Big plans for Zbrojovka: a training center and double the budget

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In September, the Brno Regional Chamber of Commerce bought the majority stake in Zbrojovce with the support of investors led by Jaroslav Havel, Kateřina Zychová and Jan Mynar. At the same time, he became the club’s general manager, and in an interview with Seznam Zprávy he outlines the future of football Zbrojovka.

You have business experience from finance to the management of industrial enterprises and have also worked as a crisis manager. Is it good training for the football business?

It’s not like that at all. In principle, I was an investment manager of an investment fund, I was in charge of all investments within the portfolio, but when there was a problem somewhere, I usually went to solve it myself.

How is this similar to managing a struggling football club?

The big difference lies in the fact that in Zbrojovce it is a public estate that can be seen and everyone talks about it, you are very visible, every mistake is analyzed. When you have a strategy that you want to implement without others knowing, that doesn’t work in football. It’s a very open type of business, I think that’s the main difference. And another lies in the uncontrollability of the product.

You can have everything perfectly set up according to plan, healthy, perfectly trained players with great training numbers, but the product is football that you are not completely in control of. When you have a great product, marketing and distribution in your company, the company usually works. In football, however, the well-known sports luck has a great influence on the final result.

How can you do business with it?

Just like in a company, you have to have a strategy and systematically and long-term to fulfill it and not abandon it. You must not be the kind of owner who, when things are not going well, fires the coach and takes similar ill-advised steps. In my opinion, it is systematic, long-term work, and this applies equally everywhere.

Have you learned anything from other recent football club owners? Now there is a lot of talk about the motivational speech of the owner of Slovan Liberec Ondřej Kania, which some observers found unfortunate.

Each person is different and must stick to their own style of communication and management. I’ve always stuck to it and I go my own way. I saw Ondra Kania’s video after that heavy defeat with Jablonec and I think he didn’t say anything wrong. Maybe people thought it was arrogant, but I’d say he didn’t mean it that way. Sometimes you need to give an impulse, and it can be even more emphatic.

Have you already talked to the Zbrojovka players in the cabin?

Yes, I was in the cabin and I move around in training sometimes, I try to get into a new environment, but I don’t interfere in sports matters at all. We have a team for that, which is still growing. Martin Jiránek became the sports director, the second assistant coach is Brno legend Pavel Zavadil. We cooperate with Sport Invest and Viktor Kolář, we have a wider consulting team focused on youth, fitness and technology. It is an eight-member team that is trying to improve the functioning of the club as quickly as possible, because the state in which we took over Zbrojovka was not very good.

What type of manager are you yourself?

I like data and information, I work with numbers for a long time and I like to understand things. Now, for example, we are dealing with the club’s information system, which Zbrojovka did not have. The system is supposed to collect information about the players for the coaches, it’s supposed to be used for communication and the like, and I want to understand that to know why we chose this particular option and not another one. But I like to give a lot of trust to the people around me, I’m not the type of person who runs around and yells at people.

What strategy did you come to Zbrojovka with? Would you rather live from cups, or from scouting and selling players?

Look, we have an asset and a Zbrojovka Brno brand. It has a large catchment area and already has a very good youth academy, so we have the potential to get our players to European clubs.

Is this supposed to be the main source of income?

There are three sources of income. The first group is marketing, partners, fans, stadium and tickets. Then education of players and their sale, ideally straight abroad. Players will be in the first team from 17 to maybe 20 and then they can move on. When they show up in European cups, we can talk about a price of six to 10 million euros in the best cases. And participation in cups is the third source from which the club can get another 10 to 20 million euros. This will then bring more sponsorship money, more traffic and the like. Brno has great potential with a large base, but we are talking about a time horizon of roughly eight years.

It sounds like a good plan, but how do you go about achieving it? What will be your first steps?

It’s only been three weeks since we arrived, so we’re still in the process of figuring out what’s missing or not working. I also deal a lot with finances and their stabilization, because now we have to put something into the club and we want to spend it meaningfully. I still don’t understand everything that happened in Zbrojovce and what caused the debts. We are also communicating with the city and other partners, as one of the priorities is the new training center and academy.

Are you planning a brand new center?

We would like to build a modern Western European training center in Brno or nearby, which will have, for example, eight courts, facilities including a canteen and changing rooms for all categories, and there should also be a primary and secondary school. We really want to become a catchment area for talents from a wide area, including parts of Hungary, Slovakia and Austria.

That sounds very ambitious.

We want a really beautiful, modern academy that will nurture talent like they do in Denmark or Norway. For example, the academy in Salzburg has been operating for about twelve years and look at what they have achieved.

Have you already chosen a place where the academy will be established?

I’m going to see some places on Thursday. Zbrojovka now has zero infrastructure, it rents various pitches in the area at an expensive price, the players are always on the bus, they don’t have a fitness center, so we would like to speed it up, even if it were to be done in stages. We mainly want to build a playground and a fitness center with changing rooms, and then add a dining room and other facilities, and perhaps a school eventually.

We would like to have the first stage completed within two years, because without it it is difficult to advance in the quality of training and education of players. With the way it works today, it’s basically a miracle that our youth are at such a good level.

The budget of Zbrojovka is around 80 million this year. If you want to reach positions at the front of the first league within eight years, where will the money come from for a budget that is in the order of hundreds of millions at this level?

Apart from Sparta and Slavia, most of the first league clubs have budgets of up to 200 million, and I think there is a terribly distorted understanding of what that means. When you have a budget of 200 million, it does not mean that the owner gives it. He will pay maybe 20 percent and you have to get the rest from other income, from cups, TV rights, subsidies, sponsorship, tickets, merchandise and so on. A budget of 150, 180 million for the first league is quite realistic.

What return on your investment in Zbrojovka do you expect?

We have a roughly ten-year horizon, because we also take into account sports fluctuations. It is easier for companies, here we have to take into account a number of other factors, such as the stadium, training center and the like. Of course, we have an idea of ​​how much money we will put into it, how much should be returned to us and when.

Are you also preparing a rebranding of Zbrojovka?

Certainly. We’re halfway through the season now, so it’s not worth changing anything fundamentally, but we’re planning something for next year. We’re talking to marketing agencies that have experience with this and we’ll see what happens.

The most important thing now is to stabilize the team, so that the guys are not so nervous, settle down a bit and start scoring goals. In the winter transfer period, we want to significantly supplement the team and strengthen the implementation team as well. In addition, we are looking at costs, marketing work is underway, negotiations with partners and the like. I think the first results could be seen in the spring.

Are potential partners in Brno interested in cooperation with Zbrojovka? Have you already talked about possible cooperation with the owner of the Brno hockey team Libor Zábranský?

There was no space for it yet, but hopefully we will be able to do it before the end of autumn. The partners are interested, but the question is whether it will lead to a real result. Unfortunately, we jumped into it at a time when this season is already sold out.

Now the budgets for next season are being decided. But we sense the interest, we have selected the top ten partners that we want to approach, and we believe that a breakthrough will be found, because the marketing potential of Brno is huge and we will do everything to make our partners visible.

Do you have a chosen and main partner?

We’re not that far into it yet. Yesterday we had the first internal meeting and we put together a presentation that we want to present to the main partner, but we will probably not be able to address them until sometime at the end of October.

How do you manage to navigate the Brno sports and business environment?

First of all, I perceive support from the city, which I think wants football to be played in Brno, and now we have to find a common way. So far, everyone is nice and our reception as the new management of Zbrojovka has been very positive. We cooperate a lot with the Regional Chamber of Commerce, which is our partner in Zbrojovka and has very good contacts.

Speaking of the Regional Chamber of Commerce, could you explain why you joined Zbrojovka through it and why you didn’t apply to buy the club on your own?

The Chamber became a shareholder of Zbrojovka sometime last year, and part of the contract included the right of pre-emption. We found out and because we were interested in joining football, we made an agreement. We have an agreement with the chamber that if we fulfill certain conditions, financial and otherwise, by the end of autumn, then he can sell us his share.

But why did you wait for the chamber to get the opportunity to use the right of pre-emption on the club’s shares, and not do it yourself?

Because it seemed that the sale agreement was done and we didn’t want to forcefully enter into it.

But in the end, you entered it a bit forcefully, didn’t you?

Yes, but it had a certain legal framework, it was a pre-arranged agreement to exercise the right of pre-emption. That doesn’t sound like a digger we’d use to get into it.

How is the stadium? Is the return to the legendary stadium for Lužánky definitely out of the game?

Yes, it’s gone, there will be some kind of development.

So are you waiting for the new stadium at the Výstaviště?

Now the reconstruction of the existing stadium in Srbská street is being prepared. Part of the stands will be demolished and facilities will be created there in order to meet the competition conditions. We will be playing in this stadium for some time, so we have to cultivate the environment.

Would you be willing to participate in the construction of the new stadium at the Exhibition Center?

In order to fulfill our plan, it is crucial that the city wants to start building a new stadium. Financial resources can be combined, something can come from European banks, something from the city, region or state. We can get involved in some kind of consortium that would build the stadium, but that’s not really our focus. But I think that it could be of interest to a number of potential investors.