League 1 Finances - plenty to peruse here | Page 3 | Vital Football

League 1 Finances - plenty to peruse here

No, football, sport, is completely unlike a regular business

For a start, regular business is not a zero-sum game. Markets are elastic, sport is not, each week there is a result and an updated table of winners and losers.

Good businesses know that if they position the right products at the right price and have them available then they will sell them. Costs can be predicted and controlled.

None of this is possible in football. If you predict your income conservatively and budget accordingly you will straight away be priced out of the market for players. You will then have to get lucky, because in football there is a very limited pool of available talent. In general business practice most people are just doing a job, the pool of labour is large.

I'd ask you to tell me any football clubs that regularly make money? In fact, I'll help you out: Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, Barcelona. That's it. Finished. Finito. There is no football club, other than those giant institutions, that makes money.

Peterborough I've always thought of as a club that makes the best of itself, buying players cheap and selling them dear. As of 2017 Peterborough United was technically invsolvent with a 1.4m loss that year and accumulated losses of over £11m. Reliant on loans from its Chairman.

I'll wager his actual business is not run in that way. And nor, I would say is the furniture business run by Notts County's owner.
so the obvious reason all the other clubs are aiming for the top, as you mentioned previously, is not the probability of huge debt. but to emulate the teams you have just mentioned. and find a place where it seems that a football club can become immune to the zero-sum game. and evolve into a giant business [or giant institution if you prefer] that regularly makes money within football, sport.

with the tv money-financial backing-global reach of football, i suppose man city, tottenham, liverpool are poised to join them in the next decade, or sooner.
 
with the tv money-financial backing-global reach of football, i suppose man city, tottenham, liverpool are poised to join them in the next decade, or sooner.

I don't even know if that's possible while actual competition remains.

Manchester United's profitability has actually taken a hit in its desperation to regain its place at the top of English football. Any time in the last 20 years you would have mentioned Arsenal, but they've slipped away. When the Premier League was formed, Everton were one of the "big" clubs demanding it.

It doesn't matter how much money is poured into football by TV, that money will end up in the hands of players and their entourages.

And for all the alleged wealth, it just means there will be more Aston Villas.
 
What do you think happened when Nates came in? That’s exactly how we got the Cowley’s, Woody, Habergham and Raggett.
We’re just very lucky that the investment payed off very well for Mr Nates with the cup run allowing us to become self sustaining for a little bit rather than rely on him.
Possibly to a point, but Woodward and Habergham came from a PT background.

R.e. Raggett, we sold Margetts, just like we sold Robinson and bought Whitehouse albeit a slight overlap in those deals.
 
This is why despite the short term gain I'm not sure I would want a huge injection of money into Lincoln, the what happens when it dries up question. Big clubs have an advantage that attracting another investor is relatively easy, not so with Lincoln.
In an ideal world, you'd want to see the money into the Club via shares and going into assets off the pitch as well as on it. Nothing wrong with huge amounts coming in if it's building the Club as well.

Peter Swann gets a bit of stick on here, but when he left Trinity, he left enough money there to cover all the player contracts signed under his Chairmanship. Bit of a wake-up call for them the following summer, no doubt, but at least he didn't pull the plug completely.