Corney hits out at drop in attendances

Simon Corney said, "We will stem the flow and keep the team competitive, but there comes a point when you can't swim against the tide any longer. I don't want people thinking we'll walk away, that definitely won't happen, but we've always said we are custodians of the club with a finite amount of money to spend. There is a superb hard core of fans, but you can't support a League One club on the basis of 3,500 people being loyal. You've got to ask whether Oldham can sustain a League One club. Do the people want to come here and give us the help we need? I hear various reasons for people not coming to games but, to be honest, I think most of them are easy excuses. We've tried everything to get more fans into the ground and these schemes don't seem to work, which is also the case at most other clubs. We certainly aren't alone in having a fall in crowds and, whatever the reason might be, it seems to be a deteriorating operation at this level."

"There's so much football on television and it's very hard to compete. You get Tuesday nights when we are at home to Hartlepool and Manchester United are playing Milan. What can we do? We froze our ticket prices last year, saw crowds go down significantly and then froze them again for next season. We aren't an unlimited pot of money and we can't do that for ever, so maybe we'll have to cut our cloth accordingly. It's a huge disappointment which impacts on the manager's budget because if we lose 1,000 people per game, we lose around £345,000 over the season. I think we have the biggest budget in our league in relation to crowds and, although we'll keep spending money and we recognise that football isn't cheap to watch, you need a bit of help when you are trying to build a Championship team."