We are now approaching 18 months since the formation of SK Ballers Limited (how official), so we thought we’d give you a little bit of information on where we see ourselves, what our aims are, what our priorities are etc etc. Hopefully this can give everyone an idea of where we are heading, and what YOU can do to help us get where we want to be, in order to give our customers everything that they could want from us. GO TEAM!!
When the decision was made to set this company up, one of the key components was taking some of the frustrations and restrictions of working for other people away, and being able to (hopefully) treat people in the football environment the way that I would want to be treated as a customer. Try and be well organised, flexible, price it sensibly, and try to have good communication with teams in order to easily resolve issues that may come up.
Those things also involved prioritising the long standing customers rather than throwing all of the best offers at new teams. Common sense will tell you that the teams who have played the longest will have put the most money into the business, which is why we made the decision to reward the teams who had been with us a year with team shirts. We could only do that because there was enough money in the business to be able to do it, and that’s why we have committed to doing that for two teams every month going forward. Obviously we will only be able to do that as long as the money is coming in, so as long as we have enough teams, teams will continue to be rewarded! That is the Ballers circle of life. Simple.
I’ve had a number of conversations with people who are under the assumption that we are making an absolute fortune from doing this given how the busy the pitch is most nights, and when the odd player is trying to get away with not paying they probably see a company name and logo and think it’s sticking it to the man, not paying money to those shareholders who sit in their offices, feet up, lighting up cigars with £50 notes and mopping their brows with 20’s. Now I enjoy mopping my brow with a 20 as much as the next man, but I can’t afford to do it with too many of them as it stands. Everyone would like to live comfortably, take home a good wage and buy all those material things that are so important. Personally I would like to buy the scented dog poo bags with the tie handles rather than the Pound Shop ones, and maybe one day those of us involved with Ballers might be in a comfortable enough position to buy whatever poo bags we want, but not yet.
Actual photo from the first Ballers Christmas night out.
We are using the money that is coming in and after we’ve paid out for the pitch hire, the referees, the trophies, the many, many footballs we need to replace due to some of the truly special levels of shooting that goes on, and we are reinvesting a lot of that into improving things within the company, and that’s where the shirts come in again. At some point in the next 12 months we’ll have every team that plays here kitted out, and those league nights will look awesome! We have spent over £1000 so far on shirts. If we hadn’t done that, no one would expected us to, and that’s £1000 we could have paid ourselves for doing a damn fine job, but we bought the shirts as we felt it was a fair reward for the teams who’ve got us this far. It might seem like common sense but who else does it?!
We are also going to be looking into ways to improve our filming, look at options with multiple cameras, film as much of the action as we can, maybe stream numerous games to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever it is we can do. We bought a device before Christmas that can measure all kinds of stats from the player that is wearing it, we hope to do a lot more of that stuff going forward. Some people can’t believe we don’t have VAR yet, give it time……
We will want to review the website since it’s relaunch. What’s good about it? What needs more work? What more can we add to it? How do we start recording other things like assists, shots on/off target, number of saves?
It’s all going to take time, it’s going to take money both in terms of buying equipment and gaining the required knowledge from people far more qualified than us, it might involve bringing more people on board, but if we keep doing our part of running good leagues that people are happy to pay money to be part of, we’ll get there. If and when we do, it’ll all be thanks to those guys who come and pay their money every week. Help us create something that’s bigger and better than anything else out there!
Time for a cigar. Next month we’ll talk referees, that’ll be a fun one.