Imagine this is another guessing game but anybody any idea how much the relegation wage reductions may be worth or likely % reduction? From memory AL seemed to suggest that those not not playing were those without clauses. Obviously this will depend on who is sold, Doucs already 100% wage gone for example, c.£4m? Most of our lower paid players are still likely on £1m plus pa and many much more.
I’m sure AL reported for those who had clauses it was 50%, but not all had them and we don’t know who. Not surprising that those on a 50% (whoever they are) would want out if possible.
Given the expenditure on 'other expenses' is out of whack with what our peers are posting, has it been raised at the AGM or fans forum or whatever the appropriate "have a probe at the hierarchy" meeting is?
As you correctly surmised on another thread it could well be justifiable and it is signed off by auditors so at face value it is not an issue. I could be wrong but the last fans forum/"at your place" was towards the end of 17/18 season shortly after the accounts for 16/17 were filed. At the time we had secured our third season in PL and there was next to no questioning of either the owners or the accounts. IIRC someone did ask Duxbury about how much debt the club had and he replied we had no external debt or words to that effect. That made me somewhat sceptical as whilst technically true as the club owes money to its parent company and its the parent company that had borrowed £70m+ from 23 Capital it was disingenuous because the cub has provided security for that loan so its totally connected/liable. We will never get closure on this as an AGM is for shareholders-the owners only and judging by Duxburys comments previously he would say "signed off by auditors" or its commercially sensitive. I suggest we wait until the accounts for 30th June 2020 are published around December time to see if the divergence from our (previous) peer group remains. We will also know how our transfer dealings have gone since the year end to guess/speculate on how we are doing financially.
Mention of WFC on The Price of Football podcast a couple of weeks back. Apparently the Capital 23 loan has been replaced by a loan from Barclays, as the former is struggling / withdrawing from the football related market possibly due to their funding sources feeling the chill. Worth catching the detail if still possible and this is “your thing”.
Watford FC: The Impact of Covid-19 and Relegation (bournemouth.ac.uk) Looking at the simple table above it shows a shortfall of £93m for this season. Clearly that is not good, but it's not as bad as that of course. Through transfers and loan fees received, Watford have raised around £60m this season. They've also had three games with some fans (around 5,500 in total) plus the TV revenue from Sky/BT Sport/Amazon matches televised from this season has not been included. So I'd say we'll be running at a loss of around £25m compared to last season. That's not too bad, considering the wage bill has been reduced significantly which will help to cover this.
Well if we got 170k off the wage bill for 2 non scoring strikers that might help ! BTW notice the link is from “ Bournemouth “!
This also doesn’t include the loan we took out against the parachute payments. Which was also about £70-80m. Unless I’m missing something.
I assume the broadcasting money would be going directly to pay off that loan. I understand the loan would be like a bridging loan, just to give us the sum we would be getting from the parachute payments, in advance. It's not to be added to the debt, only the interest on the loan can be added. In this simple example, Gino knows he'll be getting £1,000 for his birthday next week, but he needs the money urgently this week to pay for some finishing coaching for Andre Gray. So he asks Scott to loan him a grand for the week and when his birthday money comes in he'll pay him back straight away (plus interest of course).
I would have thought the broadcasting money was the parachute money as you get 55% of the broadcast revenue paid to PL. Even though that was £113m in season 19/20 i think there were rebates back to the broadcasters due to Covid impact so £62m ordinarily paid becomes £46m ? We borrowed from Barclays last July against that parachute money-who knows how much -as it was after the year end there may be a few details as post balance sheet info when the accounts are eventually published On the income front we also had to use some of that transfer and loan fee income to meet our obligations on outstanding transfer fees and the third party debt so it can't be used twice in meeting players wages and other expenses as well.
What I'd like to know is how much TV money we received for the Project Restart games. I believe the clubs had to pay a rebate back to the TV companies for not finishing the season on time, and some of the games were on free to air, but still, I assume we'd have got a bit of money for them to cushion the blow a bit?
I'm not sure we'd have got any money for them specifically. I understood the deal to televise the Project Restart games was designed to reduce the amount of rebate the PL would have had to pay to the broadcasters.
I thought that the UK deal involved a certain number of games, after the restart ALL games were available so the fact that BBC & Amazon showed some were in additional to the original deal, which I understand was honoured other than the completion date if the season, however I doubt Sky and others would be able to test this in law as the government's decisions took it out of the PL's hands.
A bit of financial housekeeping ahead of the end of the current financial year in June. Notwithstanding that the accounts to June 20 are not yet published we have borrowed from MacQuarie Bank (an Australian bank) against the £8m still owed by Udinese for the sale of Pereyra which was not due to be paid until 30/9/21. What we need the money for now rather than wait another 6 months is obviously not known. The £8.075m is after deductions of "solidarity payments" -basically money (£n/k) retained by Udinese. As of June 2019 we had owed £613,000 to Udinese for these
Is that £8m the entire sum of the Pereyra deal, or is there more? Does seem odd that, why would they pay that much if they needed to take a loan out?
We must have cash flow problems if we have to borrow against a payment due in 6 months. Here’s hoping Xisco gets us over the line and saves the day.
There's certainly more at stake than the usual promotion. The next few games will massively determine the trajectory of the club.
Puts paid to the idea that some had on Twitter (not here) that we had millions to spend in the bank and the Pozzos just weren't spending it. Wasn't there some podcast last year saying we owned 90 million to various parties? And that was before COVID/relegation.
Also not just borrowing against a payment due in 6 months, but borrowing against a payment due in 6 months which is technically from themselves?
Indeed. Next accounts are out soon and will make an interesting read. Think we will be frugal with transfers even if we go up.
It seems we did something similar when we sold Behrami to Udinese when we were going steady in the Premier League in 2017. Immediate cash flow problems due to covid/relegation probably remains the likeliest reason, but there could well be some other reason for structuring intra-network transfers in this way. League. https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/status/1080831162963185665?s=20
If we do manage to get over the line this season and go up, I wonder how this might have an affect on any squad strengthening we can do before another crack at the Premier League? I think we would need to, and are the Pozzo's willing to gamble even more to strengthen if the likelihood is we may struggle? Splashing the cash and then going down again could have even greater catastrophic impacts on the club.
I guess the plan will be to pull some strings to hit the loan market hard and also hoover up some cheaper, younger players.
Get the old band back together, Ibarbo, Diamanti, Oulare, Nyom, Suarez, Amrabat.... I’m sure they could all still do a job.
The documents filed don’t disclose that . We will have to wait until the accounts for June 20 are filed and even then it might not be disclosed as the transfer was after the financial year end so we may have to wait until the June 21 accounts are filed probably a year from now. To further complicate the position on transfers the club have previously lumped all transfers together as one sum so identifying one was impossible The arrangements between us and Udinese when it comes to the valuation of players and their cost will remain private and unlikely to be disclosed to us the fans. Of course we paid a not dissimilar amount to them for Pusetto
9 years on and I'm still none the wiser as to what these deals with Udinese mean in reality...just because we receive this money on paper, does it actually mean anything?
The whole market is down worldwide. Many clubs will need to sell to survive and players will move for less than they would pre-Covid. We might have less to spend, but it should generally cost less to recruit too. Our financial woes aren't particularly unique, and should we go up we'd probably be in a better spot than most clubs.
My guess would be sell Sarr, bring Cucho back, hope that Pedro and Zinckernagel can make the step up. Look for some Britos/Prodl/Behrami types to add nous and experience to the squad, couple of Udinese players and some free transfers. Don't think we'll spend more than £10m on a single player. Biggest worry is going up without a finisher and not having the money to buy one - will need a rabbit out of the hat.
Can one of the finance/accounting bods on the board explain when we are likely to file our accounts? It seems that in recent years we always do it in March/Feb time but so far nothing this year. I saw that there was a technical transfer embargo placed on ten Championship clubs for taking advantage of a Covid related extension to filing accounts (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...-TEN-clubs-placed-transfer-embargo-month.html) but we weren't one of those clubs so when can we expect ours to be filed?
