Saturday night’s North Melbourne-Port Adelaide match at Docklands drew a crowd of just 14,342.
The poor turn-up means the Kangaroos are likely to lose about $130,000, wiping out the gains they had made from earlier gate returns this season – especially their home game against Collingwood in round six.
Arocca said his club was yet to do the sums but Saturday night’s crowd was especially disappointing.
“We’d be astounded if it didn’t cost us $100,000, based on the budgeting and the figures that we’ve worked on,” he told SEN on Monday morning.
“It’s probably going to get closer to $130,000; it’s going to be a big hit.
“It’ll probably take us back to a zero revenue, net, from the five home games we’ve had.
“We estimate we’d racked up about $130,000 to $150,000 by the end of the Collingwood game and we think that’ll all evaporate by the time we get the figures for this Port Adelaide game,” he said.
“So we’re probably going to get to the end of the season with either very close to a zero net revenue for stadium deals … which is probably the first time in AFL history that a club’s made no money from match returns.”
Arocca said North Melbourne would have to find alternate methods of revenue to simply balance its books in 2009.
“Last year we made $1.8 [million] but $1.2 million was interstate of course (with matches being played on the Gold Coast),” he said.
“After the deal fell over we then revised that down by about 600k. The team hasn’t been performing as well on the field and figures generally seem to be down about 15 per cent in some matches.
“We’re going to have to be pretty creative in finding other revenue streams in the next three to six months to just break even.”
Arocca said Saturday night’s crowd was “unacceptable” for a club with nearly 30,000 members but the Kangaroos were working tirelessly to attract their fans back to games.
“The number of North Melbourne people I bump into who claim to be great supporters who are either not members or don’t come to games, is a real concern,” he said.
“It’s going to be a painful journey over the next three to five years but we’d love to think that in three years when we play Port Adelaide, we’d have over 24,000 … it’s a genuine challenge.”
