Doug Sez

2024 accounts saw turnover of circa £9m. And an operating loss of £9.6m. Mental.

 

Don't think we've had a lack of player sales? We made what 10-12 million alone in sales and other fees the summer after play off loss to Fowls.

Wage bill should be coming down year on year too as we keep releasing players on decent money like Williams, Cole, Benson etc. and their replacements are not on same money.

Don't doubt we are losing a fair bit, as football is broken, but I'm just not sure how it's still at the same levels as when we first came down given sales and the wages should be far lower now than then.

 

Surely these figures suggest that a significant number of our players have been getting paid a lot more than many people might have imagined. What other explanation could there be?

 

Not sure where you've got 10-12m from mate in sales, Kitching 4m Mads 3m and 500k for Brad Collins

 

While ever Neerav continues to under-write the current level of expenditure our overall operating budget is good in L1 terms. It's usage on the other hand at least since Duff left has been terrible.

It's that and that there is/has been lots and lots of them, inexplicably so in many cases.

 

We seem to be a club who make money from players sales then offload players out of contract or loaned out then report bigger losses than we already had...

 

Was also money for Duff from Swansea and sell on fee for Jacob Brown plus some talk of additional money from the Stones sell on after City paid everton extra that summer for some clause they had.

Reported fees totalled around that from that I heard but could be wrong. Either way, it was a lot that summer.

 

I can't answer any of your questions. The one observation I'd make is that the published accounts match what the club officials have previously spoken about to supporters and the press. I don't see any inconsistencies. Official figures are in line with casual comments. Basically, we're losing lots of money.

Reports suggest that player wages have been skyrocketing. If you don't pay the going rate, you don't make many signings. I guess we've been trying to offer less this summer which has resulted in very few signings.

The upshot of all this is that even if you get the higher earners on contracts signed several years ago off the books, you end up having to pay similar amounts in wages for their replacements but the quality of the player is much lower. The good players can now command a wage we can't afford and we end up with a similar wage bill but a poorer squad.

Everyone wants better players, a better squad and for us to spend less money. Newsflash - it can't be done.

 

I suspect our players are paid more than people expect. I remember years back when we saw the judgement in Hulls case against us re Angus MacDonald and being shocked to see he was on about £6.5k a week with us and it ratcheted up every year.

If we could trim and balance our squad to a more sensible size, it would cut losses a little, but we've got a significant cost base before we even take into account the football side of the business.

I'm not assuming anything or insinuating anything. Hence why I'd love to get access to the records that make up our accounts.

 

I just want us to be successful. We've been so close on a few occasions since coming down and been let down in my opinion by our owners lack of willingness to invest a bit extra on players. Not asking for multiple millions like Huddersfield etc. spending 3+ million on one player and so on. Just not the poundland options more often than not.

If they aren't willing to, or can't afford to spend to get us where they claim to want us to be, then we need to find people to invest to help out or new owners to take us forward.

 

Some of us predicted that the player/Head Coach trading model, where relatively small but cumulatively significant amounts of money was ‘invested’ on speculative punts, in the hope of hitting the jackpot, rather than actually building a team, would lead us to where we are now. The irony being, of course, that we now have a seriously unbalanced squad but are also, apparently, skint.

 

It's not investing.

It's throwing money down the toilet.

I've said many many times, our owners might be wealthy in terms of our fan base, but they aren't excessively wealthy in football terms.

Neerav has a wealthy dad who has sidelined him away from his core business. He manages a "portfolio" for his dad. Given the disastrous returns he's got at BFC, I can only imagine the rest of the portfolio. JAQ is married to a hedge fund manager and runs a not for profit organisation. The Crynes have Patricks 'fortune' which at the current rates of required investment BFC needs to stand still, would likely run out in the not too distant future.

We're losing £8-£10m doing what we're doing. Given other clubs have some very very wealthy owners and seem happy throwing a lot of money at it, doubling our losses, or in other words, Parekh et all having to put £20m a year in... why would they do that? They don't have enough money to do that.

Why does anyone do this? It's ridiculous when you think about it. Paying young people who effectively have a part time job vast amounts of money to kick a bag of wind about and having to fund it all in the hope that club get promoted to a higher league where the club will need further funds to stand still and even more sums if they want to get promoted to the top flight.

It is truly mental. Maybe the only thing more mental is the drive by football fans to encourage owners to pour more and more money into a black hole. A black hole which at some point will be where football clubs end up when the music stops.

 

This is from the official accounts, again not even close to 10/12m

 

Is that not just claiming the pure profit though opposed to the actual fees generated?

Like you said yourself earlier. We got reported 4/4.5 for kitch and 3 for Mads. That itself is above the 6.8 showed there on your image. And we did definitely get a fee for Collins and Duff on top of that.

 

Cash and profit are different, yes. But 'profit' is the right figure to focus on given the writing down of the players cost over time and the difference of that compared with sales price.

 

It's daft but it's the game.

It is also an investment if that money spent gets you up a division and you gain the additional money that goes with that. Don't think anyone who's club has gone from championship to prem after spending a few quid on signings at that level would agree it's not an investment after the riches the prem brings for example.

We've always in my lifetime been a bottom end championship side or top L1 side. If this lot don't have the funds to maintain us there then they need to sell up.

Their current model over the last few years is not working and is factually sending us backwards. Other clubs sell players, generate money and invest those fees back into the side to develop and improve. We use that to plug huge gaps that never get smaller somehow and replace these good players on cheap. Which in turn puts us further back and keeps us stuck in same spot.

Take Blackpool, I think it's fair to say a very comparable club to us size wise etc. Sold their crown jewel this summer for upwards of 2 million to Charlton, but have already spent a bit before that and rumoured to be getting Jerry Yates back too. Sold someone for good money, invested that in several good players for the level to try and get up/progress.

We sell kitch and Mads for around 7 million combined in same window, who do we bring in? A free from Working, a part time lad from Pontefract and a very cheap buy from French third tier and a few loans. If they can't afford to free up more of the cash from these big sales, or can't afford to put enough in for us to compete with the likes of Leyton orient and Blackpool etc. then what is the point and what are they getting out of it?

 

When next in oakwell look around the ground then count the empty seats...lost revenue all facing the pitch + estimated sales from the folk who should be sat in them straight away.

Now to a untrained eye those seats are empty
However to a Medium they are all full.
Full of the souls that belong to Barnsley fans that have past over to spirit, previously, along with 2 or 3 coach loads of Japanese kamikaze pilots that sit in the upper tier of the West stand nearest to the players tunnel

 

It's been explained numerous times that football is a folly. We're asking some pretty rogue dealers to come in and just throw away their money. It's folly and vanity. There may be some tax perks of offsetting losses in some cases, but essentially, they are throwing away their money in ever larger numbers. We're getting to the point of needing billionaires to run clubs because millionaires are too poor. What happens when billionaires can't afford it any more?

The higher you go up the chain, the more you lose, the more you have to fund. We've got some super dodgy owners involved in English football now.

The last part of your post is the right question though. What is the point?

There will come a point where a large number of clubs can't do it any more. So what happens then? It wasn't long ago that SCMP was seen as a success by capping spend. But people are now coming in and throwing equity at a club to get round it. And will do still with the change in rules. And it's perhaps little surprise that owners are buying lower league clubs to try and promote them because championship clubs are so indebted and likely expensive as an 'investment'.

And on the cash aspect of our fees incoming. You don't get it all at once unless you agree with the buying club you'll accept a much lower fee. If Mads signed a 4 year deal with Luton, we'll be getting that money typically over that 4 year period.

 

I know, that's common practice. But that then works both ways.

We can then do same and spread the cost of what we buy to replace over similar terms. Doesn't fully excuse that part.

 

We can't afford to spread cost on a sizeable transfer fee because we're losing a huge sum annually as it is.