Mark Devlin, Leyton Orient CEO: ‘Striking the Balance Between Ambition and Financial Sustainability: The Leyton Orient Story' (Ep80)

0:00There is absolutely no point us taking our eye off the ball from trying to be competitive in our league. What's the point of building a new stadium if you then get relegated? It's important that at the very least we maintain our current status and hopefully we can go one better than we did last year and make the jump into the Championship. David's made it very clear he wants and believes the club can be a sustainable Championship club. And by sustainable, that means that it doesn't keep costing an owner or owners£15 to£20 million a year to be competitive and chase the dream of the Premier League.

0:31The Birmingham-Wrexham effect last year meant that clubs were trying to compete with two clubs that just have revenues and have got owners that could afford to throw money at it. Birmingham, and I don't blame Birmingham, if you can do it why can't you do it? It's all within the rules and Birmingham blasted through the league with record number of points. Wrexham's a slightly different kettle of fish. League One losses are beginning to average around the five six million and are going northward but most of it is in player salaries and associated agents costs.

1:01Hello and welcome to the Business of Sport, the show that takes you behind the scenes with the industry's leading owners, operators and athletes. This week we're delighted to welcome Mark Devlin to the show. Mark is the CEO of Leighton Orient, a team that's been riding the rollercoaster of English football right on the edge in recent years. From nearly going out of business and dropping into non-league football to bouncing back into League One playoff finals, the fans have been on a ride that few would choose. However, new ownership and big plans to build both on and off the pitch make this London club a hugely exciting football proposition for the next decades.

1:34Having been so close to joining the list that no one wants to be anywhere near alongside the likes of Barry and now Morecambe and maybe even Sheffield Wednesday, Orient's struggles are another glaring reminder of the house of cards and owner financing model presents the Football League. Mark is an experienced CEO, leading Brentford through the early years of their ride to Premier League consistency. His take on what is required to build a club for the community and fan while keeping the finance team happy is what sets the O's apart and promises big things for a fan base juggling the mixed emotions of just being happy to still have a football team alongside a want and an expectation to win.

2:11Another fantastic insight into a football league institution. We're delighted to welcome Mark to the business of sport. But first, some words from our valued partners. This is digital fitness coaching at its peak. I'm so excited for us to partner with Runner, a relationship that's going to get us all up and out there, me included, pacing the streets, woodlands, parks, beachfronts, but backed up by elite level insight and accessibility. This is the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the pros. Now, all you need is a pair of shoes and a goal. I'm terrible at sticking to anything without a plan.

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3:14It's about more than downloading an app. This is fitness-driven experience and community. We bring you a global network of runners who push, celebrate, and support each other. Whether you're an existing user or want to check it out for the first time, you can use our code BOSSRUNNER, that's B-O-S-R-U-N-N-A, or click the link in the bio. Take a look, be challenged, have fun, and of course, stay tuned. Mark, it is so great to have you in the studio. Thank you so much for joining us today. You're very welcome. It's great to have you in. Leyton Orient is such a great story, both last season, but also from your journey, I guess, to CEO.

3:53really interesting one. Before we get into all of that, can we just lay some of the groundwork of the last few years of Orient? Because it's been a very, well, should we say stressful time, I'd imagine, for a lot of supporters, but also now with the success coming in, a hugely exciting time. Can we give a little bit of that context to tee everyone up? Yeah, I mean, it is a great story. And I think the story is probably why we've had a recent change of ownership in the sense that we were able to attract someone because of the recent history of the club. Look, I've only been on the journey for about three and a half years, but goes back to I think 2014 when I was working at Brentford and one of my most memorable games while I was at Brentford, sadly for Orient, is when ourselves, Wolves and Orient, ourselves being Brentford at the time, Orient and Wolves were going for promotion.

4:36We ended up playing at Orient in front of the cameras on a Sunday. We won 1-0 and we went into the promotion places alongside Wolves and Wolves and Brentford got promoted that year. Orient went to the playoff finals where they were 2-0 up at half time but ended up losing on penalties to Rotherham. And it's kind of a sliding doors moment because Barry Hearn then decided to, I think it was planned anyway, but sold the club to someone that he thought had said that they had plenty of money and were going to take the club forward. The guys did have money, but it was spent really badly. I don't know the exact history, but I think in three years or whatever, they got through 16 managers.

5:13He had the owner kicking one of the members of staff on the touchline and getting some kind of ban from the FA in the EFL, it became a bit of a circus. But more importantly, the club was run right into the ground, not in terms of being into admin. It was, as I understand it, days away from going completely out of business. That's how badly the club was run. So Nigel Travis and Kent Teague were attracted to the club. Nigel's an East End boy. It's his club. It was his father's club, his granddad's club. So he got involved for the right reasons. Although Nigel's made his money and his mark over in the States.

5:50And Nigel will tell you that for the first couple of months, they didn't even have a bank account, didn't have a lease with a training ground. I think there were four players on a contract. The club was in a right mess and had obviously just been relegated to the National League and was outside the Football League for the first time in its history. So it was shambolic. And if you were a supporter, you weren't sure whether your football club was going to make it through another week. But the fans did their bit by protesting, by helping to make the sale go through putting pressure on the previous owner and fair play to Nigel and Kent for doing what they've done they picked up the club it had a had a torrid first year in the National League and then they won the National League in the second year very timely because I think Ryan Reynolds had just got involved at Wrexham and it would have been with only one going up automatically it would have been probably a lot more difficult in the you know the subsequent years so the club was in a real mess so to see where it was in 2018-2019 to here we are now in in 2025 where we've just you know unfortunately just lost the playoff final again but where we've got record season card sales where we're looking to move to a new ground because we fill the grounds the home areas most saturdays it's been an unbelievable journey and it's been a privilege to be on it for the last three and a half years but i have to give full credit to nigel and kent nigel still involved now even though there's been a change of major shareholder nigel still involved as chairman so the club have got someone that's got their club at heart so So it's been a hell of a ride for the supporters and the club, but it's in a good place now.

7:20Is this turnover, this change of ownership now really to take the club to the next level? Is that Nigel thinking, right, this is the injection that we need to be able to do the things to push the club forward? Yeah, I mean, I think Nigel's been very honest with fans when we've been talking. He's been open and honest with them probably for the last 16, 17 months in saying that, look, I can get it to a certain stage. When you consider that a well-run club in the championship probably only loses£15 million, you start to think about how deep people's pockets have to be, one, to get into the championship and two, to have any chance of staying there.

7:53And so Nigel was clear with fans that he would seek additional equity investment. And if that meant stepping aside, he would. He was very, very conscious about what happened with the sale to the previous Italian owners. so he wanted to make sure that when he passed the baton on it was passed on to people that would care for the club and were getting involved for for the right reasons and that's uh that i think is what's happened is a football club a financial investment or a passion project for rich people can be either really because you do have to ask yourself why people buy football clubs outside of the you know top sort of half dozen in the premier league we pretty much all lose money but in our case I guess David's got involved in it because he's been very clear he wants he wants the club to become a sustainable David Gandler this is the the new majority shareholder David's been very clear with the fan base and with us as staff that he wants the club to be sustainable in the championship so I don't think he's looking for the club to continue to lose 10 not to continue but as I said earlier about you know an average championship club will lose 10 to 15 million and there's some that lose considerably more than that and that's the that's the issue we've got in football it's that you know the golden goose is the premier league so do you stick or twist and if you if you twist and you get it wrong you've got a massive headache if you twist and you get it right then you get the riches in the premier league but it's becoming more and more difficult to stay in the premier league for more than one season the last two years i've seen the three that go up come back back down so how much do you lose a season at orient so last year we lost close to four million four four but that's that's league one and that's getting worse by the way so the The Birmingham-Wrexham effect last year meant that clubs were trying to compete with two clubs that just have revenues and have got owners that could afford to throw money at it.

9:42Birmingham, and I don't blame Birmingham, if you can do it, why can't you do it? It's all within the rules and Birmingham blasted through the league with record number of points. Wrexham's a slightly different kettle of fish. So League One losses are beginning to average around the five, six million and are going northward because you've got this cycle of players' salaries, the cost of running football clubs generally. but most of it is in player salaries and associated agents costs it's the biggest challenge isn't it you give clubs more money and they don't necessarily spend it in the areas to develop revenue streams or infrastructure that's going to actually help them generate more they spend it in the ways that cripple the clubs further i.e player transfer fees and wages you asked earlier obviously about why would someone was it a passion project or whatever so in my opinion if orient get promoted we will then be a much more valuable asset to whoever owns the club at the time and if the short-term interest which I don't think is David's ambition in terms of you know the sort of value of the asset will go up because we'll be in the championship and not in league one and you pay more for a league one club than you do in league two and so forth and so forth I think the plan at Orient is for us to find a new stadium it's not easy in London trying to find the sort of land that's required our current ground holds 9 ,000 but if you're not aware of Brisbane Road it's got flats in each corner so I had a project team and architects look at what was possible at Brisbane Road we probably without without knocking down all the flats and irritating the residents there which we weren't about to do we could probably sneak it up to about 12 and a half 13 000 which really wouldn't if you're trying to be a sustainable championship club and by that truly try and pay your way you need to find ways to generate more revenue and that will come through bigger attendances better use of the stadium on non-match days potentially other sports using your stadium and looking at creative ways of generating as much revenue as you can coming into the entity so that you can spend more money and be competitive on the pitch because there's the balance i think orient fans if i'm being honest now and i don't think they're any different from any other fans i think for a few years they were they were just glad they still had a club and they were lucky that it was pointing in the right direction but of course now we've come out national league interleague two one league two interleague one got to a playoff final the expectations levels sort of pick up on the fan base and it's incredibly difficult for owners to say I can afford to spend this much on it because you'll always have fans saying why can't you spend more why can't you have you know what do you think fans biggest gripe with you today is with the club yeah I know I've it's been labeled at me personally by the by some of the fans that were too commercial now that we I still think we're an incredibly community oriented family oriented club it's a really nice safe place to come but we need to generate more revenue i mean that's the the fact of the matter is we've got to be commercial so we've got to try and get people in earlier using our bars and our and our fmb and our getting people in on non-match days and in the spirit of having an open culture we try and share that with the fans and some fans just think it it you know it comes back to it's just a business now it's not a club anymore i think you can still be a and we've got a community trust that does some spectacular work in our community.

12:50So I think we can be that, but also be more commercial. And so, you know, I've got a commercial team in there that are always under pressure to bring in, you know, more sponsors, bigger sponsors, more revenue. But back to your point earlier, if you're not careful, if you give clubs, and this is where the regulator, the new regulator will come in, I don't think you can trust football clubs to be given more money from a better broadcast deal without putting rules in place that say how much of that additional money can be it has to be capped and that probably for owners as well equity probably has to be capped as well to protect them from themselves and then you're quite right some of that has to go be reinvested into the academy into the women's team into the infrastructure of the stadium otherwise you're quite right most clubs will just it'll go out the door on players and agents and so forth well this is the point really isn't it because to achieve everything that you've just outlined and to get more revenue and to make yourself a better of business to allow yourself to succeed long term and not have what happened previously you need to own that stadium you need to bring people into that stadium you need to be able to do multiple things with that stadium but that could take you five to ten years to do it and that will impact your next five to ten years of player spend that could really impact you if you're dropping down the leagues and suddenly then you have a piece of infrastructure which is now supporting a very different team to what it was when it was starting to be built that is literally the challenge i think with football right now you know it's a penny away from the pitch it's basically a penny that could cost you where you sit in a league you're quite right last year we installed solar panels on the top of two of the stadium roofs and that's already paying dividends particularly with the kind of summer we've had this year an amount of sunshine england's had which is you know uh no great timing yeah never really expected that but it saved us a shed load but of course there are fans saying well for the money you put on those can we have got another player in and there's an argument so as a ceo we were looking at i'm trying to create an all-round stronger business and of course we can't get away from the fact that we need to be as competitive as possible and our budget is probably about mid-table if you put all the budgets in place we i would suspect we are somewhere between 11th and 14th in the table so we're asking our head coach to overachieve we've signed the head coach on for you know we're trying to take a longer term view richie has been with the club a month less than i have he's probably now one of the longest serving managers in the efl at three and a bit years we've signed richie on a longer term contract because he's key to this process.

15:07He's key to attracting the kind of players we can attract. And he's key also to some, and I think back down to it, you can have as much money as possible. If your recruitment isn't smart, you can waste an awful lot of that. I mean, if we had twice as much money to spend, if we brought in the wrong players and the wrong fit, then we'd end up not achieving the expectations on the pitch that we'd like to. So recruitment's got to be smart. Your head coach and his support team's got to be good. You know, I came from a club at Brentford that vastly outperformed its budget. So all of this is achievable.

15:40What do you take from that, what you experience? Brentford now, with hindsight, we look back and we can go, that is an incredible rise and an incredible mould to try and shape a club in because not only has it got to the top, it's also managed to maintain its position at the top, which is what everyone wants because that's where the Ipswich dream falls down. Look at Luton now back in League One. Brentford have stayed there. You were part of that in the earlier stages. What did you learn from that experience that you can bring into trying to do a similar type of thing with Leighton Orient? Credit to the Brentford ownership and to the director of football at Brentford.

16:16Everything Brentford did wasn't normal. They weren't frightened to be different. One of the mantras that we had was, you know, daring to be different, not forgetting where you've come from, not trying to outspend people, but trying to outthink them, not by being clever dicks, but just you know we had a couple of years there where Newcastle and Aston Villa were in the championship with us and I remember looking at Newcastle's parachute payment in their first year it was five times just their parachute payment it was five times Brentford's turnover for that entire season and that's what you're up against so there's no way we were going to be able to be in the same market for them so Brentford was all about using the data and analytics that Smart odds Matthew Benham's business behind that gives it a real edge not being frightened to introduce free kick coaches throwing coaches sleep coaches and when some of that was was introduced frankly it got laughed at and Matthew was what was a point of ridicule in some of the national press for for a few weeks he was pictured alongside you know the Cardiff owner who went in and changed Cardiff strip from blue to red because it's a lucky colour you know and so forth everything was methodical so what I've taken from it is not being frightened to be a bit different understanding that we can't compete with the teams with the biggest budgets so what areas that will give us an edge even if it's only 1 % here and 1 % there and that's what I've tried to take along now we don't use exactly the same method as the Brentford days at Orient but we are trying to look at different ways we can just think differently and look to outthink people and give us an edge in certain areas don't be frightened to be a bit different I'm probably a traditionalist as well there's lots of traditionalists in football that will go, no, no, no, you can't do that.

17:53You've got to do it this way. This is the way it's always been done. And that's kind of a, it's a statement that we've banned there and I don't like my staff to say it at Orient either. I don't want to hear how we've always done it because you'll only get what you get when you've only done it the same way over and over again. You mentioned the importance of performance and finding the right model with that. You've utilised the loan market really well. Charlie Kelman lost, he's a great example, scoring lots of goals. Now I saw yesterday got his move. We've got to move to Charlton. Yeah. How important is being creative in that loan market and the free transfer market when you're in League One and also with the ambitions that you have to then build the club and kind of protect your revenues as well?

18:29It's very important. So we've got to try and develop a model and that's what we're trying to do now, which is bringing through some younger players that will give us some value. They will either carry us forward into the division higher or they'll be developed by our head coach, who we rate obviously very highly, and that we will generate some value at the end of them, which we can reinvest back in the team. that's happened with Ethan Galbraith no one had heard of Ethan when he joined us from Manchester United Richie had known him because Richie's got some links up there no one had heard about Ethan he's now just got himself a you know fantastic move to Swansea for well over one and a half million pounds it's brought in and we need to do more of that and we're starting to recruit people and players at a young level that we feel we can develop however the loans market is incredibly important so what's important firstly is that we've got a culture at Orient that I think clubs will trust so whether it's our training methods style of football we play because clubs won't loan new players if they play a certain style of football and you play a completely different brand then they're not really interested in loaning new players that are not going to be trained properly and will be taught to play football in a in a way that is different to their culture so i think our style of play helps the way we look after players young players helps you know charlie was part of our league two winning team he came back didn't do so well at at Wigan when he was on loan, not sure why, comes back to Orient and has a fantastic year.

19:53And had we got promoted, we probably would have been able to afford to keep Charlie. That's just the way, you know, sliding doors moments come and you lose a playoff final and things change and you have to build for the future and fair play to Charlie for getting his move into the championship. Can I ask, you mentioned like a million and a half for Ethan. How are deals like that structured? Do you get a million and a half up front? Is it dependent on player performance, duration? What is that structure? They're all different. They're all different. So quite often, a big part of that will be up front.

20:23Then there'll be a series of add-ons, sell-ons. If Ethan does well at Swansea and he moves on, and he moves on for more money than they'll have paid at the time he moves on, then there'll be some upside. What's a typical sell-on, average? Somewhere between 15 % and 25%. It's pretty meaningful. Yeah, it can be. Some are higher than that. You know, if you get a youngster in for no fee at all, where particularly a Premier League team is willing to let you have them for no fee whatsoever, then you can expect to pay a higher sell-on than that. But it is really all down to negotiation where the player is in his journey with his parent club and so forth.

20:58So there's lots of value in the loans market. There's also negotiation when you do loan players, whether you're picking up their entire salary. Clearly, if he's coming from a Premier League club, we won't be doing that. some of these youngsters earn unbelievable salaries there are some 19 20 year olds that have never appeared for their for the first team of their parent club that are probably liberally on anywhere between 10 and 10 and 20 grand a week and we can't pay that we can pay a percentage of that but what's more important as we've seen with Charlie in a sense even with Jamie Donnelly we gave Jamie was a really highly rated player we gave Jamie the window last year he was fantastic for us.

21:36Took a bit of time. He started in the team, then dropped out of the team, and Richie got to work on him, and as did the rest of the coaching staff. Jamie had a fantastic year for us. I did Josh Keely in goal as well. And Jamie, no doubt, will go on to, I don't know what Spurs will plan to do with him this year, but I suspect he'll, if he's not part of the first team plans, he'll definitely get a loan into the Championship. And what we've done there, although we're picking up only a percentage of his salary, we've put a player in the shop window there for Spurs that they wouldn't have had. So in a way, we're developing other teams' players, and we don't mind doing that because there are certain loans that fit into that criteria.

22:13But what we've got to get better at, and we've started consciously, very consciously this summer, is bringing in and developing our own players and using loans in the right way, the right mix. But you're quite right. The recruitment team did extremely well with our loans. But it left us open because we lose the playoff game. we had five low knees at the time four of them I think off the top of my head started the game all of those have gone back to their parent clubs obviously then you had Ethan Galbraith moving on Jordan moving on as well the seven or eight of that team that played in the playoff final have moved on that's a hell of a recruitment process to go through in the summer but the guys have pulled it out of the bag again and we're looking forward to a new season That was my question really because you've got I think it was 27 goals that Charlie scored last season now you have those gaps knowing that those players are leaving are you preparing to make sure that if those players can't be signed if you don't go up if you're in a situation where you're in league one still and you think you're going to have those gaps you are prepared to fill them with the right types of players because i'd imagine very easily if you don't do that you could find yourself suddenly at the bottom of league one not pushing for promotion again absolutely i mean planning is is paramount really so you have to you have to work on the fact that players will move on certain players will move on whatever happens to you.

23:30Jamie and Josh, for instance, from Spurs may well have stayed with us on loan. Don't know for sure, but I think there was a decent chance there that a pair of them would have come back to us on loan because we were in the Championship. Spurs are probably looking for Jamie to play in the Championship next year. He's had his year in League One. So plenty of planning. I mean, you know, again, from my Brentford experience, you have to plan probably three transfer windows. So not just one. You have to keep thinking about how your team will churn, what you need to be doing, not just in this window, but in the following window, maybe the one after that.

24:03What does that player selection decision making look like? We've spoken to many different CEOs and owners, and some it's like down to the coach and manager, and some it's like, hey, we choose a selection of assets, they choose them, and some it's like, we give you the players. Which of the three routes do you choose? We're a little bit in the middle. So Richie has a big say in the players that are coming in, but there are plenty of players presented to Richie that Richie hasn't brought to the table. But we're looking for a left back. So here's two or three left backs that, first of all, you've got to analyse and understand what you're looking for in that particular position, type of player.

24:37Age profile, also do a bit of homework on the player's background, his character, because if you bring the wrong, if you bring a great player in who's got a poor character, you can screw the entire dynamic of the team. Have you had that before? I've seen it at clubs before. I've heard about it at clubs before. Yeah, you can do it. You know, super talented players come with whatever fractured egos or whatever it might be. Footballers are the same as anyone in society. And if you're trying to go with a cohesive unit that will pull in the same direction, you can't have too many big-time Charlies in there, you know, who feel they're bigger and better than where they're playing their football or the training ground isn't good enough.

25:16I mean, again, an experience there. again at Brentford we brought in players from Everton my biggest concern was Christ they're going to come in from Everton and they're going to look at the training ground we had at the time they've obviously Brentford have massively improved it and credit to Everton's academy and the type of players they're bringing through not one of them was ever a minutes problem and they've all gone on to either play more times for Brentford or go on to have really strong careers in football not necessarily at Everton so you do have to be that's the bit that analytics can't give you that's why you need a recruitment team that are well connected and can understand the character of players coming in and have got good contacts to find out what players are like behind the scenes.

25:56So it's not just about their ability on the pitch, although that's obviously a significant part of it. So yeah, ours is a bit of a hybrid system, I suppose, in that we, Richie has a lot to say. So I'm sat in the football committee meetings. I'll have an opinion on a player and what have you. But at the end of the day, I'm just a CEO there. I'm just trying to make sure that the budget stacks up so I've got a strong financial guy in those meetings making sure that we're within budget and if we're over budget what do we do about bringing it back in or what do we do in other areas of the business to make up for the budget overspend if that's what we do my belief is you just let people if you bring in good people don't bring them in to try to do their job for them so let the head coach have a good say in it I don't think we've ever foisted a player onto Richie that he hasn't fancied or hasn't wanted it may not have been his first choice but then he goes away, looks at some of the video and the analysis we've got and he may change his opinion.

26:49So it's a bit of a hybrid model, whereas Brentford was more at the time, maybe it's changed in the Premier League, more at the time of the system you said, which is here's a whole bunch of players in these positions, your job is just to coach them, we'll bring you in the right left back or the right left-sided centre half, whatever it might have been. So ours is a hybrid, we haven't fully gone down that, well for want of a poor word, money ball route. there are still a lot of eyeballs involved in our recruitment. Do you set your budget as a percentage of revenue? Yes, in a sense. I'm also understanding what the owner is prepared to invest into the club.

27:24So here's all the revenue we generate. What can you put in Mr. Owner? What are you prepared to put in? Then we sort of look at what the budget can be made up of when you take the entire business into it. So my job is to make sure that the owner doesn't have to put in any more money than he's prepared to put in at the start of the year. and if he does it's been a conscious decision on his part to put it in and that's my job and really the job of the COO who I brought in from Ipswich about 18 months ago who's got a very strong financial background. So you look at David coming in and you're going through a deal and he's understanding the financials last year you did about seven and a half I think 7.7 million in revenue but as you said losses just over three million so let's say there's total expenditure in the club around 10 he's coming in he's going right okay I know now what I need for us to probably maintain but i also know what i need to do if we're going to push that little bit further yeah that's that's just about where we are he'll obviously ask me do we need to spend as much money off the field as we're spending can we bring more money in how much is spent off versus on of the 10 there's a percentage around 30 or so i'm just trying to think off the top of my head okay so basically seven millions pet players and three millions yeah i mean remember you've got academy costs in there and so forth so it's not quite seven million or it wasn't hasn't been quite 7 million so there are other so it depends whether you include academy and things like that as being off the field i don't i think that's a football expense albeit we budget it as an academy well we're a cat 3 academy so it costs after grants and things like that we spend about 450 grand a year on a cat 3 academy cat 1 academies my understanding is it can cost you north of 5 million pounds a year after any grant work but then you are so david has come in and he's talked about having a cat two academy and it's a big leap from the cat three to cat two because you suddenly need an indoor training venue that's at least a 40 by 60 as part of if you're a cat two and you want to be licensed you have to have that well we simply couldn't have that at chigwell where our training ground is currently so that leads into a next conversation about do we now need to go and find a bigger training ground for our first team and academy and women's team that could be a training ground with the number of pitches you would need if everything was in one area is around 25 to 30 acres so we're never going to find that in London but we might be able to find it out in Essex but then that comes with a cost then all the buildings on top of that a good training ground will set you back minimum 30 million pounds probably and I've when we were looking at training I don't know why I went I went and very kindly the guys at Tottenham took me around it I mean Tottenham's training ground is just unreal I mean I understand a lot of the Premier League clubs now even the ones aren't I mean to be kind here not traditionally you wouldn't traditionally think of them but the Bournemouths of this world even Brentford are on the same site as when I was there but they've completely renovated it and have done a fantastic job and I went over to have a look at that that's more realistic in terms of what we would what we would need so it's a hell of an expenditure I mean but you know owning a football and there's no real return on that other than the fact that it helps you recruit better players and there is return and so if you look at where the majority of value now if you're looking at broader football ownership is had it's at exit if we're being really honest you're building something up to have a value eventually one day where if you sold it it would be worth incrementally more than what you bought it for the infrastructure development around that massively increases the value of the club but also where it's this is where it's so important you have the owner who's willing to do that because that expenditure if someone says i'm willing to put 30 million down to build the infrastructure around the club that's kept separately right from the football regulations around what you can spend so that's just an injection to the business i was looking at the six point kind of plan that you laid out when david bought the club and training facilities is one academy pathway another to build a new stadium another inspire more local people which would actually come through a lot of the work you'd be able to do with that improved infrastructure and the women's team so just in that when you're looking at infrastructure development of academies really we're all coming back to this plan from the new ownership is to build everything around the club it would be very difficult for us to climb through the leagues and grow community sport women's sport based off of our current site at Brisbane Road and the current training ground we've got a really good relationship with Chigwell School but the site just wouldn't be big enough for a for a cat too so we would need to go somewhere else or we would need to find somewhere for the first team to move to so that the academy can continue to use Chigwell School but you're you're right everything is about you know that there is no doubt about it and we've been very clear about the fact that we want to we want to build a new stadium the responsibility is to build on the opportunities that are out there with our new community with just the feel-good factor the fact that orient as a brand i think has got plenty of room to grow it's got it's got a very interesting history it's not a history littered with success no one's trying to pull the wool over anyone's but it's quite a storied history.

32:15How much is a new stadium? Well, there are new stadiums. I mean, pure simple terms. In London, you could be looking at anywhere between 5 ,000 and 12 ,000 pounds a seat. So, depending on your capacity, you can double that. Now, it all depends on the finish to the stadium, how many seats, the area that it's built in. But it's expensive to build a stadium. But is David aligned to tracking 50 mil or whatever? I think more than that. No, it'd be a lot more than that. David understands the scope of the cost of the infrastructure and the vision that he's got for, as I say, a multi-sport stadium that brings women's sport into it, multi-gender sports, potentially other not aligned sports.

32:58But he's involved in, I think he's shortly going to announce it, he's involved in purchasing the IP for a London-based NFL-style team. They're not NFL. they would be the European League of Football which is an offshoot of the NFL currently there are no teams in the UK yet there is a lot of latent support all the games that get played in London are all sold out whether they're at Wembley or more recently at Spurs as well so there's a big opportunity there as well so David understands that and his job and I think what he's very good at is finding whether it's himself and other funders to fund what's required for the vision that we've discussed with Waltham Forest Council.

33:41So it's, yeah, I mean, it could be half a billion pounds worth of infrastructure. But does it compromise anything else when you're pouring that much money into one thing? Is it like what we were talking about earlier, where you can't actually achieve these six things? You have to have priorities. You have to have a stadium first, then maybe the training facilities. Or is it really a case of how do we leverage different financial mechanisms to run this alongside each other? Yeah, the search for a new site, a new stadium site and the build of a new stadium and training ground won't compromise. There is absolutely no point us taking our eye off the ball from trying to be competitive in our league.

34:18What's the point of building a new stadium if you then get relegated? You know, everything gets, there's a knock on to everything. It's important that at the very least we maintain our current status and hopefully we can go one better than we did last year and make the jump into the championship. David's made it very clear he wants and believes the club can be a sustainable championship club. And by sustainable, that means that it doesn't keep costing an owner or owners 15 to 20 million pounds a year to be competitive and chase the dream of the Premier League. Are there any sustainable clubs today in the championship?

34:51If sustainable is break-even, the fact of the matter is that there's no one even near it, I don't think. The real issue will always come down to it. And there's only so much you can do. there's only so much David can do here because the macros of this the system right now is so inflated in the areas for you to be competitive that if you do want to get to the championship and compete you will have to spend a lot of money on the pitch and that when you've got a turnover of between seven to ten million is not impossible of course but virtually impossible to properly build sustainability into that model and live within a market where Birmingham in league one sign a striker for 15 million.

35:28Because what that does is as influential as Neymar to PSG for 200 million, suddenly in market price, everyone's looking at it, it sets a precedent and that's a League One transfer. And you've got to compete in that market. It's undoubtedly very tough. I wouldn't say it's impossible. It is very tough to remain competitive. And I've got to continue. The other side of that coin is we need to continue to recruit fan base. You know, ideally we want to, yes, we had record season card sales last year, but I need to get to a stage where demand outstrips supply. And we're a long way from that. And you need to have a good competitive team on the field and also a really strong community.

36:06You know, we need to create an ethos where people are proud to be involved with Leighton Orient and support Leighton Orient, not just the fans, but they are our commercial partners as well because of the type of brand we are and the kind of culture that we have. So it is undoubtedly tough, but we are very focused on trying to make it happen. You can give David one of the options. performance with continuing losses going to the championship but we're hemorrhaging cash like everyone else it's very difficult so a line of everyone else but hemorrhaging cash or not the performance stay in league one do well fine cool but sustainable team with good economics break even yeah david didn't get involved to just keep a league one club trundling along losing a little money that he would be prepared to put in every year.

36:53He has bigger aspirations. The reason for him, I believe, getting involved in the club is that he sees the opportunity in East London, particularly in the area we are, as to what we can build the club and a stadium and a support infrastructure that can be really quite exciting. And you're right, at some point, the new regulator will have an impact. Not only will there be a little bit more money flushing down the leagues, But I think you're going to see alongside that some much stricter spending. The whole idea behind the regulator is to stop things like Morecambe, Bury, Sheffield Wednesday, things like that happening.