Dave Benson Phillips

Our sponsorship agreement last time was worth £400,000 per annum and was negotiated when we were a play-off challenging Championship team. It's fair to say we would command less than half of that as a league 1 team. Take Huddersfield Town for example, a club with a significantly smaller revenue to us, they donated their shirt sponsorship last season to Yorkshire Air Ambulance. Shirt sponsorship is not as lucrative as you might think and can easily be recovered in other ways. For example, if 2,500 tickets are sold with a booking fee for each home game and 500 transactions for each away game, this will equate to £207,000 - which should cover any sponsorship revenue income. As I said, all you have to do is mess around with the revenue streams and as long as you get the same bottom line, you can do without a shirt sponsor.

Having worked in Corporate Sponsorship before, as I stated above, it would be my belief that the decision to withdraw a sponsor would have been a commercial one as opposed to a fan one. SFC will be in a much stronger negotiating position as a Championship team, where they will attract around double the sponsorship revenue ( more than covering the loss this season ) , and as I said, by increasing revenue streams in other areas, they maintain their bottom line. That said, it's a nice gesture on the face of it, and some innovative marketing by the club, as it has obviously captured the imagination of some of our supporters whilst still coming across as a freebie to the consumer, as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I would have thought that they would be in a stronger position for negotiating a new deal if we were in the Championship, where the exposure is considerably more, so it almost benefits the club to have no sponsor this season and go back to the table next season. And also as the kit is a '1 year special' , most of the costs would be met by the extra revenue this would create. I understand football kits cost less than £10 a shirt to the club, so there is £30 markup. So if we sold 8,000 shirts in the next year ( I hear we have sold 1,000 already ) then another 8,000 next year, that alone will cover the no sponsorship. By increasing other revenue streams, such as the booking fee etc, they still maintain their bottom line, so infact the club does not lose any money.

I think that Liebherr ( it's Liebherr, not Cortese that owns Saints ) is running at close to a profit right now. The only difference between L1 and Championship revenues is TV money. Which is £1.6m more than in L1. However our average gates would place us about 7th in the Championship table, and in terms of turnover, we are well inside the top half of the Championship. I don't understand why people discuss League 1 revenue, when it's all a bit hypothetical because we don't have a stereotypical League 1 revenue, we have a top half Championship revenue.

We've got lots of cash We play in a sash We've smoke lots of hash Cos we've got lots of cash ( and a sash )

We had realistic pricing in the Premiership last time and we came close to winning major domestic cups and on a few occasions, qualified for Europe through our league position. I just have no interest in paying stupid money to watch a game of football. Ticket office revenue is minimal compared to transfer revenue ( if buying well ) and Sky money.

I picked Southampton because they where my local team, Southampton born and bred. I didn't pick Chelsea, Arsenal, Man Utd etc because winning isn't everything, the sense of belonging to the city I live in is. I have no interest it watching Saints compete the big 4 and paying the price that goes with it. Give me sensible prices, sensible football and sensible league postions any day of the week.

I remember Roy Keane stopping Beckham and Scholes getting off the coach and having a fight with me after we spanked them 6-3 :cool:

That annoys me. Especially as Notts County is 124 metres further North than Nottingham Forest ( I just checked ) , so they have got the teams round the wrong way.

Green shouldn't have been picked in the first place, haven't forgiven him for bottling it against Ukraine a while ago... or acting like a complete **** when we played Norwich in the relegation season.

What exactly has that caravan dwelling **** ever done to deserve one of them?

I quite like it.

I think the kit looks pretty pukeY .