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Town Made £7.6m Operating Loss in 2020/21
Thursday, 30th Jun 2022 12:28

Town made an operating loss of £7.6 million in the Covid-impacted 2020/21 season, the club’s accounts have revealed.

The accounts cover the year to the end of June 2021, the final 10 months of Marcus Evans’s ownership and the first two under Gamechanger 20 Ltd.

The show the club make a £7.6 million operating loss, down from £8.6 million in the previous season.

Turnover was down from £10.6 million to £8.1 million, while revenue was down £2.5 million.

With fans only present at two matches and then in a restricted crowd of 2,000, ticket revenue was down from £3.9 million the previous year to just £68,000. Average league attendance was just 174 having been 19,549 in 2019/20.

Total losses were down from £101 million to £9 million following Evans’s write-off of £96 million of debt as part of the takeover deal.

The group balance sheet shows a positive balance of £3.5 million compared with the negative £91.5 million the previous year.

The accounts show that Town received £1.5 million in Coronavirus job retention scheme grants with a number of employees, including some players, having been put on furlough during the pandemic. The club also received a Covid insurance payment of £2.5 million.

Season ticket holders received compensation of £2.6 million, while £207,000 from season ticket sales were donated back to the club.

The wage bill was £13.9 million - it had been £12.9 million in 2019/20 - with the club paying out £166 in wages for every £100 of income.

The Blues paid £764,000 for players while making sales of £2.26 million during the period covered. The latter will include the sale of Andre Dozzell to QPR among other deals, while the fees for Wes Burns, Vaclav Hladky and Rekeem Harper will be included in the former.

Since the period covered, the accounts state that the club has made player acquisitions totalling £2.85 million. With the £764,000 paid out in fees to June 2021, the Blues paid a total of £3.6 million during last summer's spending spree, which saw 19 players come into the club, and further deals in January.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire tweeted his brief assessment of Town’s accounts.


Photo: Matchday Images



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Marcus added 12:32 - Jun 30
Remember some of those numbers, they'll be in pub quizzes in a few years.
-1

ImAbeliever added 12:35 - Jun 30
Very good
0

JewellintheTown added 12:41 - Jun 30
While many understandably despised Evans and what he did to the club, there's no getting away from how much of a big financial hit he took and how much he wrote off. Many will argue about offsetting that debt and smokescreens, but its still a loss ultimately, even if its felt that its partly his own doing.
He could have burdened the club with so much worse at the end.
The guy seemed to have his heart and intentions in the right place but made bad calls, but has put us in a great place to rebuild with our new experienced team.
I for one will give him that much.
19

SamWhiteUK added 12:57 - Jun 30
Right-off?
1

tractorboybig added 13:03 - Jun 30
well the pension fund is working wonders for the members
-12

ArnieM added 13:13 - Jun 30
Ever heard of long term investment? That's anything over 10 years… or more .
2

RegencyBlue added 13:14 - Jun 30
Evans had no option but to right off the debt. Nobody was going to buy the club saddled with that figure, particularly given the amount of investment required to put right the years of mismanagement and cost cutting under Evans.

As for the debt figure itself, he bought £30 million plus at 0.20p in the pound when first taking over, sold the club for £40 million apparently and no doubt offset losses against profits from his other businesses.

I have no doubt he lost money, but nowhere near as much as some people think!
8

RegencyBlue added 13:15 - Jun 30
^^^

write!
2

trncbluearmy added 13:16 - Jun 30
How anyone has sympathy for Evans is beyond me,
his own incompetence cost him a fortune and nearly destroyed ITFC
10

peewee added 13:20 - Jun 30
Evans keeped the club afloat while the club bleed out. Lest the new lot know that we need a foundation and money spent to recover the money spent, it's a gamble like any business.
-2

ringwoodblue added 13:20 - Jun 30
Considering the pandemic situation at the time this is a reasonably good outcome and the loss will be small compared to lots of other clubs.
2

Gforce added 13:24 - Jun 30
Jewell.....Sorry marked you down by mistake.
0

Bazza8564 added 13:55 - Jun 30
These figures are already a year out of date and largely irrelevant now, especially with the overall wealth of our new backers and a vastly different regime running the club properly from top to bottom.

The Evans comments are interesting though, yes he presided over a disastrous period and left the infrastructure in an incredibly run down state, but I know for a fact that he is respected by the new board for having declined many offers to buy the club from parties ill equipped to restore it to its former self. And if people think that's BS i heard that from our very own chairman, face to face. And he confirmed that Evans did write off over £100m, irrespective of his earnings and assets elsewhere.

One thing I am sure of though is that have investors now and people running our club who have the experience and capability to transform its financial performance, which CAN ONLY be achieved by putting us back in the higher echelons of English football, something the old guard and his other would be suitors would not have been able to do

1

OliveR16 added 13:59 - Jun 30
I think Evans did treat us well at the end. But this would not have been necessary for him or us if he had led the Club in a much better way - it is a financial commentary on poor management. Just a year into the new owners and the difference is self-evident - and you could easily argue that they have more excuse for not understanding how to manage a British Football Club.
2

blues1 added 14:03 - Jun 30
Tractorboybig. What are you on about? We made an operating loss due to covid. Look at the amount lost from having to play behind closed doors. Nothing to do with the new ownership in reality. And if u bothered to read the whole story rather than just the headline ud see that despite the operating loss the accounts showed a profit rather than the loss of previous years.
4

trncbluearmy added 14:22 - Jun 30
He got some land and shares from the deal, deserves neither


2

BlueNomad added 14:36 - Jun 30
Think what our ticket revenue must have been over the past twelve months, and the next twelve to come. We must be in a very good place.
1

runningout added 14:44 - Jun 30
We as fans are doing our bit at the moment. Hope it continues through the inevitable ups and downs :-)
2

Fat_Boy_Tim added 15:34 - Jun 30
We will, if we go up, need to lose a hell of a lot more than that to get into the Prem. Under FFP I think Championship teams are allowed to lose about £30m on average per year over each 3 year period and in the main they nearly all do. The gamblers - Leicester/QPR/Bolton/Derby/Wednesday etc etc usually lose considerably more and exit one way or the other. It's going to get tougher.
2

OldFart71 added 15:36 - Jun 30
I'm sorry if in any way I don't sound grateful to M.E. for writing off a few mill. But he did manage to increase it from around £31 million to over £100 million and during his tenure he used more wool than all the sheep in Wales to pull over the fans eyes. How many times were player sold and no one brought in, or if they were they were sub standard. One M.E. had got through the initial couple of managers and McCarthy came along he was restricted to loans and to be fair to him made a pretty good job of it. The following managers all came and went and it wasn't just bad luck none were successful. Now apart from a 5% stake Evans is and will be viewed as a disaster to ITFC. We all look forward with a little more hope that those now in charge will bring about the success that the fans richly deserve.
3

PhilR added 22:14 - Jun 30
To my mind the problem with the Evans years was a series of poor managerial appointments together with serial misguided investment in the squad - which resulted in failure to achieve promotion, and years of trading losses which blunted Evans's appetite to follow his investment.
Ultimately he took a big financial hit, and I think worked hard to find a half decent exit for the club, which frankly was quite honourable.
The interesting thing from these numbers for me is the relatively small spend (£3.6m) for the large number of players we brought in last summer - and so far this summer we have taken on 4 new players I think without paying a fee - which doesn't quite square with the big spending view of our club out there in the media. Hopefully our new finances do have the scale to invest in 2 or 3 more really decent players who can make the difference this season.
1

Gforce added 10:28 - Jul 1
PhilR.....Spot on
0

Dog added 17:45 - Jul 2
Am i the only one on here who don't think the figures add up.
Evans wrote the debt off 10 months into the accounting period. The covid losses were covered by grant and furlough payment, yet we still run at a significant loss with salaries running at 166% of income.
We only purchased four players before june 30 last year.
I think this points to freebies only this year. Hope i am wrong.
Next years accounts will be the most interesting. If debt levels are the same then, i think we are in for much of the same under Evans.
0


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