Sundays game against Stoke is actually a bigger game for us financially than winning the Champions League.
Failing to win it would mean our TV revenue would fall from 50 million quid to 16 million quid.
I'm being conservative in estimating that other losses from gate receipts, sponsorship, corporate, merchandising & other related football revenue would fall by 6 million quid.
Would it be worth meeting Tony Pulis in a pub with a brown paper bag with 10 million in it to throw the match??
Seriously, 40 million quid is a serious amount of money for us to lose and that doesn't even take into account our trading losses running at 35mil & 26mil over the last 2 financial periods.
To get into line finacially if we go down, we will end up with a pub team.
So we have to win and with 444k/minute at stake versus Stoke, what bigger incentive could we have??
The 40 million quid game!!
posted on 9/5/12
445k per minute, just off the top of my head
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That wouldn't cover a months interest on Manyoos' debt!!
posted on 9/5/12
No pressure then!
posted on 9/5/12
Bricks - interesting figures, and I assume as accurate as you can get them.
It's effectively a play-off final (as the media like to say - richest match in football)!!!
One question though, in your OP, you say 'our trading losses running at 35mil & 26mil over the last 2 financial periods'.
Are they quarterly periods and is this a good trend????
posted on 9/5/12
Jul '09 - Jul '10, 35m
Jul '10 - Jul '11, 26m
Annual losses and improving and probably slightly better when this years figures come out but still frightening. I can't contemplate how we will manage to keep the losses under control with C'ship income.
posted on 9/5/12
Should be better, but agree it make very worrying reading for 2012-2013 if we go down. How the hell does a club make up a £34m drop in tv revenue!!!!
posted on 9/5/12
This is our biggest game since Boro,we are on a hiding to nothing but Coyle will take us down lads.This season has been a shambles and I am bloomin livid about it.
posted on 10/5/12
I am truly terrified about the financial consequences of relegation. If we are losing money hand over fist and getting deeper into debt with PL income, we are already living beyond our means. With Championship income, the situation would be completely unsustainable. There would be three ways to tackle it:
- sell players to make a one-off hole in the capital debt
- cut the wage bill, and probably that will require more than just losing the players who are sold. It will mean releasing people coming to the end of PL contracts and maybe redundancies in the off-field organisation ... just generally scaling down the status of the whole operation
- going into administration.
I know people hope that defaulting on debt would be less of a problem for us than other clubs because the main creditor could choose to be lenient and offer to reschedule. I don't know about that - Bricks, your explanation of the offshore comnpanies the other day was really helpful but I am still not convinced that Moonshift only handles family money and that ED has just lent us some of his stash as an alternative to putting it in the Halifax! My fear is still that the football debt could take Moonshift down because it has creditors of its own - it is really just an intermediate layer between the club and big financial interests. The reason I worry about that is because Moonshift has supposedly loaned the club more money than ED's reported total personal worth - it cannot just be his money. Hope I am wrong about that.
posted on 10/5/12
bricks...
can you make sense of this? sounds like Eddie has simply lent us money via moonshift, so instead of the debt being on BWFC its on moonshift - but its STILL eddies company... im confused.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-10/bolton-wanderers-loss-soars-to-35-million-pounds-as-player-costs-rise.html
posted on 10/5/12
Yes the problem is grave but perhaps not as bad as it could be. We have a lot of big earners out of contract in June and should we be relegated, you can imagine that most, if not all would be thanked for their service and politely shown the door.
OK, we would be relying on our current players who have contracts that aren't due to end and also the younger players who are coming through from the reserves, but as I understand the situation, that was in the master plan anyway.
The thing is, there is no point in worrying about the situation. I fully expect that Gartside will have a plan B and possibly Plan C.
posted on 10/5/12
Moonshift Investments is based in Bermuda where companies can trade anonymously with anonymous shareholders so there is always concern & speculation about these companies or in this case a trust.
As for 3rd party investors in this trust, I would be very suprised if there were any outside his family.
The loan is unsecured and Eddie has 96% of our shares so it would be a lot easier for him to raise funds by selling some of his shares than allowing some other person to lend us money through Moonshift.
It seems to me that Eddie is a control freak by buying shares way beyond the level required for control of the club and I would imagine he is the same with Moonshift as there are far easier ways of raising capital like securing a loan against the clubs assets.