save altrinchams football existence

You will probably be aware that from recent press reports that the financial situation at Altrincham FC is not too good at the moment which of course is not helped by poor league attendance’s and even lower ones at cup matches. The result being the monies coming in are not enough to cover the bills going out which means that the club is losing money every week and of course this causes many problems in the operations of the club. It is not an unusual situation for many Football Clubs these days, do you remember Lance Key the goalkeeper who alledgedly came to us on loan from Northwich last season, when he arrived at Moss Lane he had not been paid by his club for about eight weeks, at last our players are still being paid even if at times it is a little late.

The easiest way of trimming your deficits is to try and cut your wage bill by reducing the playing staff, hence the reason for recent departures. As a Supporters Association it is not our wish to get involved in the internal operations of the club but we do expect to be kept aware of developments and of course that does happen and with us having our own representative in Mark Eckershall on the board to relate back to us on matters relating to the Supporters, is a huge advantage to us. The club have made us aware of its worsening financial situation and we can report that it is the worst it has been in the five years since SAFE was formed when our club nearly folded. So again this makes our priorities to try and increase our fund raising activities yet again, with us being fully aware that the monies we raise for the club are only a drop in the ocean for what is needed but we have made regular donations when the club have struggled due to lack of home fixtures etc. We would ask do we want to go down that same road again of five years ago and the answer is surely a massive NO but the worrying facts are, is if we were faced with that situation again would people be motivated enough to do anything about it, we have sent out letters to all those people who have been past Members of SAFE but have not rejoined, these letters were not begging ones but were hopefully meant to give a little dig to see if they would give us and the Club their support again, the response to those letters has been pretty pathetic. For some reason we feel that many supporters have a downer on SAFE, we ask why?, Because the Supporters Association is not about individuals, even though it seems to be the same few people who do all the work, but it is about all of us Supporters of Altrincham Football Club, or at the least this should be the case with our sole objective being to assist the club when we are able to, especially when it finds itself in its present position. We find it almost unbelievable that certain former members of SAFE have been actually overheard trying to deter supporters from joining us, that we see as a pretty sad state of affairs and how do we achieve our objectives when there are these sort of divisions amongst supporters. Do you know that on many occasions it would be quite easy for us to lose our motivation due to lack of interest that is shown by many supporters but we are very much aware that we do have some really terrific people who are involved in our Association and who give us some really marvelous support. Our Official Supporters Association are always looking at new initiatives which we could organise to further help the club, one of these is Supporters Direct, The Supporters Trust Initiative, which we hope to be orgainising an Open Meeting on, which we can discuss the subject in greater detail.

Finally we would just ask you to give a bit of thought to how important it is to you that there is a local Town Football Club for you to support and just what would it mean to you if that Club was no longer part of your life because that is exactly what we were facing five years ago and do we really want to be facing that possibility again, with your help to help SAFE to help Altrincham Football Club then hopefully that situation is less likely to happen.

Alan Brotherton, on behalf of the SAFE Committee.

FS. For starters how about making a huge effort to sell as many books of tickets for the Christmas Draw as you possibly can, these can be collected at the SAFE Cabin or during office hours from the club office.