Hi all

We are hearing constant stories about why a league clubs are unsustainable. My question is why are they unsustainable?

At the moment the current salary floor is about 2.5 million australian dollars and 2.3 million is provided via the tv deal with more provided via sponsorship. Crowd averages are a bit down from the 10-14k averages we had before covid, but we still get 8k which is healthy for that salary. To see how healthy, I looked at leagues all around the world, the transfer value of a league grows exponentially with crowd averages and the fit is quite good. For the mathematically minded, see

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eI_KaPrIcEmt6EnbCSa8FcSWNq-3p7JsjgxBYF13fzs/edit?usp=sharing

We are actually a bit of an outlier with our crowds having much bigger crowds than you would expect for our transfer value. You would expect for a crowd average of of 8000 per game a squad value of 10 million euros, well above the current salary floor. So I'm trying to dig into why our model is so expensive and how we can fix it. Some possible explanations

1) more travel than comparable leagues. This is undoubtedly expensive, but aafc modelling for the 2nd division indicated that it probably only costs clubs 300k to do the domestic travel. It doesn't explain why clubs are losing 7mil a year in melbourne victory's case and 2 million in newcastle jets case
2) lack of privately owned stadiums: in investigating this, I found that privately owned stadiums are rare. There aren't that many even in the eredivisie let alone the k league. It is possible that we have a uniquely expensive lot of stadiums. If so, does anyone know how much stadium costs are per year
3) lack of revenue sources apart from tv, merch and gate receipts. This is possible, apparently the qld lions make a ton of money off pokies as do most nrl clubs. This isn't the most ethical solution, are pokie funded sports clubs the norm outside australia? AFL and NRL do seem to rely a lot on profitting off gambling addicts. Other more ethical sources of funding would include having community teams where any joe bloe can pay to play for a season and of course there is the bar and restaurant part of a club. 
4) lack of tapping into the transfer market. Last year we made nearly 1 million oz dollars per club (about 600k euros). This has only recently been rising and perhaps a DTS would make the distribution of these funds more equitable across the league as well as inflating prices as euro clubs would have domestic competitors. But i doubt this can explain the massive gap between a league losses and the financial status of similarly attended leagues. 

Does anyone else know what on earth is going wrong with our massive costs and poor revenue compared to similarly attended leagues world wide? A good diagnosis is the first step to fixing the problem