[spireitematt]

• Turnover increased from £6.34 million in the prior year to £7.4 million a rise of 16.7%. This is mainly due to an increase in gate and season ticket receipts, player sales (Liam Cooper and Eoin Doyle) and an increased conference and banqueting activity.
  

• The cash generated from the sale of players meant that the player budget was increased during the season to £1.8m, which was the 14th highest in the league. In total we spent just over £3m on the football side, including players, coaching staff, management and bonuses.
  
  
• This has led to an overall profit for the year of £84,879, compared against £1,069,818 loss the previous year.
  

• The final figure does not include the major player sales after the year end of Sam Clucas or Tendayi Darikwa.
  
  
  
• The net debt at June 30, 2015 was £8,181,728, which was an increase of £198,544 on the previous year.
  

[bluepooch]

I'm no accountant but how can we make a profit yet the debt increases ?

[spireitematt]

Also if we spent £3 million on squad and backroom staff and made a turnover of £7.4 million where's the £4.4 million gone?

[Devongone]

Debt isn't a static figure.

When our supporters attack DA they perhaps need to realise that the only reason the club is allowed to carry this level of debt is because he and the club have assets.

In real life we're a dead man walking.

[bluepooch]

But Dev surely the Dead man walking reference can apply to most football teams in England as most have significant debt.

[Dancingwilldoit]

Matts figure are quite a bit off the mark. Wages and NI were £4.4 million not just over £3mill. Apparently during the year we paid off an ex directors loan in full £85k and paid out £250k in interest on the remaining loans. We also paid money out for players (Clucas £80k). Dave Allen had to put in an extra £600k in loans during the year and other directors put in £25k. The rest went on stadium upkeep etc.
Interesting thing is that if it hadnt have been for the sale of Doyle and Cooper, our turnover last year would have been considerably down on the year before. Our operating costs were up considerably as a percentage.
You can see why players were sold this year. Dave Allen must regret ever having got involved with us.

[Devongone]

Pooch, you are quite right, most clubs are dead men walking. Most normal enterprises would be declared long-dead were they in the position of football clubs ....... but like countries themselves, football clubs are often too important to people to cease existing. How can most of the world's nations function when hugely in debt, and how do they manage to get further loans? Economics is seemingly happy with permanently shifting goalposts

I don't really understand tax arrangements, but I'm guessing involvement with us isn't all loss for DA. For a start having a town relying on you is good for your standing and your business, but there are also tax advantages to being involved with loss-making organisations if you also have profitable enterprises. So I doubt that DA really regrets his involvement, when you've got £35 million or so, you can afford expensive toys. And with his silver hair he looks like our chairman! We are lucky to have him!

Plymouth provided an excellent example of what can happen to a football club . When shit began to look like hitting the fan all the very rich men involved walked away with nary a scratch. Businesses around the club, who relied on trade with it, were left with the sole option of collecting less than one penny in every pound they were owed, and those who kept the club going by working for free for a year were left re-mortgaging their homes. Only the emergence of the very rich James Brent actually saved the club and many of the promises he made concerning development around the ground are yet to become reality. But the fact of his money makes the position sustainable ...... for now. So like the rest of us, they are for now only.

Dancing is right, financially we have to sell players. We can't hold out forever for better money, because £600,000 for a Doyle, or £1.2 million for a Clucas could represent massively more than they'll be worth again.

If we were enormously lucky a team we acquired for very little might gain us promotion, to a level where enough of the media money washing around might trickle down to us. We might produce a genuine star, and if we had acquired enough money to even look as though we might keep him, then the offers from the monied clubs would reach numbers we hadn't even heard of. And if by some miracle we could briefly reach the Premiership then like Burnley we might surprisingly find ourselves listed amongst the world's one hundred richest clubs.

But these our our dreams, and they are all that really underpins a football club like Chesterfield. We might, like Exeter, try to carry no debt, but our ground would look like theirs which in a thriving city struggles to attract a crowd of 4,000 ..... Their strategy is safer, but their dreams are smaller too.

[spireitematt]

http://www.chesterfield-fc.co.uk/news/ar...01624.aspx

So the debt has been paid back in full only to be transferred to DA. So the club has to pay back £2 million over a 10 year period at fixed rate of 5% interest.

Does anyone know how much the club is in debt in total?