1. Who owns the club? 2. What is the business plan? 3. What is the level of investment? 4. What are the plans for the Academy? 5. What are the plans for the Valley? and 6. What is the exit strategy?
Good questions, but
3. It isn't "investment" its "losses" unless there is a clear 6.
6. Unless we unearth a sugar daddy (someone who is truly minted, loves us and can afford to spunk away a small fortune on a sporting passion) the exit strategy can only be to sell on at a profit to a bigger mug. There is no investment potential in your average football club. The premiership sky millions are for "squad investment" in other words to be spent on overpaid prima donnas and more importantly, their agents.
We are currently trapped on a path leading to the end of a rainbow.
This is precisely why quite a few of us have been asking why did supposedly astute business men and property developers buy us in the first place? Were they all mugs or were they after other things? Did Cash pull out because they discovered some of the Valley land had already been sold? I still don't understand, but as France is Bacon said 'knowledge is power' and that's why Airman is much needed.
There is no investment potential in your average football club.
Unless you can get promoted to the PL - as I say above the minimum that each PL club will make from TV revenues alone will be ca £60m a year - or around 5 times the revenue that CAFC generates annually.
But otherwise as an investment football clubs in Charlton's class are in a boom or bust scenario.
1. Who owns the club? 2. What is the business plan? 3. What is the level of investment? 4. What are the plans for the Academy? 5. What are the plans for the Valley? and 6. What is the exit strategy?
Good questions, but
3. It isn't "investment" its "losses" unless there is a clear 6.
6. Unless we unearth a sugar daddy (someone who is truly minted, loves us and can afford to spunk away a small fortune on a sporting passion) the exit strategy can only be to sell on at a profit to a bigger mug. There is no investment potential in your average football club. The premiership sky millions are for "squad investment" in other words to be spent on overpaid prima donnas and more importantly, their agents.
We are currently trapped on a path leading to the end of a rainbow.
This is precisely why quite a few of us have been asking why did supposedly astute business men and property developers buy us in the first place? Were they all mugs or were they after other things? Did Cash pull out because they discovered some of the Valley land had already been sold? I still don't understand, but as France is Bacon said 'knowledge is power' and that's why Airman is much needed.
But then why would businessmen buy ANY club (apart from perhaps Man U)? Many of our rivals have rich owners, and I wouldn't say that they were much more attractive propositions than us, and it's not as if our ground if located in the heart of Mayfair and the land is worth a fortune.
Great read and well presented but can't help fearing that this "shock revelation boardroom scandal" speculation is actually of interest to about 50 people on the entire planet.
Successful/rich self-made entrepreneurs are rarely charming, interesting, ethical or stupid and for us to be advising them on the asking price for their business seems a bit bizarre.
Great read and well presented but can't help fearing that this "shock revelation boardroom scandal" speculation is actually of interest to about 50 people on the entire planet.
Successful/rich self-made entrepreneurs are rarely...........................stupid.
Successful/rich self-made entrepreneurs are rarely charming, interesting, ethical or stupid and for us to be advising them on the asking price for their business seems a bit bizarre.
1. Who owns the club? 2. What is the business plan? 3. What is the level of investment? 4. What are the plans for the Academy? 5. What are the plans for the Valley? and 6. What is the exit strategy?
Good questions, but
3. It isn't "investment" its "losses" unless there is a clear 6.
6. Unless we unearth a sugar daddy (someone who is truly minted, loves us and can afford to spunk away a small fortune on a sporting passion) the exit strategy can only be to sell on at a profit to a bigger mug. There is no investment potential in your average football club. The premiership sky millions are for "squad investment" in other words to be spent on overpaid prima donnas and more importantly, their agents.
We are currently trapped on a path leading to the end of a rainbow.
This is precisely why quite a few of us have been asking why did supposedly astute business men and property developers buy us in the first place? Were they all mugs or were they after other things? Did Cash pull out because they discovered some of the Valley land had already been sold? I still don't understand, but as France is Bacon said 'knowledge is power' and that's why Airman is much needed.
Yes, this is an important question to try and answer. A clue might be in this survey of football finances from the accountants BDO posted by my good friend Off_it the other night. It demonstrates among other things that the Championship is the worst league of all for managing to balance the books. 88% of CFOs in the Champ don't expect to do so even after player sales. In League One only 50% don't expect to do so.
Now I recall that Richard Murray told fans 2-3 years ago that in League One a decent club might expect a loss of, I think 5m, but if they get promoted to the Champ, they break even (Henry may remember this). So it is reasonable to suppose that this was the business assumption made when the current crew took over. They may have assumed that they would have 2-3 seasons in the Champ to build towards the premiership, wthout bleeding too much money And this may be what has caused Cash to have a problem. You can kind of sympathise. If he has not immersed himself in football, he could have bought that view of likely losses, because it seems reasonable You get promoted, there's more money. It seems far less reasonable to suddenly be told that getting promoted means you lose even more money! You might conclude that football really is a basket case business, and want nothing more to do with it. And that in turn means TJ is left holding the baby in terms of these losses.
That makes sense PA and it also fits with Slater's supposed 5 year plan because he did say at the outset that he hoped he would get a year in the PL out of it. I can see that Cash would not have realised what the reality was and I can also see that TJ would not have been in a rush to tell him, if as has been suggested, he wanted to play at being a football manager. Bother, I may have to give up on one of my conspiracy theories ;-)
Thing is, SA, I don't think TJ still less RM pulled the wool over Cash's eyes. I think that three years ago it might have been a general reasonable assumption. It is only now becoming apparent how the Championship is the main victim of the scandalous mismanagement of English football.
Getting in the Premier League ( which is easier said than done ) is not, in truth, a panacea financially in the medium or longer term, as the outlay required to try and stay there and compete is huge.
Depending upon which press reports you believe, the Phoney Pharaoh may have received £150 million upwards for Fulham but I very much doubt that this covered the sums he's put in over the last 16 seasons to subsidise the club ( albeit that he did get to do his pre-match parade on the pitch with a ridiculously outsized club scarf ). Similarly, Eddie Davies was owed £125 million by Bolton as at June 2012, a figure which has very probably increased since then ( parachute money notwithstanding ). Happily for the club, that debt is subject to a ten year notice provision. Steve Gibson has pumped a fortune into Middlesbrough and so it goes on. All those teams spent over 10 years in the Premier League.
The TV contracts have, once again, increased dramatically, but I suspect that most of these additional sums are likely to be soaked up by increases in player salaries etc.
I think the short point is that, save for a handful of clubs at the top, football is an inherently unprofitable - and usually loss making - business. The Championship, of course, is the biggest financial basket case of them all and has been for some years. Let's hope that FFP introduces a little more realism.
Jiminez and whoever else purchased Charlton at the end of 2010 in the hope of making a "quick turn" in 2013 were fantasists. They'll be doing very well if they can recover the bulk of their outlay thus far. In the meantime, the club is now in a state of limbo and we have to hope that any deal that is going to happen is struck soon for the benefit of all concerned.
Getting in the Premier League ( which is easier said than done ) is not, in truth, a panacea financially in the medium or longer term, as the outlay required to try and stay there and compete is huge.
In the past I would have broadly agreed - but the new TV deals will increase revenue by about £20m at most clubs as a minimum and at the bigger clubs by a lot more. I can't see all that revenue being soaked up in transfer fees and high wages.
Say you bought Charlton now for ca £30m - incurred £5m a year losses for say three years making your total outlay £45m and at the end of year three Charlton were promoted. to the PL. In year one you would get as a minimum around £60m in TV money (probably slightly more) plus there would be considerable extra ticketing/merchandising/sponsorship etc revenue. For a club like Charlton we would probably have incoming revenues of ca £75-80m PA. The cost to maintain the team in the PL I would assume ca £30-35m maybe £40m PA, if you pushed the boat out and brought a big name player or two. This would leave a potential profit of around £35-40m. The key would be not to sign players on high transfer fees and to hope that the squad that gets you promoted largely stays together, but there should be enough decent players who you can acquire for relatively small transfer fees and if they are young then will have a decent sell on fee if/when things go pear shaped.
Mid/long term the numbers probably don't quite stack up as you would have to transfer in players costing big bucks with high wages to match plus there would be high fees to retain your best players and sign them to new contracts but as a short-term gain I can see it working provided a reasonable lid was kept on costs. If the worst case scenario happens and you get relegated then there will be four years of parachute payment money.
Is anyone please able to tell me how much has to be paid to the past directors who were promised their money back when we reach the PL and how much does the current loans interest amount to?
Getting in the Premier League ( which is easier said than done ) is not, in truth, a panacea financially in the medium or longer term, as the outlay required to try and stay there and compete is huge.
In the past I would have broadly agreed - but the new TV deals will increase revenue by about £20m at most clubs as a minimum and at the bigger clubs by a lot more. I can't see all that revenue being soaked up in transfer fees and high wages.
Say you bought Charlton now for ca £30m - incurred £5m a year losses for say three years making your total outlay £45m and at the end of year three Charlton were promoted. to the PL. In year one you would get as a minimum around £60m in TV money (probably slightly more) plus there would be considerable extra ticketing/merchandising/sponsorship etc revenue. For a club like Charlton we would probably have incoming revenues of ca £75-80m PA. The cost to maintain the team in the PL I would assume ca £30-35m maybe £40m PA, if you pushed the boat out and brought a big name player or two. This would leave a potential profit of around £35-40m. The key would be not to sign players on high transfer fees and to hope that the squad that gets you promoted largely stays together, but there should be enough decent players who you can acquire for relatively small transfer fees and if they are young then will have a decent sell on fee if/when things go pear shaped.
Mid/long term the numbers probably don't quite stack up as you would have to transfer in players costing big bucks with high wages to match plus there would be high fees to retain your best players and sign them to new contracts but as a short-term gain I can see it working provided a reasonable lid was kept on costs. If the worst case scenario happens and you get relegated then there will be four years of parachute payment money.
All you have to do is get promoted...
But, even accepting your premiss about not splashing out on high-priced players, the only way of realising the gain as the owner is to sell to somebody who doesn't grasp that (as you say) "...mid/long term the numbers probably don't quite stack up". It is a case of pass the parcel, unless a buyer thinks that he can achieve a step change in support/financial prospects for the club to put it into serious contention in the PL. That is not to say that their aren't idiots out there who might fall for it but IMHO, given the competitive nature of the Championship and CAFC's current prospects, no one in their right mind would pay £40m at this point.
But, even accepting your premiss about not splashing out on high-priced players, the only way of realising the gain as the owner is to sell to somebody who doesn't grasp that (as you say) "...mid/long term the numbers probably don't quite stack up". It is a case of pass the parcel, unless a buyer thinks that he can achieve a step change in support/financial prospects for the club to put it into serious contention in the PL. That is not to say that their aren't idiots out there who might fall for it but IMHO, given the competitive nature of the Championship and CAFC's current prospects, no one in their right mind would pay £40m at this point.
Who knows - at the point you decide to sell up a buyer with deeper pockets may want to make the necessary investment to take the club to the next level and/or be seduced by the whole ego thing of owning a football club.
BTW parachute payments for relegated teams will be £23m in the first year after relegation and £18m in the second, followed by £9m a year in years three and four - so £59m in total. That should be less of a parachute and more of a trampoline to keep you in with a shout of having a season or two in the PL every few years to keep the profits flowing.
Below is an interesting article by Matthew Syed from a few days ago. (I can't paste a link because it is behind a paywall). I don't always agree with the premise or conclusions of his articles and I am not sure I agree with all the points he makes in this article but he makes some interesting observations about the real motives for the super rich to buy into big football clubs. Also, I was really surprised by the observation that the income of an average premier league club is roughly the same as a single large Tesco store!
Neither love nor money has anything to do with the attraction of Europe’s big leagues to the oligarchs and sheikhs There is a paradox at the heart of modern football. The game is criticised for being obsessed with profits, with avaricious owners trying to get their hands on as much cash as possible. Those who subscribe to this logic argue that clubs, who were once at the heart of their communities, have become bastions of global capitalism. Profit has become the basic imperative.
Take a step back, however, and this analysis begins to fray, and then to fall apart. Chelsea have lost more than £630 million since Roman Abramovich took over in the summer of 2003. Manchester City have lost more than £1 billion since 2008. Paris SaintGermain have overseen a bonfire of Euros since the takeover by Qatar in 2011. Other major clubs have lost fortunes, too.
Financial Fair Play, the most seminal administrative intervention since the Bosman ruling in 1995, was brought in not to prevent top clubs raking up huge profits, but to stop them haemorrhaging cash. Without this ruling, owners would have continued to pour millions into a black hole (many are still trying to do so). This is not capitalism. In many ways, it is its antithesis.
So, what is going on? If owners are not in football to make money, what are their real motives? And what does this tell us about what the game has become? It is worth noting at the outset that football is not, and never has been, big business. As the book Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper, points out, the average income of a Premier League club is roughly equivalent to a large Tesco supermarket. Not the whole company, mind, just one store. To widen the perspective, it would take Manchester United a thousand years to accumulate the revenues made by Shell, the oil company, in 12 months.
It is not just that clubs don’t generate much income; they don’t make profit, either. Even clubs that are not hellbent on pouring money down the drain generally fail to pay dividends. The pressure to win matches outstrips any desire to take cash out of the club. From the perspective of global capitalism, football is small fry. It carries almost no economic weight.
However, there is one area where football is pre-eminent. It generates newsprint and television coverage, provokes debate and emotion, and connects with the public consciousness like nothing else in the modern world. Manchester United may pale next to Shell in terms of economic power, but when it comes to cultural traction, they dwarf the oil company. Football clubs are cultural Goliaths.
It is this discrepancy that explains the transformation that has taken place in the game over the past decade. Had clubs been moneyspinners, they would have operated according to the principles of conventional economics. It would have been about revenues and costs, and clubs would have floated en mass after the initial flirtation with public ownership in the 1990s.
Instead, a new generation of owners, already wealthy beyond imagination, recognised that the cultural potency of clubs could provide access to a commodity that money can’t buy: political protection. This is the real motive behind many of the most high-profile ownership coups of recent years. In many ways, the very meaning of football has changed as a result.
The first to recognise the strategic potential of football was Roman Abramovich, one of a new breed of billionaires spawned by the death throes of communism. The Russian was not attempting to make money with his bid for Chelsea. Rather, he was arguably purchasing a shield against any retribution that might arise for his alleged role in the corrupt privatisations of the Boris Yeltsin era.
The basic story is well rehearsed. The oligarchs were handed the mineral wealth of the Russian State at a fraction of the true price allegedly in return for secret loans handed to Yeltsin for use in his successful 1996 re-election campaign. It has been described as “the largest single heist in corporate history”. However, it was only after Yeltsin left office that a backlash of sorts began.
Some oligarchs ended up in jail; others in graves. Money offered no protection from the extra-judicial reach of the Putin Government. It would seem that Abramovich realised he needed something subtler and more powerful, and so ensued the purchase of Chelsea. By associating himself with a highly visible, culturally potent British asset, he effectively ensured that any attempt at summary justice was, if not impossible, then highly risky for Putin’s regime. It very much seems to be about kyrsha, the Russian word for protection.
This analysis also explains why Qatar was desperate to host the World Cup (at the cost of tens of billions of pounds), inject millions into PSG, and engineer a sponsorship deal with Barcelona via its state airline. It explains why other Gulf states have poured huge sums into football, not least a billion pounds in transfers and wages at Manchester City alone.
Many pundits tried to account for this astonishing foray with reference to conventional economics — it was supposedly a means of diversifying Gulf economies away from oil and gas. But it doesn’t take much to see that there are infinitely far better ways of creating non-oil based jobs than inflating the incomes of European footballers. Neither is the foray about deflecting attention from human rights abuses in the Gulf. The leaders were aware that the association would invite greater scrutiny, not less.
No, the strategy was about harnessing the limitless cultural power of clubs for the purpose of political protection. Sunni dictators are conscious of their vulnerability to internal and external threats. These minuscule states sit at the epicentre of the Middle Eastern powder keg, where the continuing fallout of the Arab uprising and a potential Sunni-Shia conflagration could make a mockery of their tenuous borders and even more tenuous legitimacy. When Arab states fall, their former dictators tend to end up in coffins.
The survival of these ruling elites (together with their vast privileges) hinges on one thing above all else: the protection of Western allies. Qatar, which has virtually no military, has already spent billions on the United States Al Udeid airbase to the west of Doha. In late 2012 it was revealed that the Crown Prince had offered to pay for the base in full. Abu Dhabi has also forged strategic military alliances with global powers.
However, the sheikhs came to realise that these ties, while important, offered no cast-iron guarantee of support if push came to shove. You only have to rewind to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to see why. At the time, advisers inside Western governments argued that the invasion should be accepted as a fait accompli, as Daniel Yergin chronicles in his magisterial book, Quest. They argued that public opinion would not be much concerned about the dethronement of an anonymous sheikh, provided the new regime could guarantee the continuing flow of oil (George Bush Sr overruled them, but it could have been a close-run thing).
By piling into football, the rulers of Qatar and Abu Dhabi have ensured that this argument could never be made today. Not with the 2022 World Cup at stake. Not with football clubs worshipped by millions of supporters on the line. Any threat would dominate front and back pages and generate debate way beyond politics. Indeed, the very fact that these clubs are loss- making is an advantage to the sheikhs. It means they are even more indispensable to the clubs they are bankrolling.
Football can thus be seen as part of a wider strategy. When it comes to most corporations, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund (which is worth more than $620 billion or nearly £400 billion) buys small stakes. With Manchester City and the symbolic Chrysler Building in New York, it purchased 100 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. This is not about economics; it is about maximum visibility. Qatar, too, has not merely bought PSG, but also Harrods, The Shard, the TV rights to United States matches, and vast quantities of contemporary art (a record £160 million was paid for Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players) and various other sports rights. These microstates are enmeshed not merely in the economies of Western powers, but also in their cultural iconography.
The complex interdependencies between the Gulf and powerful nations, including China, will shift as the global energy landscape moves away from the Middle East (not least because of fracking). But in the meantime the cultural affinity with the West contrived through football will remain important, providing an emotional layer to a strategic relationship. As Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert, put it: “Conventional defence arrangements were not enough. By projecting themselves into hearts and minds through football, they are far more likely to get military support.”
This, then, is what football has become. Many clubs can still be analysed within the prism of capitalism. The Glazers’ ownership of United, for example, is about bottom-line profits. There are also many owners who crave celebrity. Increasingly, however, top clubs are caught in the nexus of military, political and economic power. They have become pawns in the biggest game of all. And it is only by seeing football in this light that the astonishing foray into sport by the Gulf dictators makes any sense at all.
Henry's selling your house analogy is a good one. However, I think the driver behind the unrealistic pricing is not to enable Jiminez to buy a bigger house but avoid him being left with an outstanding mortgage (debt). Business can be very unforgiving and, like Henry's analogy, if you have to sell, it's a buyers market. Ouch. I think what we all want to avoid is the club being sold on in a seriously worse financial plight due to running costs being leveraged debt in the meantime as opposed to being met/paid. Given the evident cost cutting and budget juggling that's obviously been going on, you would certainly hope that's the case. PS should Silent Tone actually be Mute Tone? I don't think I have ever seen/heard a word from him in two years.
1. Who owns the club? 2. What is the business plan? 3. What is the level of investment? 4. What are the plans for the Academy? 5. What are the plans for the Valley? and 6. What is the exit strategy?
Good questions, but
3. It isn't "investment" its "losses" unless there is a clear 6.
6. Unless we unearth a sugar daddy (someone who is truly minted, loves us and can afford to spunk away a small fortune on a sporting passion) the exit strategy can only be to sell on at a profit to a bigger mug. There is no investment potential in your average football club. The premiership sky millions are for "squad investment" in other words to be spent on overpaid prima donnas and more importantly, their agents.
We are currently trapped on a path leading to the end of a rainbow.
This is precisely why quite a few of us have been asking why did supposedly astute business men and property developers buy us in the first place? Were they all mugs or were they after other things? Did Cash pull out because they discovered some of the Valley land had already been sold? I still don't understand, but as France is Bacon said 'knowledge is power' and that's why Airman is much needed.
Yes, this is an important question to try and answer. A clue might be in this survey of football finances from the accountants BDO posted by my good friend Off_it the other night. It demonstrates among other things that the Championship is the worst league of all for managing to balance the books. 88% of CFOs in the Champ don't expect to do so even after player sales. In League One only 50% don't expect to do so.
Now I recall that Richard Murray told fans 2-3 years ago that in League One a decent club might expect a loss of, I think 5m, but if they get promoted to the Champ, they break even (Henry may remember this). So it is reasonable to suppose that this was the business assumption made when the current crew took over. They may have assumed that they would have 2-3 seasons in the Champ to build towards the premiership, wthout bleeding too much money And this may be what has caused Cash to have a problem. You can kind of sympathise. If he has not immersed himself in football, he could have bought that view of likely losses, because it seems reasonable You get promoted, there's more money. It seems far less reasonable to suddenly be told that getting promoted means you lose even more money! You might conclude that football really is a basket case business, and want nothing more to do with it. And that in turn means TJ is left holding the baby in terms of these losses.
Yes, RM did tell people that, I think in 2010. This was overtaken to some extent by the revised FL TV deal, in which the League took a reduction because they accepted the market had peaked, just before the PL demonstrated it hadn't.
Nevertheless, let's consider just how wrong that idea was. The external funding requirement last season was £8.1m on a turnover of £11.8m and the same is being projected for this season even after a seven figure sum has been carved out of the playing budget. You can't explain that in terms of the TV deal or even inflation in players' wages, it's a massive discrepancy, and I don't say that to dig out RM but to illustrate the extent to which the future was unknown to the key man at the time.
I will say that RM's view wasn't necessarily endorsed by the exec directors at the time, but it shows you how far out you can be even as an experienced businessman.
Opening piece an excellent addition to the debate AFKA as demonstrated by the rest of the thread. There is one overarching concept that unites all the threads of opinion submitted by true Charlton supporters, we want our club to survive and thrive. Lets hold on to that idea however turbulent the waters we are about to sail into may be.
In essence the ownership of a football club is about status not profitability, ownership of a championship football club can provide status but there are a limited number of such clubs based on their exploits in the premier league. Our PL historical cachet will soon expire and with it our saleability. Clubs like Forest and Leeds have it because they were successful at a time 40+ year olds were young boys consuming whatever football was available at the time. These boys turned men of whatever nationality are now the buyers and sellers. Some clubs have an added plus factor because they are from the capital, some have the fallen / sleeping giant myth woven around them, e.g. Wendies, some are only ever going to be the province of " local" interest e.g. Hudds, Dismall and Burnley. The last category is where we are returning with our capital plus status and that's where we realistically have always been.
Geopolitical positioning is I would suggest not our concern, I suggest what we get will be an egoist or small group of egoists hoping against hope that a successful season will earn them a seat to the big table for a year or two before they move on and the chance to brag to their city mates and country estates about how they met so and so in this boardroom and that. Occasionally you get lucky and a group of successful and wealthy fans Murray et al, coincide and you get a period of stability and success. Just like a team on the pitch, it comes together and then it breaks up. Premiership football is not a realistic expectation neither should it be a particular target, the club needs to survive and if that means a sustained period of championship football so be it. To that end just like when we were at Sellout, VOTV and AB and others need to be a loud and persistent irritant because in the end they prick the conscience of the local egoists who feel motivated by support for the club and the honest endeavour of the vociferous supporter campaign to step in. Pump up the volume.
It's good to see a balanced article taking in both sides of the story. I've been struggling for a long time with my view on how the club is run. It's so difficult to get a feel for the truth with the board being so uncommunicative. Over time though, I do find myself more and more drawn towards Airman's arguments. I've tried to do a sort of force-field analysis to get a better understanding. It's by no means perfect and the scores are merely my view on how significant/important certain things are (as we all know from Statbank people certainly score things differently). As I see things though, the board certainly seem to be getting deeper into debt on the good guys/bad guys balance:
Comments
Unless you can get promoted to the PL - as I say above the minimum that each PL club will make from TV revenues alone will be ca £60m a year - or around 5 times the revenue that CAFC generates annually.
But otherwise as an investment football clubs in Charlton's class are in a boom or bust scenario.
Whenever do you find the time ????
Seriously, a very thought provoking piece - a pity that no-one other than Lifers will have the opportunity to read it.
Great read and well presented but can't help fearing that this "shock revelation boardroom scandal" speculation is actually of interest to about 50 people on the entire planet.
Successful/rich self-made entrepreneurs are rarely charming, interesting, ethical or stupid and for us to be advising them on the asking price for their business seems a bit bizarre.
I wonder what Simon Jordan thinks of this advice?
Speaking of whom, what is he up to these days?
Now I recall that Richard Murray told fans 2-3 years ago that in League One a decent club might expect a loss of, I think 5m, but if they get promoted to the Champ, they break even (Henry may remember this). So it is reasonable to suppose that this was the business assumption made when the current crew took over. They may have assumed that they would have 2-3 seasons in the Champ to build towards the premiership, wthout bleeding too much money And this may be what has caused Cash to have a problem. You can kind of sympathise. If he has not immersed himself in football, he could have bought that view of likely losses, because it seems reasonable You get promoted, there's more money. It seems far less reasonable to suddenly be told that getting promoted means you lose even more money! You might conclude that football really is a basket case business, and want nothing more to do with it. And that in turn means TJ is left holding the baby in terms of these losses.
Depending upon which press reports you believe, the Phoney Pharaoh may have received £150 million upwards for Fulham but I very much doubt that this covered the sums he's put in over the last 16 seasons to subsidise the club ( albeit that he did get to do his pre-match parade on the pitch with a ridiculously outsized club scarf ). Similarly, Eddie Davies was owed £125 million by Bolton as at June 2012, a figure which has very probably increased since then ( parachute money notwithstanding ). Happily for the club, that debt is subject to a ten year notice provision. Steve Gibson has pumped a fortune into Middlesbrough and so it goes on. All those teams spent over 10 years in the Premier League.
The TV contracts have, once again, increased dramatically, but I suspect that most of these additional sums are likely to be soaked up by increases in player salaries etc.
I think the short point is that, save for a handful of clubs at the top, football is an inherently unprofitable - and usually loss making - business. The Championship, of course, is the biggest financial basket case of them all and has been for some years. Let's hope that FFP introduces a little more realism.
Jiminez and whoever else purchased Charlton at the end of 2010 in the hope of making a "quick turn" in 2013 were fantasists. They'll be doing very well if they can recover the bulk of their outlay thus far. In the meantime, the club is now in a state of limbo and we have to hope that any deal that is going to happen is struck soon for the benefit of all concerned.
In the past I would have broadly agreed - but the new TV deals will increase revenue by about £20m at most clubs as a minimum and at the bigger clubs by a lot more. I can't see all that revenue being soaked up in transfer fees and high wages.
Say you bought Charlton now for ca £30m - incurred £5m a year losses for say three years making your total outlay £45m and at the end of year three Charlton were promoted. to the PL. In year one you would get as a minimum around £60m in TV money (probably slightly more) plus there would be considerable extra ticketing/merchandising/sponsorship etc revenue. For a club like Charlton we would probably have incoming revenues of ca £75-80m PA. The cost to maintain the team in the PL I would assume ca £30-35m maybe £40m PA, if you pushed the boat out and brought a big name player or two. This would leave a potential profit of around £35-40m. The key would be not to sign players on high transfer fees and to hope that the squad that gets you promoted largely stays together, but there should be enough decent players who you can acquire for relatively small transfer fees and if they are young then will have a decent sell on fee if/when things go pear shaped.
Mid/long term the numbers probably don't quite stack up as you would have to transfer in players costing big bucks with high wages to match plus there would be high fees to retain your best players and sign them to new contracts but as a short-term gain I can see it working provided a reasonable lid was kept on costs. If the worst case scenario happens and you get relegated then there will be four years of parachute payment money.
All you have to do is get promoted...
witty, informative and balanced with both sides of the story detailed. really good and very well written.
Who knows - at the point you decide to sell up a buyer with deeper pockets may want to make the necessary investment to take the club to the next level and/or be seduced by the whole ego thing of owning a football club.
BTW parachute payments for relegated teams will be £23m in the first year after relegation and £18m in the second, followed by £9m a year in years three and four - so £59m in total. That should be less of a parachute and more of a trampoline to keep you in with a shout of having a season or two in the PL every few years to keep the profits flowing.
Neither love nor money has anything to do with the attraction of Europe’s big leagues to the oligarchs and sheikhs
There is a paradox at the heart of modern football. The game is criticised for being obsessed with profits, with avaricious owners trying to get their hands on as much cash as possible. Those who subscribe to this logic argue that clubs, who were once at the heart of their communities, have become bastions of global capitalism. Profit has become the basic imperative.
Take a step back, however, and this analysis begins to fray, and then to fall apart. Chelsea have lost more than £630 million since Roman Abramovich took over in the summer of 2003. Manchester City have lost more than £1 billion since 2008. Paris SaintGermain have overseen a bonfire of Euros since the takeover by Qatar in 2011. Other major clubs have lost fortunes, too.
Financial Fair Play, the most seminal administrative intervention since the Bosman ruling in 1995, was brought in not to prevent top clubs raking up huge profits, but to stop them haemorrhaging cash. Without this ruling, owners would have continued to pour millions into a black hole (many are still trying to do so). This is not capitalism. In many ways, it is its antithesis.
So, what is going on? If owners are not in football to make money, what are their real motives? And what does this tell us about what the game has become? It is worth noting at the outset that football is not, and never has been, big business. As the book Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper, points out, the average income of a Premier League club is roughly equivalent to a large Tesco supermarket. Not the whole company, mind, just one store. To widen the perspective, it would take Manchester United a thousand years to accumulate the revenues made by Shell, the oil company, in 12 months.
It is not just that clubs don’t generate much income; they don’t make profit, either. Even clubs that are not hellbent on pouring money down the drain generally fail to pay dividends. The pressure to win matches outstrips any desire to take cash out of the club. From the perspective of global capitalism, football is small fry. It carries almost no economic weight.
However, there is one area where football is pre-eminent. It generates newsprint and television coverage, provokes debate and emotion, and connects with the public consciousness like nothing else in the modern world. Manchester United may pale next to Shell in terms of economic power, but when it comes to cultural traction, they dwarf the oil company. Football clubs are cultural Goliaths.
It is this discrepancy that explains the transformation that has taken place in the game over the past decade. Had clubs been moneyspinners, they would have operated according to the principles of conventional economics. It would have been about revenues and costs, and clubs would have floated en mass after the initial flirtation with public ownership in the 1990s.
Instead, a new generation of owners, already wealthy beyond imagination, recognised that the cultural potency of clubs could provide access to a commodity that money can’t buy: political protection. This is the real motive behind many of the most high-profile ownership coups of recent years. In many ways, the very meaning of football has changed as a result.
The first to recognise the strategic potential of football was Roman Abramovich, one of a new breed of billionaires spawned by the death throes of communism. The Russian was not attempting to make money with his bid for Chelsea. Rather, he was arguably purchasing a shield against any retribution that might arise for his alleged role in the corrupt privatisations of the Boris Yeltsin era.
The basic story is well rehearsed. The oligarchs were handed the mineral wealth of the Russian State at a fraction of the true price allegedly in return for secret loans handed to Yeltsin for use in his successful 1996 re-election campaign. It has been described as “the largest single heist in corporate history”. However, it was only after Yeltsin left office that a backlash of sorts began.
Some oligarchs ended up in jail; others in graves. Money offered no protection from the extra-judicial reach of the Putin Government. It would seem that Abramovich realised he needed something subtler and more powerful, and so ensued the purchase of Chelsea. By associating himself with a highly visible, culturally potent British asset, he effectively ensured that any attempt at summary justice was, if not impossible, then highly risky for Putin’s regime. It very much seems to be about kyrsha, the Russian word for protection.
This analysis also explains why Qatar was desperate to host the World Cup (at the cost of tens of billions of pounds), inject millions into PSG, and engineer a sponsorship deal with Barcelona via its state airline. It explains why other Gulf states have poured huge sums into football, not least a billion pounds in transfers and wages at Manchester City alone.
Many pundits tried to account for this astonishing foray with reference to conventional economics — it was supposedly a means of diversifying Gulf economies away from oil and gas. But it doesn’t take much to see that there are infinitely far better ways of creating non-oil based jobs than inflating the incomes of European footballers. Neither is the foray about deflecting attention from human rights abuses in the Gulf. The leaders were aware that the association would invite greater scrutiny, not less.
No, the strategy was about harnessing the limitless cultural power of clubs for the purpose of political protection. Sunni dictators are conscious of their vulnerability to internal and external threats. These minuscule states sit at the epicentre of the Middle Eastern powder keg, where the continuing fallout of the Arab uprising and a potential Sunni-Shia conflagration could make a mockery of their tenuous borders and even more tenuous legitimacy. When Arab states fall, their former dictators tend to end up in coffins.
The survival of these ruling elites (together with their vast privileges) hinges on one thing above all else: the protection of Western allies. Qatar, which has virtually no military, has already spent billions on the United States Al Udeid airbase to the west of Doha. In late 2012 it was revealed that the Crown Prince had offered to pay for the base in full. Abu Dhabi has also forged strategic military alliances with global powers.
However, the sheikhs came to realise that these ties, while important, offered no cast-iron guarantee of support if push came to shove. You only have to rewind to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to see why. At the time, advisers inside Western governments argued that the invasion should be accepted as a fait accompli, as Daniel Yergin chronicles in his magisterial book, Quest. They argued that public opinion would not be much concerned about the dethronement of an anonymous sheikh, provided the new regime could guarantee the continuing flow of oil (George Bush Sr overruled them, but it could have been a close-run thing).
By piling into football, the rulers of Qatar and Abu Dhabi have ensured that this argument could never be made today. Not with the 2022 World Cup at stake. Not with football clubs worshipped by millions of supporters on the line. Any threat would dominate front and back pages and generate debate way beyond politics. Indeed, the very fact that these clubs are loss- making is an advantage to the sheikhs. It means they are even more indispensable to the clubs they are bankrolling.
Football can thus be seen as part of a wider strategy. When it comes to most corporations, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund (which is worth more than $620 billion or nearly £400 billion) buys small stakes. With Manchester City and the symbolic Chrysler Building in New York, it purchased 100 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. This is not about economics; it is about maximum visibility. Qatar, too, has not merely bought PSG, but also Harrods, The Shard, the TV rights to United States matches, and vast quantities of contemporary art (a record £160 million was paid for Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players) and various other sports rights. These microstates are enmeshed not merely in the economies of Western powers, but also in their cultural iconography.
The complex interdependencies between the Gulf and powerful nations, including China, will shift as the global energy landscape moves away from the Middle East (not least because of fracking). But in the meantime the cultural affinity with the West contrived through football will remain important, providing an emotional layer to a strategic relationship. As Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert, put it: “Conventional defence arrangements were not enough. By projecting themselves into hearts and minds through football, they are far more likely to get military support.”
This, then, is what football has become. Many clubs can still be analysed within the prism of capitalism. The Glazers’ ownership of United, for example, is about bottom-line profits. There are also many owners who crave celebrity. Increasingly, however, top clubs are caught in the nexus of military, political and economic power. They have become pawns in the biggest game of all. And it is only by seeing football in this light that the astonishing foray into sport by the Gulf dictators makes any sense at all.
Trappist Tone?
Nevertheless, let's consider just how wrong that idea was. The external funding requirement last season was £8.1m on a turnover of £11.8m and the same is being projected for this season even after a seven figure sum has been carved out of the playing budget. You can't explain that in terms of the TV deal or even inflation in players' wages, it's a massive discrepancy, and I don't say that to dig out RM but to illustrate the extent to which the future was unknown to the key man at the time.
I will say that RM's view wasn't necessarily endorsed by the exec directors at the time, but it shows you how far out you can be even as an experienced businessman.
There is one overarching concept that unites all the threads of opinion submitted by true Charlton supporters, we want our club to survive and thrive. Lets hold on to that idea however turbulent the waters we are about to sail into may be.
Clubs like Forest and Leeds have it because they were successful at a time 40+ year olds were young boys consuming whatever football was available at the time. These boys turned men of whatever nationality are now the buyers and sellers.
Some clubs have an added plus factor because they are from the capital, some have the fallen / sleeping giant myth woven around them, e.g. Wendies, some are only ever going to be the province of " local" interest e.g. Hudds, Dismall and Burnley. The last category is where we are returning with our capital plus status and that's where we realistically have always been.
Geopolitical positioning is I would suggest not our concern, I suggest what we get will be an egoist or small group of egoists hoping against hope that a successful season will earn them a seat to the big table for a year or two before they move on and the chance to brag to their city mates and country estates about how they met so and so in this boardroom and that.
Occasionally you get lucky and a group of successful and wealthy fans Murray et al, coincide and you get a period of stability and success. Just like a team on the pitch, it comes together and then it breaks up.
Premiership football is not a realistic expectation neither should it be a particular target, the club needs to survive and if that means a sustained period of championship football so be it.
To that end just like when we were at Sellout, VOTV and AB and others need to be a loud and persistent irritant because in the end they prick the conscience of the local egoists who feel motivated by support for the club and the honest endeavour of the vociferous supporter campaign to step in.
Pump up the volume.
Good to see a post and a very good one at that. You've not had many since 2008. Any reason why now. Not having a dig. Just interested.