One thing put to bed is that the current owners are tight fisted and not supporting Chris. Looking at those annual losses and the money that they spent bringing in new player in the last 2 two years. You can see why they are being cautious now about spending more on players. Also we can drop the idea we are a well supported club, at best we have a hard core support of 15000. This of course means we are not that attractive to new investors.
One thing put to bed is that the current owners are tight fisted and not supporting Chris. Looking at those annual losses and the money that they spent bringing in new player in the last 2 two years. You can see why they are being cautious now about spending more on players. Also we can drop the idea we are a well supported club, at best we have a hard core support of 15000. This of course means we are not that attractive to new investors.
No one can dispute that the owners have put significant money in (or arranged for it to come in), and I concur that it isn't reasonable to demand extra. However, it's a bit more complicated than that. Last summer was spent targeting players that we couldn't afford to buy. That didn't assist Chris at all.
I'm extremely surprised by the 8m figure for wages and salaries. Its considerably higher than I'd been led to believe. NYA has mentioned that it includes a bonus of 658k on winning promotion, but even so.
I do think you can expect similar figures for other clubs. SHG asks about our neighbours. Richard Murray has said that he expects Palace to have similar figures to ours, perhaps slightly worse revenue in, and that is why they plan to sell Zaha as part of the overall business strategy. And someone has mentioned Brighton running on an 8m loss to. Basically Championship football is financially unsustainable. Its not just us.
The thing is, that most clubs without sugar daddies will be in the same boat.
Millwall and Palace, for example, don't have foreign owners ready to cough up large sums, their gate receipts will be comparable or lower (are their ticket prices higher than ours, to offset lower attendances?) and their commercial income is unlikely to be higher than ours. I presume their wage structure will be similar too.
I couldn't find more recent numbers, but these results for Millwall 's year to June 2010, when they pipped us for promotion out of L1, show Turnover of £7.5m and an operating loss of £3.4m
At some point someone has got to stand up to the agents and the players and tell them that they are just going to have to earn less.
I'm not aiming this at any of our players, or any players in particular, but I suspect that if the truth be known most of them would still be footballers if their income was reduced to c. £50k per annum - and I'm including many [layers (if not most) in the Premier League. What else could many of these boys do? And how much more would they need to be paid doing something else for them to give up on playing football for a living? For example Wayne Rooney is a great footballer, but I seriously doubt that he would have got a job earning more than £50k a year if he'd not been a footballer.
I don't have a problem with market forces, and I'm not in the camp that thinks it's disgraceful what footballers earn, but they (in total) need to earn less if so many clubs are spending more than they earn.
Many footballers outside of the Premier League earn in excess of £500k a year. That is ten times the, notional, figure that I've suggested. All clubs should be stress checked and, despite the fact that the journalists don't like the FFP rules as it prevents a Blackburn or a Wigan being established with donations from a rich benefactor, if they over spend their ability to sign new or extend the contracts of existing players should be taken away.
I, for one, would rather have a team that was guaranteed to be financially stable for the next fifty years than have all the excitement of achieving success with someone else's money.
Ironically, if all the players had their income cut, there wouldn't be a significant difference in the competition as all clubs would have reduced running costs.
It's about taking a gamble, which is what it is, and whether you can afford that gamble if the horse doesn't come in (ie if we don't get promoted).
Long term, slow but managed growth might be a better option for CAFC than an "EPL or bust" approach" which we can't sustain without owners with very deep projects.
And I suspect that MS and TJ realise this too as they appear to be actively seeking new owners/investors while at the same time reining in spending on players.
I don't think that was the plan originally but something changed, IMHO, which was Kevin Cash no longer wanted to pump in that extra £5m or £10m needed to fund the gamble.
But if the Club do adopt a long term managed growth plan then it will be two steps forward and one step back. Players will be sold and replacements found in the lower leagues or in the academy. Personally, I don't have a problem with that but I do think the Club needs to communicate to fans that that is the way it is going to be.
Totally agree with this. There's no point making it worse in the hope that it gets better. Time will tell.
I'm extremely surprised by the 8m figure for wages and salaries. Its considerably higher than I'd been led to believe. NYA has mentioned that it includes a bonus of 658k on winning promotion, but even so.
PA, it includes the wages/salaries of all 128 members of staff, and not just the 73 on the playing side. However I would imagine the 55 on the non-playing side are not remunerated especially well except for 'department heads'.
If one thus assumes that £7m of the total is paid to the playing side, of which say £5m is paid to the main 25-30 in the first team squad (the remaining £2m being paid to the likes of Powell, Dyer, Hart, Bloom etc. as well as fringe players, junior training/medical staff, scouts etc.) then it suggests an average playing wage of £150-200k pa.
This is a lot of money to most people but about what most of us imagine Championship players to earn, unless recently relegated from the Prem. In short, it's hard to spend much less and maintain a competitive squad whilst our London location probably doesn't help either (they won't be living in the very plushest parts of Greenwich or Blackheath I'm afraid on those wages).
At some point someone has got to stand up to the agents and the players and tell them that they are just going to have to earn less.
I'm not aiming this at any of our players, or any players in particular, but I suspect that if the truth be known most of them would still be footballers if their income was reduced to c. £50k per annum - and I'm including many [layers (if not most) in the Premier League.
KHA, someone made the point higher up in this thread suggesting lower league clubs might have to go part-time which begs the question, if you are say only the 750th best midfielder in England (about the level of a League Two player) then is it really realistic to be able to ply your trade as a full-time footballer and earn even say £25-50k?
If only 2,000 or so people are willing to pay to watch you (and 21 others) kick a football around 20-25 times a year (and virtually no-one is interested to watch it on the telly) then something tells me they're 'over-earning'. I wouldn't necessarily make the same case for the Premiership because the gates and TV interest is there (the Championship meanwhile is a bit of a difficult case for all the reasons discussed above ie. so close to the 'promised land').
If lower league clubs did indeed begin to go part-time (and some players might not resent it given their ability to build alternative long-term careers around their football), then there would be the same type of 'trickle up' wage deflation as we now see with 'trickle down' wage inflation from the Premiership.
I'm extremely surprised by the 8m figure for wages and salaries. Its considerably higher than I'd been led to believe. NYA has mentioned that it includes a bonus of 658k on winning promotion, but even so.
PA, it includes the wages/salaries of all 128 members of staff, and not just the 73 on the playing side. However I would imagine the 55 on the non-playing side are not remunerated especially well except for 'department heads'.
I think the "department heads" would dispute the idea that they are remunerated especially well. Of course, it depends on your perspective, I have no complaints about what I was paid and I'm not going to be more specific on what they are paid, insofar as I know, but I think the more junior staff have been poorly treated, and so do they.
Non-football staff last had an inflationary pay rise in 2008, although there was an uplift of about 2% at the time of the takeover. There was no financial reward - nothing - for promotion, although the same staff were effectively punished for relegation, with redundancies and increased workloads. This had an effect on morale, but I accept the wider context for wages has also been very difficult.
Meanwhile the ludicrous 2008 "executive team" was paid £500k pa between them and Prothero is on £150k basic to work part-time, almost certainly more pro rata than Chris Powell.
Thanks very much NYA for doing the analysis. I pretty much agreed with all of your italics as well.
What an absolute bloody mess.
Strip away the details and just look at the big ticket bits. This was at June 12, so things will have progressed significantly by then. The realistic picture at the end of this season will be the club are carrying £45-46m of debt (based on an assumed loss for this season of between £7-8m). That's doubled in just 24 months from the takeover where the picture was basically just the carry-over friendly debt and the North Stand mortgage (with Lombard i think).
How friendly is this additional bout of friendly debt the Club is now carrying, we simply don't know.
How has this additional friendly debt been funded and by who, we don't know for sure.
At present, we are in investment that looks as attractive as a two-week desert island break with Piers Morgan for company, and Susan Boyle for sexual gratification.
People think everything will be great if we got to the Premiership and got a sack of money. That to me seems just as unlikely a scenario because if we did get promoted, we would (by the looks of things) have to pay out an obscene amount of money before we even possibly considered bringing in a new player.
In my opinion, only an idiot who has no emotional connection to the club, or a mega mega rich overseas investor would ever consider taking us on in our current state or likely future state if we got promoted (and for the latter, there are dozens of more attractive offerings than us).
I honestly can't see how we can ever get out of this cycle of losing more than we earn every year.
At some point someone has got to stand up to the agents and the players and tell them that they are just going to have to earn less.
I'm not aiming this at any of our players, or any players in particular, but I suspect that if the truth be known most of them would still be footballers if their income was reduced to c. £50k per annum - and I'm including many [layers (if not most) in the Premier League. What else could many of these boys do? And how much more would they need to be paid doing something else for them to give up on playing football for a living? For example Wayne Rooney is a great footballer, but I seriously doubt that he would have got a job earning more than £50k a year if he'd not been a footballer.
I don't have a problem with market forces, and I'm not in the camp that thinks it's disgraceful what footballers earn, but they (in total) need to earn less if so many clubs are spending more than they earn.
Many footballers outside of the Premier League earn in excess of £500k a year. That is ten times the, notional, figure that I've suggested. All clubs should be stress checked and, despite the fact that the journalists don't like the FFP rules as it prevents a Blackburn or a Wigan being established with donations from a rich benefactor, if they over spend their ability to sign new or extend the contracts of existing players should be taken away.
I, for one, would rather have a team that was guaranteed to be financially stable for the next fifty years than have all the excitement of achieving success with someone else's money.
Ironically, if all the players had their income cut, there wouldn't be a significant difference in the competition as all clubs would have reduced running costs.
I completely agree with you that player salaries need to be reduced, and I think they will gradually do so when the FFP is put into place. I think one thing that is important to consider though, when we're talking wages per annum, is that the career of a footballer is a very short one and the time of that career that is spent earning good money is, for most, even shorter.
At some point someone has got to stand up to the agents and the players and tell them that they are just going to have to earn less.
I'm not aiming this at any of our players, or any players in particular, but I suspect that if the truth be known most of them would still be footballers if their income was reduced to c. £50k per annum - and I'm including many [layers (if not most) in the Premier League. What else could many of these boys do? And how much more would they need to be paid doing something else for them to give up on playing football for a living? For example Wayne Rooney is a great footballer, but I seriously doubt that he would have got a job earning more than £50k a year if he'd not been a footballer.
I don't have a problem with market forces, and I'm not in the camp that thinks it's disgraceful what footballers earn, but they (in total) need to earn less if so many clubs are spending more than they earn.
Many footballers outside of the Premier League earn in excess of £500k a year. That is ten times the, notional, figure that I've suggested. All clubs should be stress checked and, despite the fact that the journalists don't like the FFP rules as it prevents a Blackburn or a Wigan being established with donations from a rich benefactor, if they over spend their ability to sign new or extend the contracts of existing players should be taken away.
I, for one, would rather have a team that was guaranteed to be financially stable for the next fifty years than have all the excitement of achieving success with someone else's money.
Ironically, if all the players had their income cut, there wouldn't be a significant difference in the competition as all clubs would have reduced running costs.
I completely agree with you that player salaries need to be reduced, and I think they will gradually do so when the FFP is put into place. I think one thing that is important to consider though, when we're talking wages per annum, is that the career of a footballer is a very short one and the time of that career that is spent earning good money is, for most, even shorter.
But why should someone expect to earn enough in 10 years to live on for the rest of their life? It's hardly unusual to have to change careers, people do it all the time.
Thanks, NYA. The figure I was given - £4.6m - was definitely for the "playing squad". So it would presumably not include CP and his team, not the marketing, sales, admin, nor any directors salaries. Even so it seems a bit of a stretch to get from 4.6 to nearly 8.0. Yet my source was "authoritative" and very pleased to convey that the same figure for Huddersfield was 6.8m.
Well the bare facts are, that costs considerably outstrip revenues, and there is no obvious way how to bridge the gap in this division. I wonder how Millwall have a smaller loss, given that their revenues must be quite a lot lower.
The other thing that freaks me out is that I know a club which has a playing staff budget of £1.8m, and with this budget assembled a team that qualified for the Champions League, reached the group stage, and gave Barcelona something to think about at the Nou Camp, at least for 10 minutes. Viktoria Plzen, of course.
I suppose what it shows is the 'trickle down effect" of Premiership wages. In England, rubbish footballers are being paid way above what they would earn anywhere else. DJ Campbell, who took that execrable penalty at the Valley on Boxing Day, was apparently being offered at 22k a week in the summer. Thats 64% of the entire playing squad cost of a club whose first team he probably wouldn't get near.
So, if I win the Euro lottery (say £50M) next week and pump £10M into the club the week after, this really wouldn't move the club forward would it?
From what I understand, FFP would not allow loans from directors i.e. what our board have been doing. However, I would have thought a nice loophole would be sponsorship deals. For example, what City are doing with the naming rights of the stadium, shirt sponsorship etc.
I for one would welcome the jayajosh Valley for an annual sponsorship of £10m.
So, if I win the Euro lottery (say £50M) next week and pump £10M into the club the week after, this really wouldn't move the club forward would it?
From what I understand, FFP would not allow loans from directors i.e. what our board have been doing. However, I would have thought a nice loophole would be sponsorship deals. For example, what City are doing with the naming rights of the stadium, shirt sponsorship etc.
I for one would welcome the jayajosh Valley for an annual sponsorship of £10m.
I wouldn't welcome it.
End up like Cardiff changing colours and crests at the whim of the money men.
So, if I win the Euro lottery (say £50M) next week and pump £10M into the club the week after, this really wouldn't move the club forward would it?
From what I understand, FFP would not allow loans from directors i.e. what our board have been doing. However, I would have thought a nice loophole would be sponsorship deals. For example, what City are doing with the naming rights of the stadium, shirt sponsorship etc.
I for one would welcome the jayajosh Valley for an annual sponsorship of £10m.
I wouldn't welcome it.
End up like Cardiff changing colours and crests at the whim of the money men.
I was only joshing. However, it would be interesting to see what the thoughts would be if it was something like that or end up going out of business.
Maybe Ben Kensell is the man tasked to swell the coffers via some cunning marketing plans.
Are there ways of maximising this income that other Clubs use but which we have not seen fit to trial ? Would be interested to hear any suggestions ...
Maybe Ben Kensell is the man tasked to swell the coffers via some cunning marketing plans.
Are there ways of maximising this income that other Clubs use but which we have not seen fit to trial ? Would be interested to hear any suggestions ...
Being able to meet the existing and potential demand on matchdays at the kiosks at half time would be a good way not to dismiss tens of thousands of pounds in revenue each game for starters.
It is beyond me how this still continues when it has been pointed out on here for years. Surely someone must realise how much business they turn away each week because that cant sort out a system to meet demand.
Maybe Ben Kensell is the man tasked to swell the coffers via some cunning marketing plans.
Are there ways of maximising this income that other Clubs use but which we have not seen fit to trial ? Would be interested to hear any suggestions ...
Being able to meet the existing and potential demand on matchdays at the kiosks at half time would be a good way not to dismiss tens of thousands of pounds in revenue each game for starters.
It is beyond me how this still continues when it has been pointed out on here for years. Surely someone must realise how much business they turn away each week because that cant sort out a system to meet demand.
This!
The inherent assumption seems to be that the "punters" can miss part of the match they've paid to watch if they want food and / or drink.
Not good enough and I for one refuse to play that game! I go without or buy elsewhere after the match.
Thanks, NYA. The figure I was given - £4.6m - was definitely for the "playing squad".
Where do signing on fees to the players themselves get put? That could account for some of the difference, though still a big gap!
Signing on fees are recognised evenly over the period to which they relate (ie. the length of the player's contract). It is not clear if they are included in the separately disclosed wages/salaries line (but I suspect not).
I gave up Len getting a pint at half time as unless you dive out there ten minutes early or queue til ten minutes into the second half its a lottery as to whether you get served.
Doesnt even bother me that much as a punter but annoys the shit out of me when i think of all the money the club is not receiving because of lack of initiative.
Extrapolate the extra cash they could but dont take over the course of a season and I wouldnt be surprised if it was nearly a couple of million across all stands.
Cant take booze in the stands so when they have 20k + people "trapped" and wanting a pint basic marketing tells you to make sure you can meet that demand.
It would be interesting to do a cost benefit exercise re the Nike franchise in the Club Shop.
I assume the Club has been paid some money by Nike.
However, and I accept I may be untypical being a miserable old git, I am not going to be ripped off to the tune of £22 for a baby's kit!
If, in these straitened times, others do think like me then perhaps the Club is losing money through the exorbitant prices being charged in the Club Shop.
Comments
I'm extremely surprised by the 8m figure for wages and salaries. Its considerably higher than I'd been led to believe. NYA has mentioned that it includes a bonus of 658k on winning promotion, but even so.
I do think you can expect similar figures for other clubs. SHG asks about our neighbours. Richard Murray has said that he expects Palace to have similar figures to ours, perhaps slightly worse revenue in, and that is why they plan to sell Zaha as part of the overall business strategy. And someone has mentioned Brighton running on an 8m loss to. Basically Championship football is financially unsustainable. Its not just us.
Millwall and Palace, for example, don't have foreign owners ready to cough up large sums, their gate receipts will be comparable or lower (are their ticket prices higher than ours, to offset lower attendances?) and their commercial income is unlikely to be higher than ours. I presume their wage structure will be similar too.
http://www.fcbusiness.co.uk/news/article/newsitem=775/title=millwall+reveal+increased+turnover+in+latest+accounts
I couldn't find more recent numbers, but these results for Millwall 's year to June 2010, when they pipped us for promotion out of L1, show Turnover of £7.5m and an operating loss of £3.4m
They are different though, though know exactly where the support for the losses comes from (Berylson) and how it is financed (a three-year loan).
Lucky bastards......:)
I'm not aiming this at any of our players, or any players in particular, but I suspect that if the truth be known most of them would still be footballers if their income was reduced to c. £50k per annum - and I'm including many [layers (if not most) in the Premier League. What else could many of these boys do? And how much more would they need to be paid doing something else for them to give up on playing football for a living? For example Wayne Rooney is a great footballer, but I seriously doubt that he would have got a job earning more than £50k a year if he'd not been a footballer.
I don't have a problem with market forces, and I'm not in the camp that thinks it's disgraceful what footballers earn, but they (in total) need to earn less if so many clubs are spending more than they earn.
Many footballers outside of the Premier League earn in excess of £500k a year. That is ten times the, notional, figure that I've suggested. All clubs should be stress checked and, despite the fact that the journalists don't like the FFP rules as it prevents a Blackburn or a Wigan being established with donations from a rich benefactor, if they over spend their ability to sign new or extend the contracts of existing players should be taken away.
I, for one, would rather have a team that was guaranteed to be financially stable for the next fifty years than have all the excitement of achieving success with someone else's money.
Ironically, if all the players had their income cut, there wouldn't be a significant difference in the competition as all clubs would have reduced running costs.
If one thus assumes that £7m of the total is paid to the playing side, of which say £5m is paid to the main 25-30 in the first team squad (the remaining £2m being paid to the likes of Powell, Dyer, Hart, Bloom etc. as well as fringe players, junior training/medical staff, scouts etc.) then it suggests an average playing wage of £150-200k pa.
This is a lot of money to most people but about what most of us imagine Championship players to earn, unless recently relegated from the Prem. In short, it's hard to spend much less and maintain a competitive squad whilst our London location probably doesn't help either (they won't be living in the very plushest parts of Greenwich or Blackheath I'm afraid on those wages).
If only 2,000 or so people are willing to pay to watch you (and 21 others) kick a football around 20-25 times a year (and virtually no-one is interested to watch it on the telly) then something tells me they're 'over-earning'. I wouldn't necessarily make the same case for the Premiership because the gates and TV interest is there (the Championship meanwhile is a bit of a difficult case for all the reasons discussed above ie. so close to the 'promised land').
If lower league clubs did indeed begin to go part-time (and some players might not resent it given their ability to build alternative long-term careers around their football), then there would be the same type of 'trickle up' wage deflation as we now see with 'trickle down' wage inflation from the Premiership.
Non-football staff last had an inflationary pay rise in 2008, although there was an uplift of about 2% at the time of the takeover. There was no financial reward - nothing - for promotion, although the same staff were effectively punished for relegation, with redundancies and increased workloads. This had an effect on morale, but I accept the wider context for wages has also been very difficult.
Meanwhile the ludicrous 2008 "executive team" was paid £500k pa between them and Prothero is on £150k basic to work part-time, almost certainly more pro rata than Chris Powell.
Thanks, NYA. The figure I was given - £4.6m - was definitely for the "playing squad". So it would presumably not include CP and his team, not the marketing, sales, admin, nor any directors salaries. Even so it seems a bit of a stretch to get from 4.6 to nearly 8.0. Yet my source was "authoritative" and very pleased to convey that the same figure for Huddersfield was 6.8m.
Well the bare facts are, that costs considerably outstrip revenues, and there is no obvious way how to bridge the gap in this division. I wonder how Millwall have a smaller loss, given that their revenues must be quite a lot lower.
I suppose what it shows is the 'trickle down effect" of Premiership wages. In England, rubbish footballers are being paid way above what they would earn anywhere else. DJ Campbell, who took that execrable penalty at the Valley on Boxing Day, was apparently being offered at 22k a week in the summer. Thats 64% of the entire playing squad cost of a club whose first team he probably wouldn't get near.
I for one would welcome the jayajosh Valley for an annual sponsorship of £10m.
End up like Cardiff changing colours and crests at the whim of the money men.
Are there ways of maximising this income that other Clubs use but which we have not seen fit to trial ? Would be interested to hear any suggestions ...
It is beyond me how this still continues when it has been pointed out on here for years. Surely someone must realise how much business they turn away each week because that cant sort out a system to meet demand.
The inherent assumption seems to be that the "punters" can miss part of the match they've paid to watch if they want food and / or drink.
Not good enough and I for one refuse to play that game! I go without or buy elsewhere after the match.
Doesnt even bother me that much as a punter but annoys the shit out of me when i think of all the money the club is not receiving because of lack of initiative.
Extrapolate the extra cash they could but dont take over the course of a season and I wouldnt be surprised if it was nearly a couple of million across all stands.
Cant take booze in the stands so when they have 20k + people "trapped" and wanting a pint basic marketing tells you to make sure you can meet that demand.
I assume the Club has been paid some money by Nike.
However, and I accept I may be untypical being a miserable old git, I am not going to be ripped off to the tune of £22 for a baby's kit!
If, in these straitened times, others do think like me then perhaps the Club is losing money through the exorbitant prices being charged in the Club Shop.