Leeds United to Invest in RMC’s

Article by Steve Griffin

The first Leeds United on the Road (LOTR) event this year has now been announced and will be held on the eve of the Charlton Athletic match in London. The event, which is available to Leeds United Members, Season Ticket Holders and RMC Members, will take place at the Meridian Sports & Social Club in Charlton on Friday November 8 (6:30pm arrival for 7pm prompt) and tickets are priced at £18, including food.

Most if not all Regional Members Clubs (RMC’s) use this event to raise funds to offset their travel costs to its members by reducing coach prices. This then enables fans to travel more frequently to Elland Road and Away games.

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Previously these events where organised by the RMC’s and all monies were split with the Club 50/50 less costs, under the new system all of the money goes to the branches so effectively they raise and keep 100%. This will be a massive boost to their coffers in a period where fans are finding the cost of travel expensive and RMC’s seeing coach hire rising.

Leeds United currently has 56 RMC’s affiliated to the club and almost cover every region of the UK. Some of these are also international with the likes of Scandinavia, Malta, Dubai, Ireland and Australia. It is believed that no other football club has such an organised supporter system currently in place at Leeds. On top of these RMC’s there is the Leeds United Supporters Club (LUSC) which can boast of another 10 more branches if not more including a branch in the United States. Furthermore there are two known Independent branches, Nottingham and South Leeds, all contributing to the network of supporting the club with organised travel to home and away fixtures.

Under the new regime, the LOTR are only offered to the RMC’s and have now employed a different system to host them. There will be around 6 events this season with the first one in London. The club will in future source the venues, food and set the ticket prices. RMC’s will be left to sell the tickets alongside the Clubs ticket office. In the past this organising work was left solely to the RMC’s to complete and with most having just one or two dedicated committee members to help out found it quite demanding.

RMC’s within the area of these events will be allocated a certain percentage of tickets which if they sell; they will keep, less the costs to hold the event. Dependant on sales they will receive a further percentage of the raffle and auction prize money. So if the venue has a capacity of 200 and 4 branches are allocated 50 tickets to sell and each branch sells its allocation then they will receive 25% of all the money taken during the event. So the more tickets the branches can sell the more of a percentage each will receive.

However the club will also keep a percentage of tickets for these events and any they sell through their ticket office will be their share of the money raised.

As most of the events will be shared between the RMC’s, initially the club will in the first instance share out tickets equally. Any unsold tickets will then be distributed out to other branches requiring demand.

This new way of providing these events will now help smaller branches whose membership would not have justified of holding one exclusively. They will have the opportunity to attend and receive a percentage of their RMC’s support of the event.

It remains to be seen if the club will still allow some of the bigger RMC’s such as Scarborough, Chiltern, Doncaster, Kent and Thames Valley to exclusively host their own but initial thoughts from the club is that they will still have to share the event with neighbouring RMC’s.

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