A QUARTER of Haverhill Rovers’ spending was on wages last season, it was revealed at the club’s annual meeting last Thursday.
Up until April, Rovers had paid players money totalling £17,053.13 – 23 per cent of all the club’s expenditure.
That f
igure is the highest it’s been in the club’s history, but chairman Steve Brown assured fans the club, which made a loss of more than £10,000, would stop living outside its means.
Mr Brown said: “Perhaps it’s a bit clearer as to why we had to cut wages so dramatically.
“Maybe we should have done it earlier but hindsight is a wonderful thing.”
Mr Brown, who was re-elected as Rovers’ chairman for a third season, promised supporters he would do everything in his power to make Haverhill Rovers a self-sufficient club.
After his re-election he said: “When we changed the structure of the players’ wages I said I wouldn’t be here because of what happened.
“But I’m prepared to carry on for another year and get the club on a good standing using local players, a local manager and hopefully the committee will gets its finger out and we will get going.”
Wages paid out in February, before the cuts, totalled £2,276 – averaging more than £40 per player per match.
In March wages were reduced to £1,288, during the cuts, averaging less than £20 per player per match.
The season before Haverhill Rovers spent just £7,146 on wages throughout the whole season.
This season, bar supplies were the club’s second biggest outlay with travelling and team expenses in third.
However, officials’ costs rose by 45 per cent from the season before and Haverhill had to pay out £5,639, making it the fourth biggest outlay.
Committee member John Linnane said: “The last four games down here, we didn’t take enough on the gate to pay the officials.”
Gate receipts for this season compared with last season have halved, although that was partly down to the Aldershot FA Cup game match for which 1,730 people turned up.
Income was also down by about a third but that was also partly down to prize money and gate receipts earned during the 2006/2007 FA Cup run.
derek.bish@haverhillecho.com
