ALREADY IN CRISIS: Kolstad to reduce players wages
Their journey in European handball still didn’t began, but financial problems yes! Norwegian TOP team and the project Kolstad have announced that struggling with financial unstability due crisis will lead in some sort of new-deals with the team’s members.
According to TV 2 this means salary reducing for 30% in the first and 20% in the second season for Sagosen, Rod, Bergerud and Co, who got chance to play at EHF Champions League 2023/2024.
Here is the statement of the club:
Kolstad Handball launched the investment of the times in Norwegian handball in autumn 2021, which generated great attention from Trondheim and far beyond Norway’s borders. The club signaled that the ambition was to win the Champions League with a team from Trønder that has strong local and national roots. We signed a number of Norwegian national team profiles, in addition to 2 Icelandic national team profiles. These players, together with those who were already in Kolstad Handball, were to form the foundation for a venture that Norwegian handball has never seen before.
The club has experienced fantastic success both on and off the field in the past year. We have won both the series, NM and play-offs in Norway, and we are ready to play in the Champions League in the autumn. We have sold out Trondheim Spektrum with 9,000 spectators both against Elverum and Drammen, and have been named Organizer of the Year in the REMA 1000 league. Kolstad Handball recently won the Robert Millar award, which Trondheim Markedsforening handed out as proof that we were Marketer of the Year in Trondheim in 2022. Only once before has a sports team won the prestigious award, and that was Rosenborg Ballklubb in 1990. It is created a fantastic foundation on which we can build on, which makes us strong in the belief that we will succeed in the sky-high goals we have set ourselves.
When we pressed the start button for this ambitious venture in autumn 2021, we were sure that everything was in place to start this sporting adventure. But the worldview changed significantly when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. It was the start of unrest in Europe that led to an energy crisis, high inflation, a weak krone, high interest rates and general uncertainty in many industries about how the world will look in the future.
This has meant that it has become more demanding to secure the income we need to establish ourselves as a top European team in handball. We have always been concerned with having a tidy economy in Kolstad Handball, and therefore the club must be responsible for reducing costs now. We are reducing costs in many areas, but above all it is salary costs that we can reduce without it going significantly beyond the sporting investment we have started. All the players in Kolstad Handball have an ambition to win the Champions League with a Trønder club team that will excite the whole of Norway. We have a good dialogue with all players, coaches and employees who are affected by the salary reduction. The club’s ambition is to finalize negotiations with those involved next week at the latest.
We have implemented a cost-reducing action plan for the coming season, which will ensure that we get a balance in the accounts. The goal of fulfilling the ambition to win the Champions League is fixed. We already have a fantastic team both on and off the field, which has ambitions to create Trønder and Norwegian sports history.
