Quote Originally Posted by MrMahatma View Post
Yes. On field performance will be a key to continued operating profits. There’s enough hope in the squad to hopefully see memberships at least remain flat, and if we have a good first month of the season, numbers should swell. Limited prime-time exposure will hurt our ability to grow sponsorship revenue, which is why Good Friday will obviously remain a strategic imperative. Get that and a better stadium deal and we’re doing well.

I think this off season has been handled much better than last. You could argue that Dahl was a more loved player than Stringer but much less was made of the move. Better handling of the PR, both positive and negative, will give the club a chance to sell hope for 2019 and make it believable.

A great effort by all involved in running the club. Keep it up.
The full financial report mentioned that the drop off was largely due to 5000 free memberships no longer being given out.

So, if you factor in the +5000 freebies, we would have actually had a small amount of growth to our memberships this year (+593). Considering how terribly terrible we were in the opening two rounds and that the previous years figure was the one that followed the premiership, this is an amazing result.

FYI:

2013: 30209
2014: 31538 (+4.4% = 1329)
2015: 35222 (+11.7% = 3684)
2016: 40032 (+13.7% = 4810)
2017: 47653 (+19% = 7621)
2018: 43246 (-9.2% = -4407) with the extra 5000 would have been 0.01% growth = +593

After navigating to different articles to find the figures, I found the following page that charts each club from 1984-2016 (ours are only available from 1992).

http://footyindustry.com/files/afl/m...2016_aug13.png