2021 Accounts filed so far

I don't know. I have not read them properly yet, and tonight is too late to do so. I will post the answer here when I do.

 

There is only the cost of changes to Leased Buildings on the Balance Sheet, but that is as last year. The stadium is leased but that is not new.

The total cumulative losses following the addition of the loss of £42,345,000 this year is £231163,000. Share Capital is £36,421,000, with an additional £212,258,000 provided through loans from the owners. Just as a comparison, Barnsley Share Capital is £6,288,073 and there are no loans from the owners. The two clubs are supposed to be competing on a level playing field according to the principles of FFP..

 

Please tell me you haven't stayed up all night just to answer this particular question.

 

No, I couldn't sleep, so I got up and for something to do, I have been looking at Accounts. What is your excuse?

 

Sorry, I got the Blackburn figures wrong. They should read - Loss £6,582,107 after a profit of just £622,448 on the sale of players and a profit of £13,029,270 on the sale of the training ground to the owners. The figures for the training ground sale are:

Original Cost £6,747,504
Accumulated Depreciation £2,477,074
Balance Sheet Value £4,270,730
Selling Price £17,300,000
Profit on sale £13,029,270

The Blackburn Rovers' Balance Sheet looks a huge mess. There are loans everywhere with a creditor for PAYE of over £3.5m. To my eyes, this looks like the next basket case.

 

Same thing. Couldn't sleep, so I got up and looked for something to read.

 

This is one of the things that annoys me. Clubs not paying taxes when due. If they can afford to pay the wages in the first place, the PAYE should be paid over automatically, shouldn't it? It's only a fraction of the wages bill, after all. It's not exactly an unforeseen expense.

Clubs seem to regard taxes as something they can delay paying, sometimes almost indefinitely. Is this allowed to happen in other industries?

 

I honestly don’t know whether ffp is meant to create a level playing field or not. As I said earlier, I don’t know what they’re meant to do. Aren’t they officially called Profit & Sustainability rules? There seems to be precious little of either.

Stoke will be fine until it gets to the point that the Coates family can no longer bankroll them. They won’t be calling in debt in a hurry, but old Father Time catches up with us all, and they will become vulnerable when they need new owners. Same happened at Bolton, Wigan and Blackburn to a lesser extent, though the Venkys are now ploughing money in at a similar level to Walker, just spending it badly. Similarly, if I was a Preston fan, I’d be nervous about what’s coming next as they seek new ownership.

 

Average 14k/week to finish 18th with 52 points. There’s a theme developing…

 

Pretty much every company will have a PAYE creditor showing in their accounts. As long as it's only the current month's installment then that's fine.

When doing due diligence exercises, it's one of the easiest signs of financial distress to spot, as if you're unable to pay HMRC when due then things are generally very bleak.

£3.5m does seem excessive for a single month though, even assuming stupid wages being paid to players.

 

It's not entirely obvious from how you've phrased it, but the £100m loss figure represents the accumulated losses on the balance sheet, so the actual loss for the year is just the £4m after transfers. The total amount of loans has reduced by £4m from the previous year.

 

Football Fair Play is not about creating a level playing field in the championship despite the term Fair being in the title.

The biggest disparity will come from parachute payments that are designed to give relegated teams from the premiership an advantage at regaining their place at the top table.

The secondary element is the ability to inject £13m pa from wealthy owners to bolster a clubs finances.

FFP was voted on by the clubs and was not about a level playing field but an attempt to reign in the largest excesses. Looking at the latest accounts filed for many clubs it has not succeeded.

 

This is actually a very relevant point, as the current 'level playing field' essentially creates a set of rules designed to enable Championship clubs with wealthy owners to compete with those teams relegated from the Premier League who receive parachute payments.

Essentially at some point in time a few years ago, the £13m pa figure was deemed to be a 'reasonable' amount that owners could inject into their clubs without penalty to be able to compete with the parachute payment teams being funded by the Premier League for the 1st four seasons of Championship football following relegation. The desire for clubs to want to compete with these teams boils down to the fact that a single season in the Premier League guarantees that you will be a financial big-hitter (in Championship terms) for at least 5 years.

What is actually needed, if a level playing field is the intended outcome, is a system that allows all Championship clubs to compete fairly against each other. That's something quite different to the current system, which is never likely to produce a sensible system of financial stewardship when the root cause of the financial risk-taking is the existence of the Premier League, and its associated riches.

Strip the parachute payments away to begin with and there's something approaching a level playing field from where you can create sensible FFP rules, but which the football authorities currently deem is an unfair financial burden to suffer if you are relegated. Consequently, as it stands currently, we have FFP rules designed to run a garden roller over a pitch that has a 75 degree slope on it as the start point.

 

Surely the way forward is to only pay 60% of the Premier League money up front and then pay 20% the season after and 20% the season after that. While this may be tantamount to parachute payments, it means that clubs can't wax a whole Premier League season's worth of cash on a one season gamble to stop up, and allows them to cut their cloth accordingly for the following two years.

 

So even more likely they'd drop straight back down again!

 

That would then put the promoted team at a significant disadvantage with the rest of the PL, which was a large way towards why parachute payments were set up.

The reality is as long as English football is run with two different formats there will always be an issue. The only way to resolve is to merge the two leagues back into one and then offer proportionate TV monies through the leagues.

Never happen though.

 

If you can only stop up by buying a place in the Premier League, we might as well just go to the US franchise system.

Everyone knows the majority of teams that go up go straight back down, but it's the same with the Champions League. Once you're in in it, the additional funds make it easier to stay there.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean only the teams that went up, I meant all Premier League teams. Payments deferred for 3 years. That way if anything terrible happens to the club, they've got some reserves that they will either get the year after, or could be applied for from the Premier League in special cases.