Athlete membership fees will increase by less than 1%

Guillermo Ruiz-Longarte, treasurer of the current Athletic board, announced through the club’s official website some aspects related to the 2022-23 season at the budget level. In principle, the new directive provides for an increase in quotas of less than 1%.

“If a closure is made for you, in a very large part of a budget is also made for you. The club has the power to increase the membership fee with the average CPI of the last five years up to 50%, something that reflected in the laws, but we chose not to include 2022 because it is not closed and we do not know the closing year inflation. We know that this is the largest impact of the five-year series. We prefer to make a smaller increase in the fee , which is less than 1% apart from the proration of what is half a day of the club and in this way the membership fee will be known and there will be a minimum increase in the previous situation” , he explained.

The new board is ready to apply a war economy to try to reduce everything related to spending at the level of the different levels of the club. “We tried to squeeze as much as possible into the world of marketing and commercial revenue, which is difficult. Where we have worked side by side and in great detail is in all areas of external costs, management, running the club, understanding that a club with a recurring structural deficit, has to address a something that maybe seems bombastic and I would call it a war economy”, argues the board’s treasurer.

war economy

Ruiz-Langorte maintains that “the club must know that every last euro counts. With all the work, service and repairs where we can save is very important. When the member reviews the accounts of the club, they will see that in all these items there are already savings in the previous situation, because all areas of the club have identified levers for improvement”.

This manager emphasized that “where it’s very difficult to cut, actually, it’s in the personnel costs part, both in sports and non-sports personnel, because we can’t budget anything that we are not aware of sales, assignments or changes” .

The board of Uriarte will try, “maintaining a use of provisions around 27 million, which is very similar to what was proposed in the previous budget”, to reduce the losses by half. “Don’t end up with -10 million, end up with -5. The challenge is to reduce the loss of the club by half a year, knowing that we have limitations in the knowledge of the structure of the club, but we want to set ourselves challenges in the short and long term”.