Surrey football club says it can lose thousands when games are postponed

A Surrey football club has been telling us about the huge impacts that postponing games due to flooding has had on them.

Leatherhead FC has had three games postponed due to flooding, with two of those being home fixtures.

Mick Sullivan, who is Director of Football at the club, told us why flooding is such a problem for Leatherhead FC

"Our pitch is prone to flooding simply because of its location right alongside the River Mole and there's a certain area of our pitch where it's at its lowest point.

As the river rises, it's almost like a mini lake rises in the corner of our pitch."

When games Saturday games are postponed, they are rescheduled for a Tuesday evening. A time which on average, sees half the attendance of a weekend game.

Mick says this drop off in attendance can cost the club thousands

"For us it's about a 2000 loss on gate and then you add on the fact the bar loss, there's a financial loss on that, So yeah, it can add up to a few thousand."

Mick also added that the club had been a victim of the recent unpredictable weather. One of the games recently postponed, was a fixture against Kingstonian FC. The fixture was scheduled for the evening with staff working throughout the day to prepare the pitch.

This was all before a sudden torrential downpour less than two hours before the match leading to the game having to be postponed after all.

Another effect of postponed fixtures, is fixture congestion towards the back end of the season, a problem that has meant Leatherhead have had to withdraw from a cup competition

"We are already playing on Tuesday nights right the way through to the first week in April. Now that only leaves us two more weeks before the end of season that we have Tuesday nights.

We've had to unfortunately pull out of the Surrey Senior Cup on the back of that."

When asked about potential solutions to the problem Mick said a possible idea could be to relocate cup tournaments to the start of the season, or even before the league starts, to reduce fixture congestion.

The other point he suggested was expanding the season by a month or two to give clubs the extra time to ensure all fixtures could be played without needing to cram them in

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