UK Edition
Goals Soccer Centres teams up with Man City owners for US push as UK turnaround suffers mixed results
A cash injection from the owners of Manchester City Football Club is set to instill extra pace into Goals Soccer Centre’s US business as it suffered slower UK sales growth than it had hoped for.
City Football Group, which also owns New York City Football Club, has put $16m (£12m) into a joint venture that Goals, the five-a-side football company, has will use for its two existing US sites.
Mark Jones, Goals’ chief executive, said the pair would aim to open at least two sites a year for the next five years with the focus initially on expanding its presence in California but then looking to Texas and Florida.
The decision to expand in the US comes as the company said it expected like-for-like sales in the second half of the year to be “slower than originally expected” partly because some of its sites weren’t performing as well as they could do because of a lack of investment.
Mr Jones added that while playing at one of the company’s sites was affordable, especially given the cost of hiring a pitch can be split between team members, “nobody can ever say they are bullet proof” amid a consumer spending downturn.
Management accelerated its upgrade plans this year with 238 of its pitches - roughly half its total amount - now fully refurbished. This means that the average age of pitches across the estate was just over four years, down from seven years previously.
Mr Jones said the 27 clubs with five or more pitches that had been improved had seen sales grow 5.1pc in the past 10 weeks. However, the 11 clubs it had spruced up which have four or less pitches had not enjoyed similar uplift.
No more upgrades are planned for the rest of this year but roughly 50 pitches will be upgraded in 2018.
In the first half of the year, sales rose just more than 2pc to £17.3m but investment in the Aim-listed business's estate meant pre-tax profits dropped by a quarter to £2.6m. This knocked 10pc off the shares to put them at 93.6p,
The company has had a tough time recently after announcing its first loss last year since it floated in 2004 and axing its dividend.
It suffered a £6.2m loss in 2015 because of a write-down against underperforming centres, compared to a £6.8m pre-tax profit in 2014, as it also faced increased competition from artificial pitches at schools and on local authority sites.
Mr Jones is hoping to turn the company’s fortunes around with initiatives such as the launch of its Junior Academy later this year, which it hopes will entice a raft of new young players to its sites.