Kloten's vice president Doug Piper: "The business model of the National League A doesn't work!"

As Doug Piper confirms to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Kloten Flyers will end the season with a deficit of more than CHF 7 million: "We cannot deny it, we're losing more money here than we expected," Doug Piper says. "We absolutely have to change these numbers. But don't ask me yet how we're going to do this."

In a first step, they excluded the playoff games from the season tickets at the beginning of this season. "This definitely was a mistake," Piper says. "Not that we changed this model, but that we did it at this point in time. We tried to make clear to our supporters how difficult the financial situation of the club is. Apparently, this message didn't get through."

For the future, Piper and Avenir Sports believe that the whole league has to change: "The level of the National League A is excellent, but the business model doesn't work," Piper explains and adds: "It's not a good buisness model when a league can only exist thanks to grants from the owners and when the fans see it as a sort of basic right that someone pays for a team that they can enjoy themselves." (tme)