Important Information: Season Ticket Payments by Debit/Credit Cards

Apr 10, 2015

Over the last 12 months of planning for the DFC500 Club and 2015-16 season tickets, the Board of Dir...

Over the last 12 months of planning for the DFC500 Club and 2015-16 season tickets, the Board of Directors has been keen to introduce methods that would allow fans to spread payments for season tickets over periods up to 12 months.

Extensive discussions have been held with a number of traditional, as well as alternative, finance providers to offer this facility to fans. Without exception, the finance companies have been unable to offer packages that are commercially acceptable to the Club at this time.

This is extremely common in sports clubs as providing finance on a season ticket presents the lenders with a high level of perceived commercial risk. The negative legacy issues connected with Darlington Football Club are also still considered a factor by lenders.

The Club could have accepted financial terms from lenders, but would have had to incur, or provide, any combination of the following to satisfy those perceived lender risks:

Excessive transaction fees for use of debit/credit cards

FCA compliance regulatory costs

IN ADDITION TO:

Impractical ‘deferred settlement’ terms (i.e. the Club not being entitled to receive cash paid by fans for up to 60 days), and/or

Personal guarantees/indemnities to the finance companies by the volunteer Directors (Martin Jesper and David Mills) in the event of any shortfall, and/or

Up front bond from the Club's immediate cash resources to the finance provider (held in favour of the lender in a separate bank account)

Given the Club’s current priority of ensuring cash is available to fund the return to Darlington, the Board of Directors considered this combination of high costs and an absorption of available funds, as described above, not to be in the best interest of the Club at this time. It is therefore, with regret, that we are unable to offer fans the opportunity to pay for the Early Bird Season Tickets by PayPal, debit or credit cards.

Moving forward we are continuing to look at various options to introduce payment plans for fans that (i) have low transaction costs and (ii) remain straight forward to administer by the Club’s volunteers.

Your patience and understanding on this matter is appreciated and, as soon as we have a methodology that we believe is both effective and appropriate, it will be delivered.

The Board of Directors

10 April 2015