Bleak, but only to a certain extent - the reduction in revenue is directly related to a drop in revenue from CL - this was known and it’ll bounce back up again this season to a point where we’ll likely be talking about record revenues this time next year.
It might shed some light on why the contract issues are ongoing - we likely aren’t able to “pay them what they want” and remain within FFP guidelines.
I’m sure
@Beamrider will be able to pick some holes in it - but it feels like a little bit of over-cooked sensationalist clickbait nonsense.
OK, I've taken a more detailed look at this now.
It's based on a report from a site called OffThePitch (no, me neither). They've done a "forecast" = made up some numbers, but they did some graphs so it must be genuine. They did this for lots of clubs.
In Euros.
Read that again, Euros. We don't work in Euros buddy, but yeah, reporting numbers in Euros makes them look worse.
The drop-off in revenue from CL to Europa looks to be in the right ball park and was expected.
The reference to travel costs? Seriously? Will add fuck all.
They have amortisation going from €122.6m to €147.2m. I have a detailed, line by line estimate of amortisation. My guess was within about £0.5m of the actual charge for 2023. I have amortisation as flat going into 2024.
They have wages going up despite sales of Fabinho, Milner, Henderson. They take no account of reduced wages for not being in the Champions League.
They make no mention of the Dynasty investment which was used to pay down bank debt, much of which will have come from funding the Annie Road expansion.
They say nothing about reduced transfer expenditure in recent years putting less strain on our cash flow.
There's no doubt that the 2024 figures won't make for great reading, but these guys are way off. Because they have done a sloppy job and haven't paid attention to detail. We'll make a loss for sure, but not on the scale reported.
What does it mean for FFP / PSR?
On FFP, we're on the football costs ratio for UEFA purposes. Because of the drop-off in revenue from no CL, the ratio for 2024 won't have been strong, but it will be below the target (which was a very generous 90% in 2023-24).
PSR won't be an issue. I reckon our adjusted PSR profits for the previous 2 years will have been around £40m+, so we'd need to lose over £145m in 2023-24 to be in trouble. Even these muppets aren't predicting that.
TLDR - bollocks, move on.
And please don't quote uninformed bollocks from the darker corners of the internet at me. Anything that isn't sourced from actual accounts needs to be ignored. Nobody knows who is earning what, except for the Club and the FA, and they won't be putting that info out anywhere. Even the accounts don't split out players and staff so you can't even get it in total. Ditto commercial revenue. You can make an informed stab at media and match day income (but not associated costs of delivery), everything else is pure guess work and should be treated as such.
