We kick off today in another competition where all roads lead to Wembley - this time it is the FA Trophy where Hemel Hempstead are our visitors. 

The FA Trophy gives two non-league clubs every year the chance to flood Wembley with their fans and savour the spectacle of their 'small' club playing on the hallowed turf. It must be every player’s dream to appear at Wembley and we have reduced the ticket prices to just £10 for adults and £1 for children for the fixture.

Eastern Daily Press:

Often clubs reduce prices in the early rounds of the FA Cup and whilst this normally receives a warm welcome from fans, unless the gate increases substantially the revenue stream is vastly reduced. When we played at Doncaster in the last round of the FA Cup many fans probably multiply the ticket price that they paid by the crowd and assume King’s Lynn receive around 45pc of that total. The crowd in Yorkshire was 3,965 that day so most fans probably think we earned around £17,800 in gate receipts.

Sadly, we received nothing like that. When you hire a coach, you are allowed to claim a fixed rate of £3.60 a mile from the home club. It is never possible to hire a coach for that amount (at least not in our part of the world) so we lost £644 on transport costs driving to the game.

Total gate receipts came to £22,585, but after deducting VAT, the figure reduced to £18,820. Stewarding and gatemen cost £8,228, ambulance and first aid accounted for another £2,863 and with various smaller deductions the net gate receipts came to just £6,441.

Our share of the pot came to £3,221, giving us the princely sum of just 81p from every fan in the stadium. Once we deduct our team’s hotel costs and our transport, we are left with just £369, or not even a penny for every supporter in the stadium.

When we reduced the gate prices against Ashington we sent them away with a cheque for over £5,100, although that did include their coach travel, which would have been higher than ours, but the crowd was far lower at just 1,709.

Whilst we won the game at Doncaster, which meant earning some valuable prize money, had we lost, we would have generated less than £400 which, for being in the first round of the FA Cup does not feel a fair rate for a day’s work! 

The Accrington Stanley chairman Andy Holt often publishes gate receipts for visiting fans on his Twitter account and I think in the interests of transparency doing so can show the highs and the lows of the game in terms of finances. Perceptions and realties are often two very different scenarios.

On the positive side, the next round of the FA Cup will allow the club to claw back some of its losses for the season - £60,000 in TV broadc1qast fees from the BBC, radio fees of nearly £8,000, advertising boards bring in another £23,000 and with ticket sales at our usual league prices currently at 2,711 (excluding complimentary allocations) and over £4,000 in hospitality sales, we must be truly grateful that we are playing at home. 

Had we been the away team only the radio fees and TV money would have come our way. There will be multiple cameras around the stadium, including one in the home dressing room, so it will be worth recording and watching the game again later.

The game itself is live in several countries around the world and will help increase the profile of the club. Everyone is happy other than my wife, who was upset to learn that I have sold her table to a paying hospitality guest; but that is life at our end of the football pyramid – when the money is there you need to take it!