Club Accounts Published

A day?

 

Let's split the diff, call it a week. Most people could live well on that.

 

Forgot about it because of the whole end of civilization, but the full books are now live on Companies House. And they are both better and worse than the topline numbers suggest.

First, the good news: most of the loss is a paper loss. Amoritization, which has no real-world impact, jumped significantly and drove the loss. Our cash-on-hand fell a bit, but not too much. Our debt didn't budge. Consequently, we still find ourselves in a net cash position of £25m, down about £8m from last year. That's not awful.

But then there's the bad news: we were expected to have a lot of money going out this year, with not a lot of money coming in, and that was before the apocalypse. Our transfer funds to-be-received dropped significantly, and the money we owed (on transfer funds, on deferred payments of some variety, other stuff) rose. Our wages didn't increase, but neither did they drop. So we had £8m less inbound expected this year, £17m more outbound, and a further £9.5m more outbound after this season.

In other words, we were expecting that things would get worse this year, potentially pushing us into a net debt position, and then sports ended and the economy went poof. So it shouldn't be a surprise if Gao is now looking to break even rather than make a profit.

 

Full thread there on the accounts from Swiss Ramble.

The bit that stands out: we're one of only three teams that managed to lose money on an EBITDA basis, which excludes all of the fiddly bits and player trading and serves as a good benchmark for cash in versus cash out. The other two are spending hefty sums chasing Europe; us, not so much. Excluding the top six and ourselves, the average EBITDA was £25m; we were at -£4m. We're really bad at this financial stability thing.