|
A recent visit to Turf Moor led me to reflect on the football phenomenon that is Burnley. As you drive down into the town, you can see most of it spread out below you. The population is 60,000 and it is estimated that around half of the core home support of 6,000 comes from the town itself. These figures take no account of the fact that a considerable proportion of the population is made up of an ethnic minority of Kashmiri extraction, very few of whom are in evidence at Turf Moor. Burnley is not a prosperous town. It is an old mill town, has continued to be over reliant on manufacturing employment and has developed relatively little service activity. On an earlier visit I saw some of the worst scenes of urban devastation I have seen outside the United States. Of course, the town has prosperous areas and there are some beautiful villages in the surrounding countryside with expensive housing. Nevertheless, this is a town with the same population as my home town of Leamington Spa.
has a similar population and is much more prosperous but only supports a Step 4 non-league club (admittedly with ambitions to move higher up the non-league pyramid).
There is no doubt that any linear regression scattergram which plotted population/prosperity against success on the pitch would show Burnley as an outlier. Part of the answer is history. Burnley was one of the original members of the Football League. But some of these early teams have fallen by the wayside (Darwen, Glossop) or have had to be re-formed more than once (Accrington just down the road from Burnley). Bob Lord was, of course, for many years the chairman of Burnley (including, I think, when they won the league championship) and was portrayed as a local butcher although it seems he was a somewhat larger scale meat processor. This season Burnley have been on the edge of the Championship play offs. When I was there in 2006, the programme commented that just one year in the Premiership would set the club up for ten years. The club is planning a £30m facelift to provide a Premiership style stadium and would presumably replace such features as wooden seats.
The club is highly reliant on gate money which is why it is so important that as much as 10 per cent of the local population turns out regularly for matches. Over 50 per cent of the net income at Turf Moor comes from season ticket sales. Chairman Barry Kilby noted in the programme, 'Without Premiership football, season ticket cash remains a staple of our club's financial budget'. The club has also been clever in its transfer dealings, even selling players at a profit and then buying them back later at a knock down price. It is losing money, but the losses appear to be sustainable, particularly given that there are more prosperous supporters around the world who identify themselves as Clarets. The example of Burnley shows that it is possible for a club to achieve success on the pitch against the economic odds, but it may be the exception that proves the rule.
|
