Weather is snow joke for Goals

Published on Friday 3 July 2009 21:26

GOALS Soccer Centres has revealed that February's heavy snow cost it about £300,000, after its five-a-side pitches were affected across Britain.

Managing director Keith Rogers said sites had been affected from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, with games cancelled for up to four days.

"It was a unique event. In all my years in the business I've never seen anything like it," Rogers said yesterday.

"Like a lot of businesses, we were affected. We can clear snow from the pitches fairly quickly, but it was more a matter of whether people could get to us.

"Because it's a team sport, you only need one or two people to be unable to make it and the whole game falls apart."

First-half sales and profits will be hit by 300,000 by the closures.

Despite the impact of the snow, Goals still expects to reach market forecasts for the six months to 30 June, as it delivered an otherwise upbeat trading statement yesterday for the period.

The East Kilbride-based company, which listed on Aim in 2004, said pitch-hire revenue, which accounts for just over three-quarters of total turnover, remained robust, although growth at its newer sites is slower than expected.

There were also signs that ancillary revenues – non-pitch hire – which fell in the second half of 2008, are beginning to recover.

Goals said bar spending was showing "early signs of recovery", although it did not say whether this meant sales were ahead of the start of 2008.

Rogers said the company had rolled out a new electronic payment system in its bars in March, giving it greater insight into when and where customers were buying drinks. While the new system was helping bar sales through targeted promotions, Rogers said he believed that the drinks market was also improving, citing other examples in the leisure industry.

But other non-pitch revenue, such as corporate events, remains weak.

Goals announced plans to scale back its site openings earlier this year because of an uncertain economic outlook, but last month it decided to raise 11 million through a share placement to increase its expansion.

Yesterday, it said it was increasingly confident of being able to open six sites in 2010.

In the first half of the year it opened a site in Coventry, while two more, in Liverpool and Reading, are being built, and construction of pitches in Portsmouth is about start. Rogers said the pipeline of potential sites continues to improve, and that the recession had made the planning system less time-consuming.

A downturn means planning officials have fewer applications to process, while councils are keen to see community investment, he said.

Altium Securities forecast that Goals will make a pre-tax profit of 9.2 million in 2009, a 12 per cent increase on 2008.

Shares in the company rose 6.5p to 208, more than double the low of 102.5p in February.