Fleetwood Town chief hopes for a cashless future

Speaking on a video uploaded to his Twitter handle, Pilley says the move would be a way of further halting the spread of coronavirus.

Nevertheless, he also maintained that the switch would help to improve time management at Highbury on matchdays.

He said: “I believe we have to change the way that we live our lives and make payments in order to minimise the loss of life and to counteract this awful virus.

“It cannot be right to pass bits of paper covered in germs between hundreds, if not thousands, of people. We need to take measures to prevent the spread of the illness.

“Therefore, I think we should all make an effort to pay electronically to minimise the transmission of the disease.

“This is not a sacrifice that is going to detrimentally affect any business. Quite the opposite.

“For the last 15 years we’ve had to set floats up at every single pay point which is time consuming, is expensive, and is a laborious, time-consuming job.

“We then distribute the floats. Eventually we’ll probably get a call to say someone’s run out of 50ps or pound coins on the other side, someone has to run round and deliver the change.

“Eventually we have to cash up, hoping we haven’t lost any money during the course of the day.

“We then lock the money in the safe where we become a target for a robbery or a burglary.

“It happens, people have attempted to do it twice over 15 years, and they’re never going to be able to because we have enormous safes and the damage, they do cost money.

“It’s a pain. The next day we then have to call someone to come out and take the money and that’s expensive – and to top it all, we have to pay fees to pay cash into the bank.

“It’s not best practice, it really isn’t. The speed of the service is very, very slow when you’re paying with cash because people have to get change, it’s three times faster to pay contactless with a card.

“This is what I’m going to do. It will help my business and I’d urge anybody else who has a business – a football club or whatever sector you’re in – to go cashless.”