Town chairman Mike O’Leary says the Blues’ accounts, which were released earlier this week, included no surprises given the plans which were put in place when Gamechanger 20 Ltd took over the club two years ago tomorrow.
The accounts for the year to June 2022 showed the club make a loss of £12.6 million, something that was wholly in line with expectations given the investment which has been made on and off the pitch.
"Let me take you all back two years,” chairman Mike O’Leary said at last night’s Fans’ Forum. "I remember saying right at the beginning that we’d done a study of the various areas that needed investment that we thought were important
"And we ranked them and we put together a plan that defined how much we thought we needed to invest over what time period. That played a part in listing all the things that we wanted to do, but also putting it into a budgetary process.
"At the beginning we had a budget that was very detailed, that covered the first three years and it included some variations which would alter that programme depending on which league we were in, because clearly in the Championship we would have different requirements from those that we might have in League One.
"Given all of that and given what’s happened, there are just no surprises at all in what’s been sighed off in the accounts for the year ending June 2022.
"There’s nothing in there that is particularly different from how we intended it to be at the beginning and we’ve got a long-term plan to build the club, to restore some of the investment that we thought was missing and that’s covering everything from the training ground to the turnstiles to the bars to the carpet in the Sir Bobby Robson Suite to the players.
"And the plan remains rock solid. No surprises in there at all. Very happy with the budget process that we’ve just been going through for next year again in detail. I wouldn’t be losing sleep over that if I were you.”
If Town were to go up, would the investment be sufficient for the Blues to be able to challenge towards the top of the Championship?
"I’ve tried putting padlocks on [manager] Kieran [McKenna]’s office door to keep him locked in,” O’Leary laughed. "We’ve covered a bit of that by talking about budgets and it boils down to budgets effectively.
"The planning we do is quite far looking and it’s incredibly detailed. I can’t remember the exact percentage difference from the budget that we achieved last year but it was single figures and it was very low, which is incredible really when you think about all the variables that we try to budget in our cost lines, which is difficult.
"But that we did and given that control and that degree of control, I think going forward really should be straightforward because we know well in advance what we’re going to spend, what we’re going to need to spend, we think about it a huge amount.
"Mark and his team literally go line by line through all the costs that we have and clearly playing is a big side of that, but it’s not all of it.
"We’ve had incredible costs just running the stadium this year, the UV lights that we have out on the pitch to help the grass to grow because we don’t get a lot of natural sunlight in there.
"After the electricity price hikes over the last year, the cost of running those is now something like £800,000 a year and that’s a staggering number. Hopefully we’ll see that reduced because [chief financial officer] Tom Ball has managed to do a deal with the local energy company that gives us a better rate going forward.
"Nevertheless, we’ve got that covered in the budget, we know where we are, I’m not really too worried about it.”