Football Is Not A Normal Business Said Gloucester Chairman

Gloucester City chairman Alex Petheram has spoken about how his club is coping with the effects of coronavirus virus.

'Following the outbreak of COVID-19 we as a club have been effected massively. I personally went down with the virus before the Blyth game with several others self-isolating. I’m not going to name which players, they can do that themselves if they want…

Financially times are hard, very hard! If this was a ‘normal’ business and not a football club, you’d shut the doors and walk away. The key word above is ‘business’, the football club is a business, it has a company number like every company in the world… I genuinely believe some people think as we’re a football club that it’s a charity number. But the club like every business in the world, needs to make money, as trading insolvently is illegal.

With that said, now we’ve no football being played, no community projects, no working in schools, no Easter and Summer Camps etc etc… yet wages and bills still to pay, we are going to lose £111.4k at the last count. How’s that going to be paid I hear you ask…. The second football stopped I had to personally put in £25k, with another £54k put in this week. What makes it worse for me, is that with so little football played over the winter, I had to pump in £30k in that period also. This was to get us over what I thought would be a cashflow issue… ha I got that one wrong! So at a time when the weather has turned and we should be having a run of home games in the sun, we’re in fact facing further losses … Steve Harvey has also put money into the club (thank you mate) and as for Eamonn… well for the past 20 plus years Eamonn has done nothing but put money in to the club.

As I said the other day, all our staff and players have been placed as furlough workers, with all players taking a 20% pay cut, thank you lads. So everyone in the club is feeling the pain, but that’s what teams do, stick together as we’re never out the fight!'