Dragons News: The Cost of Running a Team - Donations, Fundraising, and Sponsorships

We’re back for a quick update from the London Dragons! We took a break over the summer after ending the year as the 2026 BUIHA Champions to work on some administrative bits and bobs. 

Since the University of London dissolved its Student Union and left us without a home and funding, we’ve had to pick up the slack.  This means we went from being a normal club sport to an independent charity and with it, all the administrative and legal work that would have otherwise been handled by the university.

It also means that we’re still without a sustainable funding source for our team and our charity.  We’re publishing this article to help illustrate how our alumni, families, and friends, can help us survive and thrive. 

Just £5 a month (not even the cost of a pint) can help us start to recover and stabilize our team. 

Still Recovering

Over the last six years, we’ve struggled along with minor deficits in our budget as we established our charities, found our footing, and grappled with price fluctuations that were made significantly worse by the COVID lockdowns.  Prices for jerseys, ice time, transport, and more changed dramatically from year to year while the world wrestled with the impact of global lockdowns.

Now, most things have stabilized but we’re still in a difficult situation and just at the start of our journey rebuilding the Dragons’ legacy. 

Until 2020, the Dragons relied on a matching grant system with the University of London (UoL).  We were required to collect student membership fees to hit targets that unlocked funding from the Student Union (SU) and from UoL.  In our article today, we want to illustrate the change in cost over the years from 2012 to 2019, and again from 2019 till today so that we can demonstrate how important funding was and how much of an impact even the smallest donations have on helping the Dragons thrive.

• In 2012, the cost of running a single team for a year was £11,154 with 40% of the costs coming from student memberships (£130/year) and the other 60% coming from UoL. 

• In 2019, the cost of running a single team for a year was £14,432 with only 35% of the costs coming from student memberships (£270/year) and the other 65% coming from UoL.

• In 2025, the cost of running a single team for a year was £20,284 with 70% of costs coming from student memberships (£625/year) and the remaining 30% being covered by alumni fees and donations. 

• In 2026, we’re estimating the cost of running a single team for a year to be £23,216 with our student memberships rising to £750 to ensure that we can continue operating while we establish more stable funding sources.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up

You might be looking at these numbers and thinking “how did these guys go to these great universities in London if they can’t add”.  The maximum size of a hockey roster is 22 (20 players and 2 goalies) which makes the total £15,200.  You might be looking at that and saying the numbers still aren’t right and that’s because we have lower fees for goalies at £100. 

A note to our readers: We keep goalie fees low for a few reasons, primarily because only one goalie can play at a time. Goalies are special players that usually travel in pairs and will alternate playing either whole games or half games.  They are also required to have more specialized gear which is significantly more complicated to travel with and makes games and practices more difficult to attend. Not only that, but they will also travel to away games, sit in full gear, and sometimes never play while the opposite happens in practices where they are constantly bombarded with pucks and rarely given a break.  Goalies are a very unique type of player and so our fees reflect that.

Back to the numbers, the cost of running just the team and our regular season is around £14,900.  Comparatively, the cost for just the season in 2012 was £7,840 and in 2019 it was £9,815. In the seven years from 2012 to 2019 we saw a roughly 25% increase in costs for which we had UoL funding to cover without having to raise fees that much. But from 2019 to now, we’ve seen an almost 52% increase in costs just to run the basics. This includes all of our registration fees with the BUIHA, insurance, ice time, buses to away games, referees, and any related administrative fees to keep the lights on.  So not only have we seen double the increase in costs for running a team, we’re now also paying for that out of our own pockets.

For the most part, we’ve streamlined the fees and costs for running a team with as few additional costs and expenses as possible.  Almost 97% of our fees go directly to support players which:

• 60% towards ice time,

• 18% towards player and game costs (insurance, registration, referees),

• 13% towards buses for travel,

• 6% towards storage at Lee Valley to store pucks, water bottles, gear, and jerseys,

• 3% towards administrative overheads like websites, financial software etc.

We try to keep our administrative costs to a bare minimum so that we can put as much money as possible into players and their season. It makes it quite difficult for volunteers as we often need to provide our own tools to help with managing the Dragons. We would love to have access to better social media software, organizational management tools, and other premium services that could help us grow as a sports club and a charity, but those will have to wait for another day!

If you would like to donate towards helping with these types of costs, please reach out to manager@londondragons.com or donate using our link! 

Even £5 a month can make a huge difference, that’s like a coffee a month, depending on where you are in the world. 

Wait, the Numbers Still Don’t Add Up

The last bit of costs that come up in the season are from additional fees. The additional fees are entirely optional for students and include jerseys and socks as well as the year-end Nationals tournament in Sheffield.  We provide all students with our own team jerseys and socks at no additional cost, and they are allowed to use those the entire season and return them at the end.

A note to our readers: Students pay for their own jerseys because they are unique to that player.  Jerseys are usually things players want to keep and use forever and because of that we usually do not pay for the cost of jerseys for players.  This is something that we want to change in the future because we don’t want any players to suffer because they cannot afford their own jerseys, which is something that has happened in the past (Mike, one of the authors of these articles and President, couldn’t afford his jerseys and socks when he first joined back in 2015 and was fortunately helped by a teammate). 

If you would like to support our players, help remove additional costs, and make sure that all students are included in buying jerseys, we are looking for a jersey sponsor.

A £2,000 sponsorship or donation every year would help us cover our jersey costs for all players, help us make sure we have spare jerseys for players to use, and help create a lasting legacy for new Dragons.

If you’re interested in sponsoring jerseys please reach out to manager@londondragons.com or please use our donation page to donate! 

Even just £5 can help us make sure that we can cover basic costs to store jerseys and £5 a month is 4 times less expensive than a Netflix subscription!

The other major cost that we keep as optional is the BUIHA Nationals Tournament.  Again, there are a few reasons why we keep this as optional for our students.  The first and foremost is that the Nationals Tournament is not the primary focus of our season, our goal is to win the BUIHA Championship by winning the Division and then the championship game against the North.  This is the most rigorous and difficult trophy to win and that’s what we focus on.

The Nationals Tournament is often an afterthought for many of our students because it is so far away from the end of the regular season in March (this year it was 2 months after our last regular season game), it’s after the BUIHA Championship game, and it’s directly in the middle of students’ final exams or when they go home. 

A majority of our students are not from the UK and usually must travel long distances with very expensive flights to get home.  Most will have booked flights home well before the BUIHA Nationals Tournament Schedule comes out. We don’t get confirmed dates for Nationals until February which makes it hard to communicate to students to keep their weekends available in April just in case the dates are confirmed differently than other years.   

It is also often on or around Easter Holidays which makes it an even harder ask for students who are put between a rock and a hard place having to choose between studying for finals, going home, enjoying their limited holidays, or paying to go to Sheffield.

Because of this combination of difficult choices, we need to ensure that all students are aware of what they are signing up for, explain potential costs, and then sort out our roster of people who will actually be going.

Every year this is a massive administrative hurdle for us. Student schedules vary and, without financial support, we can’t book hotels until we know exactly who will be attending.  It is usually a mad scramble to get everything sorted and book hotel rooms at our favorite Ibis IceSheffield before the ‘dynamic pricing’ pushes room prices through the roof.  The last piece of the puzzle is that the long weekend means we can’t hire a bus to go up unless we want to pay a couple of arms and legs to afford it. Students take the train, bus, and cars up on their own which sometimes leads to small heart attacks when players prank their teammates that their car broke down 4 hours before their game.

All of these issues together make the Nationals Tournament a logistical nightmare and an optional fee for students. That being said, it’s a unique experience that we usually want players to experience if possible.

We’re always looking for ways to help our students and make sure that they have the best experiences with the Dragons.  If you’d like to sponsor the Dragons’ attendance at the BUIHA Nationals Tournament, an annual donation of £4,000 could help get all of our students to Sheffield. 

Stop Asking Me for Money

At this point, you’re probably getting a little tired of hearing how much everything costs. And we’ll be very honest; we hate having to ask people to donate considering how difficult life can be these days. But what we hate even more than asking for money is seeing how hard it is to play hockey today for students. Having been in that situation ourselves and a number of our team having benefited from the charity of teammates, we want to make sure that new players never have to experience that.

We want to make sure anyone and everyone who wants to play hockey, can play.  To do that we need your help.

To end our little article here, we just want to expand a little bit on how much just £5 a month can make. You may have noticed by now that we’ve emphasized that a lot and you might wonder how such a small donation each month could support us.

In our London Dragons Alumni Group, a WhatsApp community for our former Dragons to keep up with everything Dragons related and constantly talk about how bad the Leafs are, we have 140 alumni.  If every one of our alumni gave just £5 a month, that would cover 56% of our fees costs for the regular season. 

In our LinkedIn group, we have 333 followers. If every one of our LinkedIn fans donated just £5 a month, we’d have our regular season fully covered and 83% of our entire costs covered, including Nationals and jerseys. 

Our Instagram has 1,488 followers. If every one of our followers donated just £5 a month, we’d be able to cover every expense we have and be able to start growing our sustainable endowment for the future while also providing more opportunities to play hockey.

It may seem like a small amount, but it makes a huge difference to us!

We have a lot of ways to donate but the best way is to use our London Dragons Donate page or reach out to manager@londondragons.com. We have a lot of opportunities to support including bringing back awards ceremonies with sponsorships and sponsoring individual players. 

So, get in touch and help the Dragons thrive!

All of the Dragons Links and Webpages:

At the bottom of every article we'll also include links to all of our web pages and our forms. As always, please help us in our journey to reinvigorate the Dragons after UoL cut all sports!

• If you were on the Dragons, please help us keep in touch with our Alumni Contact Update form!