic with us and give you feedback, we'll show you what we think is right. We'll listen to what you want to say and sometimes we'll go with it, sometimes we won't. But we want to involve you in that dialogue. and we think that that's helped people understand why we do things don't always agree with it but i think if you ask the fans now having been communicated to and being part of the strategy are you happy with that or just being given a blind price right i think the communication works do you agree peter kenyon got a lot of stick i think he said for saying that your fans are your customers i spent five years at sheffield wednesday and that had been somebody there had said that at the time and sometimes I think the word gets used and then people hung up on it ultimately it's a business clients fans customers if that is a transacted technically you are I'd always go with supporters because I believe that if you buy a shirt if you buy a ticket if you I think you're you're a supporter and you're part of the club but I don't see a problem in in the terminology as long as you're doing the right thing by that person whatever you call them and you've got the interest of the club, support, the fan, the customer at heart, I think that's what doing your job right is about, is looking after the people.

19:32Because the football club is miles bigger than the chief exec, even bigger than the GM. They're custodians of that football club. In 50 years' time, you just want to have done the right thing by those people and by those supporters, because they'll outlive you at that club. So maybe the terminology is wrong from some people, customers, but for me, stakeholders is probably the best way to describe it. You've halved your operating loss in a year, but as you said, you're now in the bottom four. So you're relegation threatened on the pitch. Good business achievement. You and I started talking off the back of this, the release of the financials.

20:06And as you said, something to be celebrated because of the challenges of football finance at the moment. How do you counter the most important thing really to the majority of the fans and quite often in football, which is this is a game of winning on a Saturday? I think I hop back to what we've just said on the community. if they know that it's going to be tough before it starts I think that's important our messaging at the start of the season was all about we put a video out from the media team we've got a fantastic media team and they put a video out underdogs do win was the message so we start the season saying we know this is going to be tough from day one but I think it's getting fans to understand where you sit and we're really proud of the fact that we're the longest serving team in League One we've done 10 consecutive seasons and we've been hammering that message out to say So, for Shrewsbury Town, the size of the club, the number of people we get through the turnstile, that is a good achievement.

20:56And the natural position to sit is somewhere probably where in the lower region of League 1, upper end of League 2, and then push on, provided you get everything right, you then have one big go at it. Because you're sustainable, because you've started selling players, you've got a little bit more of a budget, that's when you can go and try and just keep growing that little bit every season. But it is tough because fans don't want to know what's going off on the balance sheet. Fans just want to see you win 3-0 at home on a Saturday. And there'll always be a certain part of fans that just don't care.

21:26They want to pay the season ticket money, they want to come in and want to see them. That's perfectly fine. But you also now, because of social media, you've got that second generation of fans that actually want to know what's going off and want to challenge you. And you've got really intelligent, successful people that are just on the turnstile on a Saturday, but want to go, hang on a minute, why? And we want to try and educate them as to why, not in a patronising way educate them but show them that you this is how even a normal business but it is kind of different in football because you've got so many different non-numerical KPIs that you've got to try and deliver you mentioned there about looking for investment and that being an integral part of a football club tell us about the ownership structure currently and how you're actually looking to attract more people into the investment side of the club so from from day one as I walked into Shrewsbury town I didn't go in there blind and I wasn't kind of caught off guard by this the conversations were we are looking for investment the chairman of supertown is roland witcherley mb he has had the club for 29 years as chairman he i think he is the longest serving chairman within the league or within the fl not just within league one and has done an unbelievable job taking it from the old gay meadow where it floods twice a year doesn't have a safety certificate literally one of the sort of famous grounds in football from that perspective the coracle where the ball goes in the river and comes over that but to where it is now which is a fantastic 10 000 seat purpose-built stadium sat on 24 acres of land the oldest thing that's within within the entire plot is 17 years old it's done a fantastic job to be there and to be as i mentioned to be 10 years in league one is phenomenal but he'll say himself and there comes a time when football because of the likes of wrexham birmingham the outside investment that we've talked about isn't attainable anymore for a local man that's come from nothing built an entire business sold his business done really really well for himself dreamed to own the football club done a brilliant job but has come to a point where he said i can't do this anymore and that's when we've come right how do we go and do it and you'll see from the people that you've spoken to and the amount of clubs at the moment that even this week club saying we're now in exclusivity with a particular investor we are at that stage ourselves so we went out via a couple of agents to the market to try and sell the football club how you do it you're not going on ebay how does one put a club up for investment i mean daft as it sounds you can't go out there and put a for sale sign outside the front of it but we try and for every bit of press that i did was to say look we're looking for investment we had this we got a bit of stick at the time because we kept saying we're actively seeking succession.

24:07Then it moved on and there was, I can't remember the exact narrative, but we were getting a little bit more of that and the people making memes up for the rest of it. But we knew that there's always been expressions of interest. People come in and there's an awful lot of people that say they want to buy a football club. But when it comes to it and you say, okay, let's see some proof of funds. Let's see what do you want to do? Give us your plans. Give us what, if you want to spend that much money to buy the club, surely you've got a plan for what you want to do. And it doesn't take long to get to the point where you think actually i'm not sure on these particular people we've had people from all over the world do they want to buy whole ownership part in the ship most people from that we've spoken to tend to want to buy the whole thing we're in a position where our current chairman controls 92 of the the business so that is anything over 75 in football is is complete ownership but we're in a strong position from that perspective they want to come in and everybody like you would if you're early on is it a vanity project it's it becomes their baby they want to do something good with it are there many like illegitimate buyers are there many people who actually kind of pretend they have the cash and don't i'm sure there's those i'm not going to go into any specifics on that but it's so easy now to get in touch with people as you see yourselves you've got linkedin you've got a direct line to most people you can get hold of the ceo you can get hold of finance directors you can get all sometimes the owners respond to people directly on on those kind of medium so you've you can have a conversation depending on whether you've got 50p or 50 million as if you come across in a certain way it's about cutting the wheat from the chaff as you do it and saying well quite early we got to the point where we were saying look we're not going to have the conversation unless you can show us your proof of funds early doors because if not we're just wasting your time and wasting our time in it we do want to sell the football club and we believe that at the time when we chose to go exclusive with our current partner our future investor we had three people at the table we looked at everything they wanted to do and thought do you know what this is the right guy that we want to work with and having had something for 29 years the chairman said and i genuinely believe him he said it's like selling one of his kids because he's been there that long he wants to make sure that who he sells it to is the right person i'm really interested what of those you know when you're looking through um those proposals let's say and please i appreciate the discretion but what what right now for you as the CEO for the fans what does a good owner look like what are you looking for I think if you asked our fans this question rather than me as someone who's come to the area in the last 18 months because of what we've talked about in terms of what we built 24 acres of land beautiful stadium everything everything that's there they don't want someone to come in and asset strip that they'll they see that land it's a brilliant part of the world oh hang on a minute we can take that patch of land we can parcel that off sell that sell this sell the other then all of a sudden and you're just left with a football club in the middle.

26:58They want to make sure that what's being built is there. There's then that sporting competitive side that we've talked about, is the fans want to see us succeed. So I'll use what I can talk about and say what the chairman's looking for with someone that's not going to asset-strip the place, but also has written into what he wants to do, is they must make a commitment to what they're going to invest in the squad, because he wants to see the club do well. You don't want him to come in and go, well, actually, we're not that bothered. We want to succeed. He wants to still come here. wants to live, breathe, die in the town, wants to say, I've done the best thing I could do while I was here.

27:31But not only that, I've moved on, but I left you in the best possible hands that are there. From a CEO perspective, you want to see a bit more detail. You want to see what is the actual plan. Do you want to build a hotel? Do you want to fill the corners in the stadium? Is it a player trading or do you want to do? Is it something that's just just for the team? What's the actual meat and bones on the plan? I know it's true for a lot of deals. Have you seen a lot of the interest come through is looking at this as a real estate play as much as a sports play i think the area of shrewsbury in particular there's a lot you can do with that land because there's a shortage of hotels there's a shortage of nurseries the land's developable you'd be making the place better so you do get people that go we can use this as part of a football club we've got natural attraction to the area a natural footfall that comes through every weekend could we could we just could we put food food establishment could we put a pub on there could we do all that kind of stuff becomes part of what people put together.

28:27I do think a lot of people, it is just the football side. The EFL is 72 clubs you can buy. Most people want to play sport. If you can't play sport, you want to work sport. People get excited by it. And that's a good thing. The more people want to come and invest in our game, the better. What is the budget this year? Sorry. Our budget, I'll not give the exact numbers, but we are fully aware that we've got the lowest budget in League One. Okay. How does that change with a new owner? That depends on what they want to put into that our manager's gone on the record so we've got gareth ames as i mentioned in charge and he said he he doesn't need a massive budget he just wants a little bit extra to be able to build something and and that's exciting for us because we're not saying we need the next round reno don't get me wrong we'd love to have that kind of investment but we just need somebody that's going to say right if you're operating on on this current on x if i give you the additional y that will take you from being 24th budget in the league to mid table he said at the fans forum i I can build something with that.

29:23And from our perspective, just anything that sees us be more competitive would be brilliant in the eyes of the fans. Do you need to have multiple budgets for where you are right now, based on the fact that, you know, you look at probably staying in the league, going down, investment, not investment? Yeah, we've been in that process for a while in that we've almost have to build more budgets in that if you have investment, there's a League One budget and a League Two budget. If you don't have the investment, where we are now, we have to build one that says, right, keep using the word sustainable, but this is our sustainable budget in League 1 and League 2.

29:54And here's the, if we did have a little bit of money, where would we go shopping for players? What would we do differently? What would we invest in? And the stuff that can, go back to your revenue question earlier on, that 6.9 million, it is pretty rigid. But if you start saying, right, we're going to build the other things I've talked about within the 24 acres that you've got, all of a sudden that number can rise. And it's not just from having 23 home games a season or 25 with cup games. It's from putting extra things in there. Can you get concerts back to the stadium? They're the bits where you go, actually, how do we get that number to just incrementally grow up each?

30:28What do you not do today that you would like to do to add revenue lines to the business? Could be concerts, could be housing developments, could be you name it. I've mentioned a couple of them there, but what I've put to the new owner and what they've come back to us is if you've got unlimited budgets, there's a big shortage in the area of shoes before hotels. You'd obviously have to speak to the councils, do all the necessary, all this is blue sky thinking. Anything there's a shortage of, that's what we need to do. We've got one of the most valuable commodities in that we've got land. So you look at it and go, what can we do with hotels?

31:01What can we do with nurseries? What can we do with paddle tennis? What can we do? All those kind of, where you think, where's the demand? What can we do on that particular land? That's what we've built. We've got a purpose-built stadium, as I mentioned, but it's got four individual stands with four corners open, deliberately built that way so that if in time, if the club progressed to the championship, at 10 ,000, you don't have to change anything. You've got the right stadium to be promoted. But if you're in there and we've grown from having 2 ,500 fans at the Gay Meadow to 6 ,500 fans at the Crowdmeadow, what can you do if you went up a division?

31:37That's where the investment coming. Well, that's not a million miles away. If you can build something in the corners out of, you've seen full stadium, it's been modular built at the moment. Could you build something? One of those things I've just said in the corner, that's glass-fronted that can have multi-purpose to be used in the week to make money, but also can double up as revenue or as quiet spaces for autism at the weekend. Could you have those multifaceted buildings that make the ground look better, but also add to that revenue line 365 days a year? We have a really good conference facility that's in the area, and it's very rare that you don't come to our stadium.

32:12There's something going on every day. But if we had more facilities available, we'd actually be able to spend more of it. So, yeah, you'd build more, speculate to accumulate. Everyone likes to talk about match day experience revenue, getting people in for beers before, hot dogs in the middle, and then beers after or whatever. To what extent is that actually a meaningful part of revenue or just kind of hundreds and thousands on top of the ice cream? There's a bigger piece in that. So, yes, you've got the match day revenue from doing it, but it's the fact if you're coming to that, you build footballs about you do the same thing, you go with your dad, you go with your mum, you've done the same thing all your life if you can increase that dwell time from oh we just go 10 minutes before kickoff and grab a burger but you can make something fun in a fan zone where someone's going for an hour and a half because you've got penalty shootouts with the mascot in the fan zone or you've got a band on or you've got inflatable dartboards or you've got anything like that all things that we're working on getting towards that that extra five pound that you're getting from someone at the moment can suddenly be 20 pound that routine that someone's got into well they're bringing one kid they have another one their friend wants to come and that's how you gradually grow the amount of time people spend there the more money you generate but also that by having the routines you create that for years to come and you get make it more enjoyable you can't always win every game of football definitely can't it's huge be town on our budget but if you can make the whole day a good day out that's why it's important because then they'll go do you know what i will buy a shirt i'll pick up this today and that's what we've got to try and do that we control the controllables, what can you control?

33:44How's the rest of the day? What happens at 90 minutes? Unfortunately, that's where we have to just sit back and just hope for the best. Are longer drawn out investment processes, are they kind of enemies of innovation in football clubs? Because naturally an owner who wants to sell wants to kind of keep as much money in the club to make it look as financially solid and sound as possible, not necessarily put outlays on things that may take a little bit of time to develop. The longer this goes on, Are you almost in a bit of a zombie state around what you can do? You need a resolution here eventually, surely.

34:14It sounds like you were in our board meeting on Tuesday, Charlie, because I like to do things quickly. I like to do things fast. I think football misses that sometimes, is that things have always been done in a certain way. So if you want to try and speed things up, you've got to go through certain processes. And right now, because we're in that juxtaposition between is the revenue coming or not, we go, well, the things that we've been discussing could actually happen now with limited outlet or you could borrow the money to do that but the last thing you want to be doing if you're in the sale process you mentioned is going to say oh well we haven't got any debt on our stadium whatsoever we don't want to be going and mortgaging or putting up bits of property to get cash when you're about to get someone to come and buy it it's not the right time but at the same time the longer you leave it the more you're hampering your long-term progress so not specifically about sure how much is like a league one team the average price for various models that you can use to value a football club so i mean we i walked into the door and luckily i know professor rob wilson who's a football finance expert and he did me before i came in and my due diligence are going to shoes be a model of using the multivariate it would be valued at x but then you look at shrewsbury town and say well if it's valued at that if every acre of land is worth something well you've got 24 acres but you can't value a football because you've got a football club on it.

35:35There's so many different parts of every football club as how you value it. But like everything, you know what the turnover is going to be. As we mentioned, it doesn't change that much. So you can look at that and go, well, what can I physically afford? What are my chances of getting a payback from it? And make a decision on whatever club that you're coming to buy. But you referenced Birmingham spending allegedly£50 million on centre-forward. There's a lot of clubs you could buy within League One for the value of their centre-forward. But also then, I think we spoke to Charlie with Charlton, and they don't own the stadium.

36:06So straight up there, he said, well, literally if you buy Chelten, you're buying a license to play. And that's a lot of clubs are that way because they've had to get the money. They've had to make money. So they've just leveraged bits of the stadium, bits of the training ground, gone. And that's been done. That's why when we were approached by a lot of different investors, we see ourselves as quite a clean purchase because there's no debt. The only debt that we have is to the chairman and the vice chairman who have lent that money to the football club completely interest free you come in you pay them back the rest of it's yours there's the keys get yourself in you can do what you want with that football club and I'm not saying the football club is where they have that is a bad thing either by the way people have to cut their own cloth accordingly but everything you'd be buying so we can literally sell and we're selling our football club you buy and hit the training grounds ours another seven acres of land that's sat there that we own that you can build again on that and go again and invest there if you wanted to if that's just on pure performance of the first team you'd go and invest in that again.

37:02You'd build the bits on the stadium but certain clubs you're buying the license that's how it will go under the regulator but you're buying the brand but certain clubs you're also buying what goes with it. You mentioned a couple of times Gareth Ainsworth and the importance of having a manager who really aligns with the executive. How was it bringing him into the club? He's been an absolute ref of fresh air since he's walked through the door. We, I would say we interviewed him but it was more like he was interviewing us really. We got him down to the we actually went a weekend without a point in our head coach because we'd heard through football circles you know how the game works that you might be interested so we delayed announcing we'd interviewed some candidates it all did really well but we delayed appointing anybody until we had that conversation with Gareth on the Monday and if you look back some of our fans and say well why didn't you have a manager in for Burton that was one of the biggest games of the season we made the decision that it was worth hanging on to try and have the conversation with Gareth and his assistant Richard to try and see if they were interested in the project and from that moment he bought into the idea of a lot of the things that we've said the stadium's good the club's good the fans are really really on board was it very obvious that he was the right fit if you'd have said the start of the week he's available we he'd have been we'd have gone straight away it was only later in the process that we found out there might be an interest he talks about he doesn't want to build a football team he wants to build a football club that's what he's done at Wickham there's a proven track record there of starting with very little and building something over time he is constantly on the record saying he wants to do that we want to support him in that journey the investment will be key because he wants to have a go at it with with a little bit of budget behind him as well as what we've got now but if you watch his his press conference everything's positive and that's what i'm about as a person that's what he's about that's what i think you've got to be people work all week they spend all the money to come to football the last thing they want is to be moping about our negativity yeah you might not win but if you've got a bit of belief and a bit of positivity around the place.

38:56It's amazing what it can do. And just little things on a match day, like he'll just walk into the hospitality lounge and pick up the mic and start having a conversation with the sponsors. And we've never, I've never seen that in football. Normally the manager is so zoned into the game, but he's like, what can I do? 20 minutes before the game, they've had the team talk, they know what they're doing. Comes in and gets everybody together and he's got time for a lot of people. And I'm speaking really well of him, but that's because he has been fantastic since he walked through the door. Because he's got this side to him, do you find yourself planning a bit of the business side of the club with the manager rather than just keeping that within the executive oh 100 so we're sitting now and he's doing an event this evening he's speaking at a local business one of our local partners he's doing a sportsman's dinner he's involved he's doing that tonight to try and build things for us on that on that front we've done we've got already booked out and even with gareth he's not even playing with his band he's just coming to talk about his career and his notoriety his celebrity status has helped he's been on sky sports and coming up she should Town manager puts more eyeballs to Shrewsbury Townies.