Davefevs

Started watching it earlier. My first World Cup as a “worker”…Euro 88 was during my A Levels and WC86 was O Levels. Funny little memories of being on a work booze cruise for the opening game to find out Cameroon had beaten Argentina, watching Germany v Yugoslavia in the Full Moon at Stokes Croft. Imperial Ground for the QF v Cameroon and then playing football outside on the cricket pitch outfield til the early hours.

I wonder how much footfall the shop gets on non-match days?

From what I heard he wasn’t that interested because 1) didn’t want to taint his first time here 2) it was a different Bristol City to what he left. It’s not like the same group of staff and players were here. Of course the lure of Pompey was huge too.

I know, I’m agreeing with you. The real flaw was overpaying in the first place on an expectation that boom time would continue to get boomier and boomier. I still think we could’ve mitigated some of that too…e.g. Diedhiou. Not only did he walk for zero in summer 21, he cost us £2m in 20/21. Of course that was the club’s right to “get his value on the pitch”, but that didn’t happen either! What a mess.

Think he means about this summer when King re-signed. (King has been available all season so far)

Like I posted earlier…what we (City) lost was the opportunity to sell on players for anything like their pre-covid value (let’s not get into how much we paid in the first place!). My view is much like yours - toughski shitski. A strategy based on boom-time was gonna go pear-shaped at some point, covid just hurried it. What is surprising is that the financial expert couldn’t see the flaw in that strategy. Revenues plateauing at £30m with costs growing fast and reliance on transfer profit was as Nige says “bonkers”.

I think Magnússon was still officially a City player in 2018.

No, I think he was after Nige.

It’s pretty amazing to have a Bristol City player at a WC.

Sowah was one of the Leicester players who played in Belgium who I wondered whether we might try and get on loan in Summer 21.

no

Great if you’re a ground hopper…and surely better (from memory) than England fans having to travel obscene distances between group matches in Russia and Brazil. Disagree with all the other shit going on, but a centralised WC seems fine to me. If you’re concerned about trouble, the threat of Qatar law would be enough to make me behave.

Just to add since the summer of 2021 we’ve effectively “had” (???) to let £20m+ of assets dwindle to nothing…because of covid. Not saying we would’ve got it all back on each player, but we might’ve and more in some cases.

I don’t think any of us disagree. However…(an example, theoretical - remember that) If you buy Tomas Kalas at market rate in 2019 at £8m, the theory is he’s worth £6m a year later, and if you wanted to sell him you could expect to get £6m back and everything squares off. If however Covid has meant clubs can only afford £2m, that’s a £4m hole…and in some ways probably means you keep hold of him. And by year 4 he’s worth £0. Everything is back aligned. We could have impaired him in the summer of 2021 when his asset value was £4 in line with: If we revalued him at £1m, that would’ve been a £3m impairment in that year’s accounts (counting against our P&L and therefore FFP) plus the £2m due that year, but amortisation of the final £1m, would’ve been £0.5m p.a. for the final 2 years. But he still costs us £8m over his 4 years, just instead of being 2+2+2+2, it’s 2+5+0.5+0.5. But it’s the cost of not being able to sell him that I think it being disputed by RG, Stoke, etc, whether that’s for a profit or not, rather than transfer profit itself. The plan was not to let him get to the end of year 4 and be zero value. I even agree with Mel Morris on this. The collapse of the transfer market has “forced us” to hang on to the likes of Kalas because there was no market to recoup his asset value. Tough shit you might say. I tend to agree, but it’s not black and white. But RG will argue that revaluing the asset value of all of our signings because of Covid is a bit unfair (whether that’s done through the accounts or via add-backs. I do have some sympathy…especially when City have a good record of moving on players to balance the books. If we ignore players wanting to better themselves, imagine keeping hold of peak Flint, Pack, Webster and Brownhill. (I’ve deliberately not named any Academy players, as although that is a similar argument, the treatment of those players in our books doesn’t incur any amortisation). We’ve recognised that our model relied on selling, and stuck to it, when you can bet the manager would’ve loved to have kept them. Finally, in our theoretical Kalas example, what if we sold him for £2m last summer, when under his new value he was just £0.5m in the books. We’d raise a “transfer profit” of £1.5m that would help towards FFP. I don’t think there was an easy way of being fair, winners and losers from both sides of the fence. We are paying for the way we previously “gambled”. I think the next post that came in whilst I was typing.. …sums it up nicely. But I don’t blame RG for trying!!!

Indeed, most businesses go bust as a result of lack of Cashflow rather than through losses. It is mad, but if you’ve got a wealthy benefactor you can play it to your advantage. When selling a player you can ask for more by offering nice payment terms. When buying a player you can discount by offering to pay it all up-front. Yep, allegedly: Weimann accepted a deal on half his “Ashton Wages” Baker accepted one considerably less than half, but weighted towards appearances

Because clubs (most clubs) don’t pay the transfer fee up-front!!!

Of course, but also worth referring to the Auditors comments too: Looks like we want everything to be above board.

I take heart that two other clubs (at least) - Forest and Stoke have put in accounts for earlier years than our early 2022 accounts and haven’t been “done”. Stoke would’ve breached 20/21 cycle without their £40m “impairment”, Forest are likely to have breached 21/22 without theirs. Nothing has happened to them has it? We are fine for both those cycles.

As we know, FFP compliance for the cycle ending May 2022 is achieved. if you plug the numbers in, that was achieved without resorting to using any Covid Allowances! So I can only assume that the comment above is referring to this current cycle.

And that is where we use “add-backs” and more than the basic £5m lost revenue in 20/21 to complete that swing / plug the gap. We know that without those two allowances we cannot comply with the £39m.

But the message we are getting from Gould is that we are compliant, so any sell doesn’t need to be done by the end of our financial year. The reason for selling a player is to trade. Currently we have no spare money to go into the market to improve the squad, so we are selling to create that headroom…not to comply with FFP. Even if that happens in January. Headroom will be created in the summer too as budget taken up by Kalas, Massengo, etc is released (wages and amortisation) either by them re-signing deals at 2023 wage levels or leaving. We either have Kalas on £x’000 p.w. or his replacement, for example. Of course Gould may tell us different in the coming days and weeks, but that isn’t the message he’s given out so far.

The point I was trying to make was about needing to bring those costs down, or increase revenue…£57m is too high for a £30m turnover club like City. Trying to work out the gap is fine, but without knowing which year we are applying the allowance to, makes projecting anything very difficult / impossible. I can only guess that we looked beyond the simple £7.5m (2 lots of £5m halved plus £2.5m) Covid allowance in terms of our lost revenue? There is a legitimate case that we lost far more than the £5m allowed in 19/20, so I assume we put our evidence in for that. And then we have the lost transfer revenue / add-backs. But again, trying to work that out, and what year each part falls into makes future estimates difficult. Seeing as we comply for the end of May 2022 cycle, you’d want to add that into the next cycle, as 22/23’s accounts will be used in three cycles and £28m isn’t a great starting point! I think he will go for a tidy sum, but not enough profit in it for us to end our financial woes…but anything is welcome. I’m sure it will be a profit percentage too. A couple of hundred thousand for Szmodics sell-on was all welcome in my book.

That’s where the covid revenue allowances and add-backs come in…they fill the projected “gap” over and above £39m. We cannot put a player sale into the wrong period, nor would be project something unlikely to happen. Kelly being sold in May was not the norm. Yep, £57m of costs shows we need to be more efficient. Wage bill for this season will be lower than just reported for last season, but not tonnes, O’Dowda and Palmer off the books as the high earners. Some of Moore’s wages saved. Amortisation will come down a couple of million. No more impairments. So that’s probably £3m better off. Little bit of transfer profit on McAllister and Szmodics. Little bit of money for Semenyo and Diedhiou from the WC. Currently averaging 20k crowds at home in the league too. So hopefully a bit of revenue uplift.

Good question, no idea…Sir Gerry?