Progress has been made off the pitch at Nottingham Forest over the past two years - and the numbers prove it.
Under the ownership of Evangelos Marinakis, the club has worked tirelessly to “transform” their commercial revenue streams. To great effect.
Chief financial officer Sam Gordon was already in place at the City Ground before and has helped to oversee an impressive rise in the amount of money coming into the club.
“Commercially it’s been transformed,” Gordon said of the changes over the past two-and-a-half years.
“You look at all of the commercial areas - hospitality, advertising and sponsorship - the revenue has gone up nearly 70 percent over the two years.
“Catering revenue has gone up nearly 60 percent over the two years.
“Ticketing and retail are a bit more modest, 17 percent each. Ticketing understandably, because, certainly the first year (of Marinakis’ reign), the focus was very much on getting young people back here.
“We could see the demographic of our season ticket holders was ageing, and it was important to try to bring that younger group in.”
The Reds made changes to their ticket pricing to encourage young people to come watch games at the City Ground, with a focus, too, on the city’s student population.
It has paid dividends in the form of bumper attendance figures.
“We’ve got a huge student population here and we need to make sure that we can give them access to football,” Gordon told Nottinghamshire Live.
“So we did a lot of work on that, hence the pure commercials perhaps don’t look quite as dramatic as some of the other areas - because it’s been a big shift in terms of pricing. But that has been hugely successful.
“And the important thing is we are filling the City Ground, which we were not before.
“I can remember my first few months here, for the last game of the season in 2016/17, I sat there and said, ‘right, we’re going to fill the stadium for the Ipswich game’. Everyone looked at me a bit like, ‘we can’t do that’.
“And we did.
“It’s gone on from there. Once you tell yourselves that you can fill the stadium, you can fill the stadium. If you tell yourselves you can’t, you won’t.
“We have incredible crowds now every matchday and it’s great to see. It’s amazing when you’re here on a matchday and it’s full, or virtually full.”
at the City Ground, it means the club’s off the pitch recruitment is a key area for Gordon.
Her role also encompasses catering, IT, operations and human resources.
And it is the latter which is particularly important as the Reds “run very leanly on staff”.
With 600 stewards and catering staff involved on matchdays, Gordon is eager to see the “right people” in place to ensure the best possible customer service for fans at the City Ground.
“Finding people who get the bug and enjoy it - because that’s actually when you do your best work - those are the people we really want here,” she said. “We want people who are actually really going to become part of the club, be committed to it and passionate about it.
“That’s why HR right now is a massively important area for me, because it’s important we get the right people in there.
“We need to drive recruitment, we need to get the right people in, we need to retain people and we need to make sure that everybody has got customer service at the forefront of their minds.
“It’s an area that’s been a challenge. It will always be a challenge to an extent, because when you need 600 casual workers every matchday that’s tough.
“But we need to make sure we are getting the right people through the door, that we’re training them right and treating them right. That way they will deliver the best customer service to our supporters, which is where we need to get to.”
