Sports Cafe, Quay Street. (c) gmgrd.
One of the Sports Café chain that tried to tie general sports in with American style pool tables with live telvised football. What it failed to grasp was that many local pubs had this without the necessity to pay high prices, both to play and to drink and they didn't have enough of an angle to attract the hoardes required to succeed. Closed down when the whole chain went into administration. It clearly wasn't a profitable venture as the Manchester branch wasn't included in the buy-out when part of the company was sold off.
Sports Cafe Manchester was making money hand over fist but unfortunatly Sports Cafe Liverpool opened and was a huge failure leading to the Manchester branch having to prop it up. This along with head office making some hideous business decisions left SCM floundering. One of which (allegedly) was to illegally use 8 domestic Sky boxes which left them getting a huge fine and then only being able to use 2. This had a huge reprocussion on Champions League nights which had been massively successful due to being able to show every game.
ReplyDeleteThe main reason it wasn't included in the buy out was due to the ridiculous amount of gang problems it had suffered over the past 5-6 years and the terrible reputation it had.
The beer was nothing special as huge chains like this never are but the thursday wing night deals and 2-4-1 deals on beers and cocktails were fantastic value and a massive hit with students. Another problem it had was it's capacity was 1400 which meant if there was anything less than 400 people in it there was no atmosphere.