Mayo FC to cost €90,000 in year one

AN extra €90,000 will be needed to fund the newly established Mayo FC soccer club, according to a former Mayo Football League Chairman.
Gerry Sweeney, now a member of the league’s committee, told The Mayo News that he has assembled a team of seven dedicated people to help secure financial backing for the project.
Speaking at the launch of Mayo FC at Breaffy House Hotel earlier this week, Sweeney said that an official Mayo FC supporters’ club would need to be set up ‘straight away’.
In 2024, Mayo FC will field League of Ireland boys’ teams at Under-14 and Under-15 level, as well as an Under-17 girls’ team.
The club aims to have male and female teams competing at all underage grades and adult level, but no firm deadline has been set for this.
“We’ll be meeting in a few weeks, getting together around the table,” he explained. “There’s some ideas out there already.
“But one of the things I hope straight away will be an official Mayo supporters club. Straight away, that’s one thing we need to have very very soon,” said Sweeney, who will serve as Mayo FC Commercial Manager and one of its Child Protection Officers.
“Obviously, we’ll be calling to companies in the county. We are making the contacts and we’ll be targeting people for sponsorship or whatever.
“There’s 137,000 people in Mayo. There’s a diaspora abroad and all over the place in Australia, Great Britain or wherever. Mayo people are good supporters of things. Anything with the Mayo name in it, and we hope this is going to have the effect here as well.
“This is new, and I’m sure people will get behind this financially.”
Mark Scanlon, the FAI’s League of Ireland director, told the launch that competing in the League of Ireland ‘isn’t cheap’ and would require ‘a lot of support in the county’.
“We’re looking at a cost of about €90,000 per year initially,” replied Sweeney, when pressed on how much it would cost to run the club.
“Obviously there’s players' membership to come into that there’s a bit of an FAI grant. We’ll be after, as Minister [Dara] Calleary said there tonight, there’s Sports Capital [funding] being announced there very soon.
“We’ll be hitting that.
“We’ll be targeting every place we can get a euro, simple as, to try and fund this.”
In an interview with The Mayo News, Mark Scanlon said that Mayo would receive ‘very little’ FAI funding and would need to be self-sustaining.
“The club have submitted their own budgets to us which obviously are confidential in terms of what they have, but we’re happy with the budgets they’ve submitted for the current teams to be up and running,” he said.
“It’s going to require an element of sponsorship, an element of investment into the teams, that’s certainly an element from any football club from the grassroots to League of Ireland. That’s always required to take the next steps.
“From our side we try and help the clubs out as best we can with youth development grants and travel grants for those clubs that travel across the country, but really the club itself needs to be self-sustainable.”
See full coverage of the historic launch of Mayo FC in Tuesday’s edition of The Mayo News.