Carlton CEO Cain Liddle held a Q&A via a closed Facebook group with the club’s members on Thursday afternoon, addressing a number of key questions surrounding the club’s circumstances.
Members naturally had plenty of questions to ask regarding the COVID-19 crisis and how it impacts the club.
Firstly, Liddle confirmed the $20 million redevelopment of Ikon Park from the Victorian State Government will go ahead.
“The master plan continues as planned. The funding is locked away. Whilst the situation has forced us to review the scale of the project,” Liddle wrote.
“We remain 100% committed that the master plan goes ahead either later this year or early next year,” Liddle wrote.
Concerns have been raised in the media regarding the future of the AFL Women’s competition and whether clubs would be able to continue supporting their teams financially.
Carlton already made the difficult decision to end their VFL alignment with the Northern Blues, but fans should have no such concerns for their AFLW side.
“Our AFLW team is not going anywhere. Like our AFL team, our AFLW program has put in significant work in recent years to be in a strong position to pursue ultimate success on-field,” Liddle said on Facebook.
“The financial reality due to the current situation means, like the AFL program, we will need to adapt.
"What those exact adjustments are will become clear in due course but rest assured we will give our players, coach Daniel Harford and all the staff as much support as possible to make sure they continue to make our Carlton Football Club proud.
“To be clear we could not be more committed to our AFLW program.”
Carlton also remains committed to reaching 100,000 members by 2023 despite the current situation.
“I certainly haven’t given up on 75,000 members this season. Interestingly when we launched the strategic plan at the end of 2018 with an aim to have 100k members by 2023, it was our aim to sign 67k members in 2020 and not hit 75k until 2021 (remembering we were low 50’s when we launched the plan),” Liddle wrote.
“On that basis we are still very much on track for those targets and its credit to our supporters who have joined as members that we were actually tracking so far ahead of the curve we had predicted.
“Also worth highlighting we had another 29 members join yesterday. Incredible effort by our supporters and members.”
The Blues have not been mentioned among the teams who are self-sufficient and not in need of AFL assistance to survive the shutdown period, but Liddle believes the club is heading in that direction.
“The club has worked incredibly hard over a number of years to get the business into the strongest position off field it had been, in a long time,” he said.
“Over the past 12 months we were able to get the club into a position to repay $3.4m of our historical debt and a strong plan in place to repay the further $3m historical debt within the next 12 months.
“This is a testament to the strength of our supporter base and as a club. We are confident through the ongoing support of our members, the continued investment into building our non-traditional revenue streams including Carlton In Business and the Carlton College of Sport, we will be able to rebound as quickly as possible.”