Harlequins
Quinssa Meet the Management Evening Part 1
By Prof
February 25 2009
On the 18th February 2009 Quinssa held a Meet the Management Evening with Mark Evans and Dean Richards. Here is the first part of what was said.
Q: How is the ownership of the club arranged?
Mark Evans: In the past we were a members’ club, until 1964 you had to have played for the club to be a member. Between 1964 and 1988 you could only be a member if you had been proposed and seconded (looking round I can see the benefits! That’s not going to look very good in black and white!). Between 1988 and 1995 you could buy membership if you could get three signatures from other members. In 1996 it was incorporated with 50% of the membership belonging to the membership. In 1997 it was bought by Duncan Saville and Charles Jillings’ company. Now Saville and Jillings’ company owns 97-98%.
Luckily for us they prefer a non-executive ownership which is unlike some Premiership club owners.
Q: What is their exit route?
ME: I have no idea, they have never shown any signs of wanting to sell up and move on. They are both in their 50s so they are a lot younger than many other Premiership owners and I think that makes a difference.
Q: Do they put much money into the club?
ME: In the past they have put in upwards of £15,000,000 into Quins.
Q: What are the finances of the Premiership like at the moment?
ME: It is very mixed, the likes of Leicester and Northampton are extremely healthy and in profit. At the other end you have clubs with heavy losses at an operational level like London Wasps, London Irish, Saracens and Sale. Some have significant assets such as London Irish with Sunbury, Wasps have nothing any more, neither do Sarries.
Basically it comes down to if you’re not drawing 12,000 in each week then you are making an operational loss. We just about get that so we just about break even - £100,000 either side, usually under, but we do have building costs to pay.
Like most sports clubs one interesting marker is the % of wage costs compared to revenue. In football a club like Newcastle United has a percentage of around 70%, whereas Manchester United, with a much higher wage bill but even higher revenue, the figure is only about 33%. [Evs didn’t mention what our wages:revenue percentage is]
A lot of clubs are in quite a precarious position, Bristol and Newcastle Falcons in the Premiership and Nottingham and Coventry in ND1. You don’t have to go far back to see what can happen with the likes of West Hartlepool and Wakefield.
In France 7 of the top 14 clubs are reducing their playing budgets next season and only 4 or 5 clubs are making a profit – Stade Française, Toulouse, Claremont Auvergne, Perpignan USAP and Biarritz.
I think it’s going to eventually end up with a European League.
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