Treasurer’s Update - August 2026
Well, we are properly under way, and what an opening month to be given! Eight games in thirty-one days across three competitions, our first competitive football at Step 4, and at the end of it we were still standing in both cups. Plenty of people have asked me over the summer how we would find life a division higher. On the evidence of August, we will be just fine.
The Season Begins – and almost all of it away from home
The full set of results:
• Sat 8th – Westfields (a) – FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round – won 5-2
• Tue 11th – Mickleover (h) – league opener at the Oval – lost 1-3
• Sat 15th – Carlton Town (a) – won 2-0
• Tue 18th – AFC Rushden & Diamonds (a) – lost 2-3
• Sat 22nd – Rugby Borough (a) – FA Cup Preliminary Round – won 1-0
• Tue 25th – Coleshill Town (h) – won 3-2
• Sat 29th – Lincoln United (a) – FA Trophy First Qualifying Round – drew 1-1, won 4-2 on penalties
• Mon 31st – Sutton Coldfield Town (a) – lost 0-2
Four league games, two won and two lost, and progress in both FA competitions. Plenty of clubs coming up have found the first month at Step 4 a good deal harsher than that, so I will take it. Coleshill at home was the pick of them, and the night at Lincoln United, where we equalised late and then came through a shoot-out at the end of a very long trip, told us rather a lot about the character in this group.
From a Treasurer’s point of view, though, the shape of that fixture list matters rather more than the results in it. Six of those eight games were away from home, and both of the two matches at the Oval fell on a Tuesday night. Worse than that, the way the league calendar and the cup draws have landed means we will not play a home league fixture on a Saturday until Corby Town come on 26th September, which is very nearly seven weeks after the season started.
It is not rocket science why that hurts. The money going out does not care where the game is being played. Playing budget, coaching wages and training ground hire all start in full from the first weekend of the season. Meanwhile the biggest single thing we earn on a matchday, the Saturday gate, simply is not happening. For a lot of clubs at this level an opening month shaped like that would put an extraordinary strain on cash flow, and every season, somewhere in the pyramid, it does real damage to somebody.
We can absorb it, and I want to be clear that this is design rather than good fortune. Season ticket and sponsorship money for 2026/27 was largely in the bank before a ball was kicked, it sits on the balance sheet as Income in Advance, and it is released month by month as the football actually gets played. We are not living hand to mouth on Saturday takings and we never have been. The playing budget was set against an average attendance of 400, which is deliberately below what we expect, so that a thin month cannot knock us over. That is the whole point of the sustainability model, and honestly, I would encourage any club in our position to run the same discipline. An August like this one should be an irritation to a well-run club and nothing more, and so it has proved.
Cup Income and Crowds at the Oval
Happily, the cup runs went a long way towards filling the hole. This is one of the genuinely good things about the non-league game: in the FA Cup and FA Trophy the gate receipts are split down the middle between the two clubs once expenses come out, so a decent away tie pays us even though somebody else is doing all the work of staging it, and the FA puts prize money on top at every round. August gave us both:
• FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round at Westfields (8th) – gate share £861, prize money £1,125
• FA Cup Preliminary Round at Rugby Borough (22nd) – gate share £1,288, prize money £1,444
• FA Trophy First Qualifying Round at Lincoln United (29th) – gate share £759, prize money £1,500
That comes to £2,909 of gate receipt shares and £4,069 of prize money, or £6,978 in total, which is close to a third of everything the club earned all month. Put another way, three cup ties we were not even hosting brought in roughly what two home league games at the Oval would have done. Winning cup football is far and away the most useful thing this squad can do for the numbers I report, and in a month with only two home games it very nearly covered the fixtures we did not get.
My thanks, too, to Westfields, Rugby Borough and Lincoln United for hosting us properly. Westfields and Rugby Borough both had our share of the gate in our account within a few days of the final whistle, without a single reminder from me, which is not something every treasurer in the country can say about a cup tie.
The two home games were very well backed. 612 came to the Oval for the league opener against Mickleover and 507 for Coleshill Town a fortnight later, both of them on a Tuesday night. Set against the 400 average the budget is built on, that is 212 and 107 to the good on the two nights, and I would guess there are not many clubs in this division pulling figures like that midweek in August. My thanks to every one of you who turned out.
Figure 1. Home league attendances so far in 2026/27, against our 700 target and the 400 average built into the playing budget. Gate receipts above the 400 mark are transferred to the Back to Nuneaton fund.
Now the honest bit. Holding those numbers at least where they were last season, in a tougher division and with results that will not always go our way, is not going to happen by itself. The hardest crowd to get through the gate is the one on a wet Tuesday after a bad Saturday, and every club in the country knows it. Two games are nowhere near enough to call a trend, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but the drop from the first to the second is a reminder of how quickly this can move.
Why does it matter more here than at most clubs? Because of what happens to the money. Our budget is built on an average of 400, and every paying supporter above that mark, at every home game, has their gate receipt transferred straight into the Back to Nuneaton fund. On those two August nights that came to an estimated £1,198 after VAT. Once you are past the 400th person through the turnstile you have stopped paying for this season and started buying bricks.
So, if attendances slip, we lose twice over. The fund grows more slowly, and our case to the council gets harder to make, because that case rests in large part on showing real, sustained local demand for a ground in Nuneaton, and the most persuasive evidence anybody has ever produced for that is the number of people who actually turn up. The money and the politics point the same way here, and both are settled at the turnstile.
Sponsorship, Advertising and Merchandise
The other half of what got us through August is the commercial side, and I am not sure we have ever properly set out what it is that the commercial team actually sell. There are seven separate streams. Here is each of them, with the income recognised so far this year rounded to the nearest hundred:
• Kit sponsorship – shirt, short and training-wear branding – £34,000
• Sponsorship packages – multi-element commercial deals combining several of the below – £25,000
• Digital space – advertising across the website, social media channels – £6,000
• Pitchside boards – perimeter advertising at the Oval – £4,500
• Matchday sponsorship – match, ball and hospitality sponsorship – £4,500
• Player sponsorship – supporters and businesses sponsoring an individual player’s season – £1,100
• Programme advertising – £500
That is a little over £75,500 so far this year against roughly £57,000 at the same point last season, so we are up by about a third, and against the budget we set in the summer every one of those streams has hit or beaten its target bar one. My thanks to every business that has put its name to this club, and to Lee Davies, who had been beavering away at this since March. Lee has since stepped down from this role as Commercial Director, and I’d like to pay tribute to all he did for the club during his tenure.
The exception is player sponsorship, and it has been poor. We have taken £1,100 against £3,700 at this stage last year, so we are roughly £2,600 light on a line that was doing perfectly well twelve months ago. I do not have a clever explanation for it; the take-up simply has not been there. It is one of the cheapest ways going to support the club, it puts your name or your business alongside a player for the whole season, and there are still a good number of the squad unsponsored. If you have sponsored a player before, please have a think about doing it again. If we cannot close that gap, we will have to find the money somewhere else, and it would be a shame to watch a cracking cup month and a record start on merchandise quietly eaten away by a shortfall on the one line we already know how to fix.
Businesses interested in any of the above should contact us at commercial@nuneatontownfc.co.uk.
Merchandise, on the other hand, has been flying. Sales are just under £8,000 for the year to date, made up of roughly £3,800 of other clothing, £3,100 of replica shirts and £1,100 of non-clothing bits and pieces, against about £3,700 at the same stage last season. We have more than doubled it, and close to £3,900 of the total came in August alone.
A special word here for Ethan Hayward and Richard Dean, who stood in for me on the pool table for the Coleshill Town game and did a sterling job of it, taking around £1,700 on the night. That is not far off a club record for a single evening, and it was done by two volunteers who had somewhere else they could have been on a Tuesday. It will never make a headline, but it shows up very clearly indeed in the figures I am reporting to you.
Expenditure
August is the first month where the full cost of a Step 4 season actually lands, and it lands all at once. The club’s outgoings during the month included:
• Playing staff wages
• Playing staff expenses
• Coaching staff wages
• Other matchday equipment
• Stadium hire for the two home fixtures
• Cost of sales on merchandise, mostly replica shirts
• Playing kit
• Coaching staff expenses
• Match official fees
• Matchday travel costs
• External security staff
• Training ground hire
• Players’ and officials’ food
• Hospitality catering
• Web sales shipping costs
• Veo subscription
Administrative costs included:
• Administrative salaries
• Subscription to Xero and other IT
• Bank fees
• Transaction fees (Stripe)
• Employers National Insurance
I said last month that July showed almost none of the playing budget and that August would show all of it, and that is exactly what has happened. The jump in the cost base between the two months is the single biggest reason this month’s figures look so different from last months, and none of it is a surprise. Travel was heavier than a normal month too, for the reasons above.
Turnover of £23,124 in August, against cost of sales of £18,579 and administrative costs of £834, gives a net profit for the month of £3,711. There were no exceptional items.
A surplus at all in the first full month at this level is better than I had budgeted for, and I want to be straight about why, because it is the cup and nothing else. Take the £6,978 of cup gate shares and prize money back out again and August is a loss of a little over £3,200. Worth remembering now that both cup runs have finished. I told you in July to expect losses in most individual months from here, paid for out of the season ticket and sponsorship money already banked, and I have not changed my mind. That is simply the shape of a football club’s year, and it is nothing to be alarmed about.
The third column is the one most of you will look at first, and fairly so. Turnover for the two months to date is £128,726 against £89,794 at the same point last season, up £38,932 or 43%. Cost of sales is down from £35,112 to £30,076, gross profit up from £54,682 to £98,650, which is down to the season starting a week later, and net profit up from £52,576 to £96,785. Every line has moved in the right direction.
Before anybody gets carried away, I need to explain what sits behind that, because the headline flatters us badly. Almost all of the year-to-date profit is the £92,858 of Income in Advance that we released in July, which is season ticket and sponsorship money taken in the spring for a season we still have to go out and play. The costs that money exists to cover are spread across the ten months in front of us. The same effect applied last year, so the comparison itself is a fair one; what would not be fair is reading £96,785 as money sitting in a drawer, because it is not. The cost of sales comparison is flattered as well, this time by where ground hire happens to fall between July and August in the two seasons, so please do not read it as a saving we have banked.
One small housekeeping note for anyone checking these figures against last month’s report, and I do hope somebody does. The July comparatives have shifted slightly since publication, because £767 of matchday clothing came in after that report had gone out. The year-to-date column above ties exactly to the balance sheet, so those are the numbers to work from.
Cash Position
The club received £15,971 in cash during August and spent £34,562, giving a cash deficit for the month of £18,591. That takes the closing bank balance to £142,152, split between £135,850 in the Back to Nuneaton account and £6,302 in the Co-op Bank business account.
How can we lose £18,591 of cash in a month we have just reported a profit in? It is a fair question and the answer is straightforward. Almost all of it is two things that have nothing to do with trading at all: £18,008 of tax settled during the month, and £11,430 of costs accrued over the summer finally paid down. That is why creditors dropped from £20,214 to £7,869. What we did in August was pay off June and July, which is a rather different thing from spending more than we earned.
You will also spot that the Back to Nuneaton bank account went up over the month while the business account came down. Nothing has happened there other than housekeeping; cash we do not need for immediate working capital sits in the account that earns us the most interest on it, and the two balances want reading together rather than separately.
Elsewhere on the balance sheet, debtors were broadly flat at £23,650, and Income in Advance was unchanged at £44,728, which will be released across the rest of the season. Stock of clothing went up from £9,001 to £10,080 as we restocked to keep up with the sales described above, and accruals stood at £12,665 at the month end.
Back to Nuneaton Update
The “Back to Nuneaton” fund stands at £101,335, up £2,583 on the month and now 67.6% of our £150,000 target. We have gone through £100,000, which I think deserves a moment. That has been built out of supporters putting their hands in their pockets and people walking through a turnstile, a few pounds at a time, over two- and a-bit years.
The movement comes from two places. The first is the gate money above 400 from the two home games, which I make roughly £932 from Mickleover and £266 from Coleshill, an estimated £1,198 once VAT comes out. I have valued the supporters above the 400 mark at the average price actually paid on each night, so anyone who fancies checking my working is very welcome to it. The second is £1,385 of donations during the month, and £795 of that came from one source: Kevin Brown’s “Boro Bazaar”. That is an extraordinary amount to raise off a bazaar and Kevin has my thanks for the graft that went into it. Thanks as well to John, who by all accounts did a fair bit of the buying.
As always, that figure is money specifically earmarked for the Back to Nuneaton project. The bank account of the same name held £135,850 at the month end, which is a good deal more, because it also holds short-term cash surpluses that are not committed to the fund. The difference between the two is season ticket and sponsorship money being kept safe until we need it during the season. I labour this point every month for a reason: I would much rather you asked me about it than assumed we had £135,850 towards a ground.
Progress on the ground itself is as follows. We have had no further meetings with the council since 10th July. However, we have been informed that councillors are reviewing drone footage of the possible sites and assessing feedback from WCC Highways Department. We have again requested an access permit to carry out a ground survey at Vale View, as this forms an important part of the evaluation of this site. The council has confirmed that our contractor has provided all the information they requested, but a permit has yet to be issued.
If anyone would like to make a donation to the fund, you can do so here or by emailing finance@nuneatontownfc.co.uk.
What to Expect in September
September brings seven fixtures:
• Sat 5th – Bromsgrove Sporting (a) – Emirates FA Cup First Qualifying Round
• Sat 12th – Matlock Town (a) – Isuzu FA Trophy Second Qualifying Round
• Tue 15th – Wellingborough Town (h)
• Sat 19th – Shepshed Dynamo (a)
• Tue 22nd – Grantham Town (h)
• Sat 26th – Corby Town (h) – our first home league fixture on a Saturday this season
• Mon 28th – St Ives Town (a)
By the time you read this both cup runs have ended, 0-2 at Bromsgrove Sporting in the FA Cup and 1-5 at Matlock Town in the FA Trophy. Disappointing, and there is no dressing it up, though I would note that the money was banked on the way through.
Three home games is a far kinder month than August gave us, and the 26th is the one to get in the diary. Corby Town at home, our first home Saturday of the season, seven weeks in. Wouldn’t it be something to fill the Oval for that one? If you have not made it down yet this season, that is the afternoon to do it and bring somebody with you.
How can I help?
There are several ways that fans and local businesses can help support the club:
• Secure your season ticket for 2026/27. You can pay in full or in three interest-free instalments.
• Come along to our home fixtures and consider buying a 50/50 draw or Golden Goal ticket on matchdays.
• Join the NTSC 200 Club – support the club financially and win monthly cash prizes: Join the 200 Club
• Join the Nuneaton Town Supporters Co-operative and help shape the future of the club: Join the Supporters Co-operative.
• Local businesses: contact commercial@nuneatontownfc.co.uk to discuss sponsorship opportunities for 2026/27.
• Donate to the “Back to Nuneaton” fund: donate here.
