The Fun Behind Organising Football Friendly in Beautiful City of Vienna.
I made a little list of max 10 things, true story about the cost of our magic football every single year. I wanted to calculate how much is the cost of each item we use to make sure we can play football on a weekly basis, Tuesday, Friday, Saturdays and/or Sunday. In order to simplify things, I added a cost pro year for every single important thing.
I will start slow, point by point, mandatory costs, things that disturb dramatically our fun if there are not paid in time.
1) Meetup license – in order to organize football via meetup.com you need an organizer license. The cost of the license is paid every 6 months (it is cheaper this way) . It is about 43€ every 6 months. Participants are not required to pay. Write down 86€.
2) VEO Licenses – every single camera costed me about 1000 euros. But this cost of the hardware once is paid, is done, no more costs. What we need to pay now is the license to operate that camera every year. We need to cover the cost of the Veo Platform, the cloud storage of our videos, the editing tools, the automatic filming of the games (artificial intel), the highlights that are processed in the cloud, the support & service. Each camera license has a cost of about 975€ and we have 3 cameras. Write down 2900€.
3) Internet - Starting with March 2022, we will start broadcasting the events live from the football pitch, and for that we need an additional 3G chip – A1 Internet data plan – the cheapest 30Mb download, 30Mb upload is about 40€ a month (tx included). Write down 400€ for these 10 months of data plan.
4) The Electricity Bill - I noticed that because of playing 3 times a week, most of the time 30 people involved, 3 times a week we need to wash the bibs, the shirts, the shorts when playing 11a side. Two cycles after each football day. Yeah, the washing machine is working hard until 1, 1:30pm in order to wash all the bibs and shirts used. That brought my electricity bill up to at least 20%. The washing machine is the bigger consumer of energy in my house. Nothing compares with that. Write down 25€ a month, for a total of 300€ a year. If the washing machine is not working, which happened once, there is no football, we cannot play a tournament, we cannot play in the championship. We quickly need a fix or a new washing machine. I don’t want to think about replacing my current washing machine. It is big enough to allow me to wash everything in 2 cycles, about 2 hours.
5) Sport Bags. 3 Times a week, we need to carry all the equipment to the sport facility. This includes the VEO cameras, 30 set of colored bibs, balls, cons, first aid kid, notebook sometimes for the referee, socks, goalkeeper gloves, shinpads, and other little things. I noticed that one solid bag can hold for 2 years. One good one can cost up to 200€ and a recycle (replacement) is needed every 2 years. I will add here easily 75 to 100€ a year.
6) Austrian Football Federation - In order to play in the Austrian Federation you need to add certain costs, taxes for Covid, operating fees with the football federation, appointed referees, fines that comes from different games, cancelation fees, and so on. Everything easily can sum up to about 300 to 500€ a year. Write down 400€.
7) Website - In order to comply with the COVID regulations, but also to automate the players registrations and payments, we needed to invest and build up a website. The hosting of the website is about 300€ a year, including here the domain renewal (the name of the website - footballExperiences.net / footXP.com). I build up the website, so no cost added here. Otherwise, think about a few thousand euros easily. Write down 300€.
8) Diesel for Car. Because we filmed the games, because we play a tournament at least once or twice a week, we need specific gear to bring to the pitch. This is not possible by using public transport. We need 2 large tripods, one large sport bag and a set of balls to name only the mandatory things. I roughly calculated that I need about 120€ only for Diesel, full tanks 4 times a year at least. I used the car for personal reasons as well, but without car I am lost and late for football.
9) Payments Taxes / Accounting - Every payment processor is taking a percent from every transaction that is made thru our web platform (footballExperiences.NET). We are collaborating successfully with Stripe (for the credit card payments) but also with Paypal. The cost for a year is hard to estimate, but I noticed that we pay at least 30-50€ a month only for the payments to be properly processed. We are happy with Stripe because the transactions are standard, secured and the money arrives in timely manner. The group accountant cost us 250€ a year to do the taxes of our football affairs - in top of my personal accounting matters. Write down here at least 500€ a year for both these two items.
10) Coloured Bib/ T-shirts recycle – Every year, we are wasting at least 20 bibs and 3 to 5 shirts that we need to buy once again, print them with numbers and logos for a cost of about 120€ a year, maybe less, maybe more - depends on the quality.
There are here maybe a few other expenses that are not mandatory and I would like to keep these things out of this story. I really don’t want to summarise all these 10 points because I get headaches and probably will give up doing it. In the end, the entire football experience is made with all these items assembled together.
In case you are interested to do a simple math, please keep the result for you, or for someone else that is interested to organize football and put heart in it. My intention with this article is to have a reality check for me, for everyone thinking that organizing football on a weekly basis is a simple thing. I keep doing this for some years now (since 2016) and not sure when I am going to stop. In top of the money here, you can add time, my time, my wife’s time, other peoples voluntary time that I will not mention here. Time is probably the most valuable asset we have and no one can put a number on that.
Cheers, see ya on the football pitch!
-Sorin / WhatsApp +43 6764276984
