For The Kieran Maguire Wannabes....

We owed £46m to Gino and £77m to external lenders at June 22-so overall its £9m lower.

I get the focus on numbers but for me a stand out is that in Feb 23 we appear to have borrowed all of this seasons parachute money then.

 

Legendary stuff, thank you.

Basically any slim hope of being a competitive championship team who can threaten the play off spots will involve having to sell someone like Asprilla for something like £15m, pray that money is reinvested, and then pray again that we can make that £15m work for us in a way that makes the team much better than it was than if we just kept Asprilla, which currently, isn’t a great team anyway.

 

No surprises, reaffirming what most of us knew anyway.

 

That we had decided to fold and he shouldn't hold on as he would soon be sold, as in a tale that never gets old Gino just wanted some gold.

 

Thank you, Dr Seuss!

 

Excellent post as always sir.

 

They use to say football was a simple game, I’ve just read through the accounts and can categorically state it’s not!

 

Good point. God I feel old now!

 

So how much are we in debt if you take away what we owe Gino as he says he won't ask for it back ( yeah right) and if all transfer money, in and out, was paid up . The bottom line basically because you mention the figures here but in your post earlier you mention two much higher figures.

 

On that basis nothing as the external debt should be fully repaid from the parachute money.

That’s what Duxbury promised and if my guesswork on how the external debt is structured is correct then he should be right.

 

The external ( long term ) debt appears to be around 63m.Most of this has to be repaid before March 2024 and my understanding is it is secured by parachute payments and future transfer fees. So if is feasible the club will be ‘debt free’ in that sense . I don’t think these accounts have revealed anything revelationary.

I’m not quite sure where that leaves the operational cash flows though, I guess if they can trim the wage bill further we will end up in a similar position to pre -Pozzos , ie having to sell players semi -regularly to keep going .

 

Who was the interview with 2, 3 or maybe 4 years ago - Pozzo's sister? - who was talking about selling the naming rights to the ground?

It would seem like a viable way of getting a short term 'cash' injection over however many years, in the same way a new shirt sponsor brings in a 'cash' boost

Seems strange no talk that I've seen recently has ever mentioned it (not that I'm scouring the net for news of it)

 

I'm thick as two short planks when it comes to finances, but from the above it seems that...

• All income will go to paying off loans, which were agreed on that basis
• The club owe Gino around £63m, but he's not asking for it (at the moment)
• That leaves about enough to keep the lights on

Also, Duxbury rakes in about £1m a year.

 

Isn’t the problem that given incoming fees are borrowed against we will still owe transfer fees will no obvious way to pay them than more debt or player sales. I agree it would still meet Duxbury definition but won’t we still be in a tight spot? Unless Dennis money covers the shortfall?

 

Agree- @Knight GT painted a scenario that all transfer fees in and out ( and borrowed against) are paid up.

In reality the transfer fees we owe ( even excluding the £19m to Udinese) will need to be met from cash flow and with income in 24/25 only enough to meet wages and operating expenses there isn’t enough cash to buy new players or meet the remaining transfer commitments unless we get investment or sell players. A tight spot indeed.

I had a look at the accounts of Hull City for June 23 just out-income £18m-wages and expenses £35m but loss reduced thanks to player sales-£15m profit

Whilst the year 23 accounts for WBA are not out yet the FY22 accounts for Coventry (which exclude the sale of Gyokes & Hamer) show income £18m and wages and expenses £23m so £5m shortfall funded by increased debt. These will be typical Championship scenarios.

 

It makes me wonder how clubs like that compete with the ones in receipt of parachute payments… like Watford.

 

All those dodgy agent fees, overinflated transfers fees, settlement fees….all add up. Gino is fine though, coining in 10% interest on the money he’s loaned to pay for his mistakes. It makes me sick.

 

From Andrew French's article tonight regarding Duxbury's £948k salary:
"To give some context to those figures, in 21/22 Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy was paid £3.26m, former Aston Villa CEO Christian Purslow received £1.075m and Brentford chairman Cliff Crown had a salary of £700,000."

 

At the most basic level, the thing that these accounts and French's article lay out in full is that we've really been playing the Championship on extreme 'easy mode' (financially/behind the scenes) these past two seasons, and still fuccking it up monumentally, right?

Obviously, we're talking about what players we have left to sell to garner any money in/transfer kitties at all from next season on, but the flipside of that is, of course, that we would then no longer have that player (that we have developed and put up with plenty of dodgy/inconsistent performances in order to reach that transfer-worthy level) to feature in our team. And so we'd need to replace them with an at-least matching article, just to stand still. And we might be the worst money-spenders in the footballing pyramid at this point. Jesus H Christ.

 

Was covered at this event last month:

https://www.watfordfc.com/news/at-your-place-commercial-focused-event-round-up

 

I pretty much said the same regarding selling Asprilla on one of these threads, basically he’s our most saleable asset, and if we somehow get something like £15m for him, and that’s somehow at least partly reinvested, we won’t have Asprilla anymore, who were also not that great with as it is, but will need to hope we can at the very least replace him with someone of the same ability. We’re running at a pretty appalling ratio of hits vs misses right now, for every Asprilla (who is mainly still potential anyway) there is a Bayo and a Rajovic, so we’re definitely going to need some sort of miracle to even, as you say, just stand still if we do make any money from players. When we had money to throw around it kind of worked as throwing **** at the wall would produce the odd Pedro etc. but now we don’t anymore.

Edit: Also interesting to note AFs latest article states we’re actually running at a deficit of nearly £80m since Pozzo took over in terms of player trading profits, so it’s not like we were actually ever that good at it in the first place.

 

One of the major issues was our players on close to PL salaries were also still trying to play the Championship on extreme 'easy mode' (and put in correspondingly sub-par performances).

 

Yes Asprilla is still mainly potential at the moment - the maligned Bayo and Rajovic both have the exact same amount of goals+assists as him in fewer minutes.

(I'd still want £15-20mil for him in the summer mind, but I don't think he's an irreplaceable player right now, far from it)

 

But that’s missing the point isn’t it, how much would we get if we sold Bayo or Rajovic? And then if we sold them we’d obviously need to replace their goals and assists with at least the same to stand still by spending the money we made from selling them.

The whole point is we are going to need to sell any saleable assets to reinvest and buy any players.

 

Re the EDIT. Yes, I’ve been keeping tabs on the trading over the years, and I’m surprised AF has come out with an £80m deficit. I don’t think that’s correct.

I think we’re probably up on the trades but not by much. We’ve pretty much broken even over the years. They certainly are not the miracle workers people made them out to be, turning big profits on undiscovered gems. They’ve lived off Sanchez, Richarlison and Pedro. That’s probably about it. If I, or anyone else, was in the game as long as the Pozzo’s were, I think even the dumbest punter would have got lucky a few times.

 

I agree. I had a go at it about 2 years ago and had him about evens for his whole external transfers (ie excluding losses on Peneranda/Success and excluding windfalls on Vydra/Ighalo.). Obviously limited by working with reported numbers.

I think our problems come from inflated expenses, agent fees and hiring and firing expensive staff and managers rather than the transfers themselves. That said the money has gone somewhere as every single penny we made from the premier league has been spent.

 

My response was based off the point you were making in your comment that:

"but will need to hope we can at the very least replace him with someone of the same ability"

Because Asprilla is currently mostly potential, I was pointing out the Bayos and the Rajovics who would cost less are still currently producing a similar output to Asprilla, so it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to replace him with someone of similar ability in terms of current output for a lot lower fee than we would receive for Asprilla.

Your initial comment didn't appear to state that not only were you concered that we could not replace him with someone of the same ability as Asprilla, but that it should also be someone we can sell at a huge profit later on as well.

As a quick aside, we bought Asprilla for just £2.5mil, but as with JP before him it has taken him at least a full season to get to a level where he is an contributing to the team to a decent degree.

 

Another way of looking at the combination of player trading and all costs is that when the Pozzos took over in 2012 the club had a profit & loss deficit of £5m. Some 11 years later and after revenue of nearly £900m that deficit has increased to £65m. That is audited figures. £60m of losses.

 

Sounds like we need some of these U18s to make the step up so we can sell them. That's if Premier League clubs don't take them for peanuts before they've had a chance to play for us.

 

Am I missing something here, we owe Udinese £19m in transfer fees? Who have we got in the squad that was sourced from them, TBFC, Martins (loan?), WTE before that but surely that is paid up.

Surely all the transfers in recent times have been the other way round, Kamara, Okoye, Ferreira (loan?), Kabasele, going back a bitPereya, JD etc....

How can this be unless we have been paying them to take our players away?

 

Good point!

 

Maybe the crazy £16m for Kamara wasn't Udinese paying us...

 

Looking at the transfer dates, I imagine we still owe some installments for Samir along with potentially WTE, Perica, Sierralta and Pussetto. Would surprise me if they were to total £19m still at this stage however...

 

Fair point-this is an extract from the accounts-maybe they are not transfer fees but just amounts owing-but for what ?

The following transactions took place with Udinese Calcio SpA, a company under common control: During the year, the Company was charged £4,548,000 (2022: £278,000) by Udinese in respect of the purchase of player registrations and the Company charged Udinese £27,587,000 (2022: £34,199,000) in relation to the sale of player registrations. There is a net amount owing to Udinese of £19,069,000 (2022: £12,796,000) at the balance sheet date

 

Something here stinks thinking about it!