Bays Lotto

The Club has recently updated our Strategic Plan for the 2025 – 2028 period. As a part of our stakeholder engagement process, two fundamental priorities became evident to everyone that we spoke to:

1. Connection – increasing our connection with each other internally here at the Club and more broadly with our families, members, fans and local community.
2. Sustainability – prioritise improving our financial stability, on-field success and succession planning, the quality of our football programs, the long-term welfare of our people, our relationships with our community and driving innovation.

It is with this in mind, that we are committed to giving our players every opportunity to, not only play in a premiership each year, but also provide the best environment, the best coaches, best equipment, best infrastructure and utilise the best technology that we can afford.

As a Club, we want to continue to win flags and maintain our most successful era in the Club’s history. But as you know, this doesn’t come cheap and all of our footy club costs are going up in price every year.

For example:

• Playing guernseys – we are now purchasing multiple sets of guernseys for our men’s and women’s teams each year (traditional black, away strip, Indigenous & recently ANZAC Day, which now costs over over $32,000).
• IT costs (eg: Champion Data, Huld, Arc, GPS etc.) was costing us $67,000 in 2022. We are now investing over $125,000 ($58k more) in 2025 to support the development and performance of all of our teams.
• Medical expenses – tape, medical supplies, player insurance costs etc. have all increases significantly in recent years.
• Venue costs – all profits from our venue go directly into funding our football department. Costs such as Award wages, food and beverage cost of goods, electricity, insurances, repairs and maintenance etc. have also increased significantly in recent years.

This is why we’re launching the Bays Lotto – to directly increase funding to our football programs and sustain our Club.

Whilst the Club has enjoyed great on field success in winning the 2023 and 2024 men’s League premierships and good profitability from this, the hospitality sector has been under significant strain due to cost-of-living pressures. Our venue has not been immune to this and has suffered a downturn in recent times. Importantly, every dollar raised in the venue is injected back into the football department to co-fund footy. When a downturn occurs, so does our ability for the venue to co-fund all of the resources we want to run our footy programs.

What has become recently evident, is that we cannot fully rely on the venue business to fund football. We need to diversify our revenue streams and the Bays Lotto concept will be one several new key initiatives that will stabilise the Club moving forward.

Some other SANFL Clubs enjoy the profitability of having large, multi-site hospitality venues in prime locations to help fund their football departments. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same luxury and need to rely on the great work we do producing great football results that attract a great supporter base, which in turn invest into the Club. We plan to tap into our great supporter base and community to invest in our Bays Lotto initiative.

In 2020, the Club had total debts of about $2.5M. Currently, this sits at $900,000. Reducing our debt has been a great achievement but has, and continues to, take a lot of hard work and diligent management.

After the City of Holdfast Bay recently agreed to waive 50 per cent of the $1M debt owed to them, we are in a much more financially sustainable position than several years ago. Whilst we had been negotiating with Council for some time, they have been wavering monthly debt repayments. This has finished and we now have over $80,000 of principle and interest repayments that need to be paid each year to eliminate the $900,000 of remaining total debt the Club has with our lenders.  Whilst we have an increase in debt repayments, we don’t want to compromise the quality of our footy programs nor the great culture and environment that we’re building that we know will drive our on-field success in the coming years. Hence, another reason why the Bays Lotto fundraising initiative is a critical new concept to diversify our revenue streams for our football department.

As mentioned above, the money we raise from this Bays Lotto has been budgeted to maintain the investment into the resources we currently have. Understanding that many of these costs have increased we don’t want to lose or reduce them, and hence, we want to keep the great momentum we building in our men’s, women’s and junior programs. Bays Lotto funds will also help contribute to various capital projects around the Club.

There are a lot of capital projects that we will be seeking to partner with external stakeholders in order to raise enough money to upgrade and develop our facilities. Many of these are incredibility expensive projects and unfortunately the precinct is aging. We are working with the Council and SANFL to prioritise and fund these items over the coming years.

Yes. All funds raised through the Bays Lotto will go directly towards our men’s, women’s and junior programs. Other fundraising activities support various areas within the Club, but this one will directly benefit our players. This is why we’re launching the Lotto – to directly increase funding to our football programs and capital projects to help sustain our Club.