Note to Roland, "Burnley returned a profit of £30.1m, a club record, during their 2014-15 stint in the Premier League." Further clarification for Roland - the Premier League and League One are not the same thing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/35933749 
Comments
Some people (not saying you, Dessie) seem to equate the £100 million, or whatever, payout for getting into the Premier League with £100m of profit for the owner. How many times have you seen people say, "If the owner (not necessarily ours) just spent £20m on decent players it would pay for itself when we got to the Premier League" - which just isn't the case.
Say we did get to the Premier League, eventually. Would people be happy with the owner (whoever it was) pulling out say £20-30m cash to cover some of their initial outlay? I doubt it. People would be demanding they spent the cash on more players and higher wages.
Which all, in a roundabout way, goes to prove that you must be batshit crazy to buy a football club - or else you're crooked and laundering money!
To their credit, Burnley have put together a very solid, if not unspectacular squad, most of which the kept together through relegation, promotion, and back again. But they are the exception rather than the rule. QPR is of course the great counterpoint--invest a lot in players and wages, go down, and struggle in the championship.
End of the Off_it has it bang on, you have to mental to buy a football club in England.
"Decisions were taken early in the season to clear all the club's external and internal debts, as people will remember that last time we were promoted we did have around £10m of debt, both in terms of external creditors and directors," Garlick said in a statement to shareholders.
"They have been paid off, as have the Turf Moor Bond holders and, of course, the ground buy-back.
"We also committed to stadium improvements, such as the offices and new Clarets Store, as well as redeveloping our training ground at a cost of around £10m, in order to bring us in line with other clubs in both the Championship and Premier League and help to attract the best possible playing talent to the club, whatever their age group.
"If you add all that up, the combined cost of eliminating all debt, plus the new developments is approximately £20m."
---
And they're not the only club to make a profit. Palarse's profit in their first season in the PL was £23 million, after some "infrastructure" spending, as their current floppy-haired wonder put it.
Well done to them, sounds like a good, sustainable way to run a football club. The internal investments all seem very sound. My comment above was not to disparage them, far from it. It was more that they are very rare these days.
Palace are turning a profit. City, Chelsea, Man United, and Arsenal are all turning profits. I believe Swansea operate at even, if not better. It can be done. What I would point out about Palace, City, Chelsea, and United is that all of them have or had very large debts. I believe Palace's were written off by the new owners (after they nearly went to the wall), Shinawatra left City in awful financial shape when Abu Dhabi came in and spent around 1b to operate at a loss while building the team. The Glazier, United leveraged takeover thing is well known (and an absolute cancer on the game).
I'm not saying that clubs can't be run at a profit, and not necessarily all debt is bad. I'm just trying to make the point that if you go back a few years, a lot of these clubs were in far different situations, and required "altruistic billionaires" to bail them out, and there are only so many of those kicking around.
Even us, with our £5m of losses a year are beyond all but a handful of local owners
I always wondered why the football league has not used this small leverage they have when being blackmailed by the PL over things like EPPP...
When they first took over, WHU had big debts and were one of the PL clubs considering mortgaging parts of their future income for years to come in order to have more cash in hand at the time (about 2011?) Everton had already done exactly the same thing. I don't know if WHU actually did it.
Now many people think WHU have a free ticket into the top 6 biggest in the land. Gold's suggestion a year or two ago that the club will soon be worth £400 million or £500 million will be an under-estimate, if some of the predictions, like the recent Daily Express article, are right.
Of course, we're paying to make the porn merchants mega rich.
Or could it somehow go belly-up?
In fact, Leicester’s performance off the pitch has been every bit as good as that on the pitch, as seen by the 2014/15 accounts, which revealed record revenue of £104 million and a pre-tax profit of £26 million. After adding a tax credit of £5 million, the profit after tax was even higher at £31 million. Unsurprisingly, the club called this “the most successful financial year in the club’s recent history.”
The previous season in the Championship produced a loss of £21 million, so the year-on-year improvement was a massive £47 million. As Whelan put it, “Promotion to the Premier League and the subsequent retention of that status in May 2015 has transformed the financial performance of the club.”
Revenue more than tripled from £31 million to £104 million with the vast majority of the £73 million growth coming from the much higher TV deal in the Premier League, which was worth an additional £68 million.
..
As would be expected in the top flight, the wage bill increased by £21 million (58%) from £36 million to £57 million, reflecting new signings and contract extensions for a number of key players, though in context this growth still merited the club’s assessment of “prudent cost control”.
..
Note that the wage bill was £36 million in the Championship, compared to a turnover of £31 million (about 115%). In the PL it was £57 million, compared to a turnover of £104 million (about 55%).
Source: Swiss Ramble
http://swissramble.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/leicester-city-sweet-dreams-are-made-of.html