At least nine richer English clubs than us...

[urban.spaceman]

19 minutes ago, Fox92 said:

Man City are well owned tbh. They've spent their money contributing to East Manchester and look around the ground now how they've got brand new training ground, women's ground and several pitches for development.

 

And they don't seem to chuck money around on silly players now. I know a couple of their signings have gone the wrong way (ie Rodwell) but most of their signings are very good and not that expensive. I don't think they've spent more than 70m, compared to Man Utd for example.

 

But points about money. Big clubs have always spent money. Fergie used to spend £20m-£30m on players 20 years ago and people seem to be quick to forget that.

Man City certainly like to pretend they don't spend big money on individual players but instead they'll happily spend £45m-55m on 4 or 5 players each, often in one window. (2016: Stones 50m, Sane 45m - always injured; 2017: Walker 50m, Mendy 50m, Laporte 56m - the latter two always injured; 2019: Cancelo 58m, always on the bench)

 

Fergie obviously spent a lot of money for that era but at least he did it on a basis of the club's earnings from winning everything. They were the first beneficiaries of the Premier League and the Sky deal but even then that came off the back of 8 years of preparations and the development of the class of 92. They'll fallen so far from that philosophy and there's 85m reasons why that's brilliant for us.

[urban.spaceman]

32 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

Rightly or wrongly, what other fans remember is that by the end of 2014, Leicester City had received approx £140 million in share capital and loans from the owners, and that under previous owners you had paid 2p in the pound towards the cost of the new stadium.  (Is that second part factually accurate?  It's certainly widely believed.)

 

I know Sean Dyche is widely mocked for mentioning (perhaps more than once!) that Leicester had financial advantages over Burnley, but it's undoubtedly true that they did.

Someone else will have to tackle to share capital and loans issues as I'm foggy on that. The stadium is an example of other fans ignorance towards us. We built it for just £32m but were thrown into financial chaos through no fault of our own. Yes we'd been relegated, but ITV Digital collapsed leaving a huge financial black hole that was beyond our control. We had players on Premier League wages who we couldn't play as well as two who played for free. Then Dennis Wise tried to sue us after we sacked him for assaulting another player. We went into administration and some people claim we weren't punished. They forget that there were no punishments for administration at that time. Even if there had been - the 10 point deduction would have still meant we'd be promoted by 1 clear point anyway. 

[NaijaFox]

Some of the provincial “lesser god” mentality on here. SMH

 

While insanely-wealthy clubs will always enjoy some advantage in attracting premium talent and thus theoretically building a better team, football does not necessarily work out as a direct correlation between the wealth table and the points table. Look at Arsenal, for instance, the healthier it’s balance sheet got, the poorer it seemed to get on the football pitch. We have a healthy enough balance sheet (and wealthy enough ownership, FFP notwithstanding) to attract and retain enough very good players to be in reasonably regular contention for a Top 6 finish and continental competition, so the notion of this (annually-fluctuating) chart putting our performance in the league thus far into some sort of “perspective” is defeatist.
 

Pretty soon, folks will be valuing accountants over players!

>

Edited 14 January 2020 by NaijaFox

[Muzzy_Larsson]

On 24/01/2019 at 16:48, AKCJ said:

Nothing to do with how much we're earning.

We just simply should be ahead of Wolves and Watford owing to the fact our squad is simply better than either of theirs. 

 

As you say, the apple cart is there to be upset but that doesn't mean we should just accept being behind teams we ought to be ahead of.

This is spot on.  If clubs finished in the league in order of budget then what's the point but that very rarely happens, when there is a small disparity in terms of budget anyway.  Obviously Man City and the likes are in another stratosphere in terms of budget and finance and it would be unrealistic and unfair to expect to consistently compete with them.  I'll caveat this with saying I haven't looked at the figures in any real depth but I can't imagine there is too much in it in terms of finance between clubs like Leicester, West Ham, Newcastle, Everton, etc.To accept any such club should finish ahead of you due to a greater budget of something like £10m is a cop out imo.  Any sporting advantage gained from say West Ham being circa £5m better off is absolutely negligible.

 

Given the vast wealth sloshing around the EPL in terms of TV money and the fact it accounts for most of clubs budgets means that bar slight variations it's pretty much a level playing field for all the clubs outside the traditional top 6 in terms of finance imo, the key is to how best to utilise the cash.  A lot of clubs are scattergun with it and pay way above the odds consistently for average players.

[Master Fox]

I’m sure a shirt sponsor would give us an extra £10-£20 million a season 

[urban fox]

1 hour ago, henrik_62 said:

This is spot on.  If clubs finished in the league in order of budget then what's the point but that very rarely happens, when there is a small disparity in terms of budget anyway.  Obviously Man City and the likes are in another stratosphere in terms of budget and finance and it would be unrealistic and unfair to expect to consistently compete with them.  I'll caveat this with saying I haven't looked at the figures in any real depth but I can't imagine there is too much in it in terms of finance between clubs like Leicester, West Ham, Newcastle, Everton, etc.To accept any such club should finish ahead of you due to a greater budget of something like £10m is a cop out imo.  Any sporting advantage gained from say West Ham being circa £5m better off is absolutely negligible.

 

Given the vast wealth sloshing around the EPL in terms of TV money and the fact it accounts for most of clubs budgets means that bar slight variations it's pretty much a level playing field for all the clubs outside the traditional top 6 in terms of finance imo, the key is to how best to utilise the cash.  A lot of clubs are scattergun with it and pay way above the odds consistently for average players.

It is mind boggling the amounts of money that is sloshing around in football these days. I agree that £5m-10m difference between clubs is nothing these days, its what you spend it on that counts. We like many other clubs have had some disasters in the transfer market, but generally we have been good at spotting talent and snapping them up while still relatively cheap, and in some cases selling on for a nice profit, to then fund the next round of buys. This is the way it should be done, not a scatter gun approach. However, with the massive inflation in prices recently (for which we have to shoulder some of the blame re Maguire sale) it is becoming increasingly important not to make mistakes.  When an average player is setting you back £20m+ these days, one or two "mistakes" that do not work out for whatever reason and you could find yourself in serious trouble.

Where the main effect of higher overall income levels that the "top 6" enjoy is the ability to pay much higher wages (except sours of course and look what a mess they are in with players running down contracts), which of course guarantees that they get the best players.  As you rightly say, most clubs vcan now finance the actual purchase price of all but the very tip echelon of players, but paying their wages is another matter.

[Chrysalis]

10 hours ago, urban.spaceman said:

Transfer spending in the 2013-14 season:

 

Kevin Phillips (Free)

Riyad Mahrez (£450,000)

yep our issue was always wages rather than transfer spend.

[Aus Fox]

7 minutes ago, Chrysalis said:

yep our issue was always wages rather than transfer spend.

To be fair when Pearson returned he tried to address this, from memory between him returning and us winning the league; Beckford, Mills, Peltier, Wellens, Gallagher, Marshall, Waghorn all left the club, I am sure there are more that I am forgetting too, but these players would have all been on high wages for the Championship at the time. 
 

[Chrysalis]

10 hours ago, dsr-burnley said:

Rightly or wrongly, what other fans remember is that by the end of 2014, Leicester City had received approx £140 million in share capital and loans from the owners, and that under previous owners you had paid 2p in the pound towards the cost of the new stadium.  (Is that second part factually accurate?  It's certainly widely believed.)

 

I know Sean Dyche is widely mocked for mentioning (perhaps more than once!) that Leicester had financial advantages over Burnley, but it's undoubtedly true that they did.

Do you believe it though, because we certainly did not pay 2p in the pound on the stadium, we brought it in the end for a lot more than its initial cost and on top of that paid rent for several years.

 

The myths from that era are staggering, people making stuff up just to draw hate to a club.

 

A quick estimate based on how much KP paid to buy the stadium, and what we paid in rent I would say we paid 50-60m for the stadium which had an initial cost of about 30m.

Edited 14 January 2020 by Chrysalis

[smudger63]

13 minutes ago, Chrysalis said:

Do you believe it though, because we certainly did not pay 2p in the pound on the stadium, we brought it in the end for a lot more than its initial cost and on top of that paid rent for several years.

 

The myths from that era are staggering, people making stuff up just to draw hate to a club.

Indeed, even after all these years, we still hear it, and yet they are basically coming out with stuff that they have no idea about in terms of what happened.

It`s often said that we went into administration to avoid paying our debts, and yet the truth is, we were trying everything we could to stay out of administration, and had struck deals with alll of the people we owed money too, except one, a football agent of a former player, who we had sacked for breaking the jaw of one of our other players during a pre saeson trip.

His agent refused to accept the offer we were putting to him, which of course he was entitled to do, but then threatened us with a winding up order, which then meant that we had to go into administration to protect the club.

The thing is, that 6 months later Ipswich Town went into administration, voluntarily or forced into it, they will know, i don`t, and still no points deductions in force at that time, and yet they never seem to get mentioned by other fans.

Another myth of the time, was and still is, that we kept all our best players, when we should have sold them to help pay off the debts, but the truth is, we actually sold Robbie Savage, Gary Rowett, and also against what he wanted, Matt Piper.

All our players were up for transfer, Muzzy Izzett for instance had talks with Villa, but chose to stay here.

We were actually trying to offload players!

We could only sell if a club came in with an offer and the player chose to leave.

As you have stated, we certainly did not pay 2p in the pound on the stadium, i`ve even heard fans of other clubs saying that we got the ground for nothing, when actually we paid a significant rent on the stadium for a number of years before the owners bought it, for alot more than what it would have cost us.

Neil Warnock, who was with Sheffield United, one of our promotion rivals that season, was constantly coming out with nonsense about us having an unfair advantage, and stuff like that all season long, and i think some of these myths are actually what people were hearing and believing from him!

He was one of those who said that the least we should have got was a points deduction, but as the points deduction when they brought it in was 10 points, we would still have been promoted anyway.

Finally and ironically, given the state of them now, the Bolton Chairman of the time Phil Gartside,who`s  Bolton sat happily in the money trough that is the premier league at the time, said Leicesterr should have been chucked out of the football league altogether for the financial mismanagement, and then a few years later, was suddenly all for a premier league 2, because of the pitfalls of getting relegated from the premier league with players still on premier league money, and not being able to get rid of them, and the financial pressure it put on the relegated clubs.

He obviously seen it from the other side once it was his club that was having to deal with it!

 

[Wolfox]

On 24/01/2019 at 15:07, SheppyFox said:

Not really where we should be, we’re basically a top European force that is underachieving because of poor management, we’re a sleeping giant and we’ll be challenging for the title soon enough once Puel is dismissed. 

Almost prophetic…

[st albans fox]

4 hours ago, Wolfox said:

Almost prophetic…

Almost the right word 😂😂😂
 

don’t  be sad sheppy .... it was an open goal .....

Edited 15 January 2020 by st albans fox

[dsr-burnley]

13 hours ago, Chrysalis said:

Do you believe it though, because we certainly did not pay 2p in the pound on the stadium, we brought it in the end for a lot more than its initial cost and on top of that paid rent for several years.

 

The myths from that era are staggering, people making stuff up just to draw hate to a club.

 

A quick estimate based on how much KP paid to buy the stadium, and what we paid in rent I would say we paid 50-60m for the stadium which had an initial cost of about 30m.

That's the point - I don't know.  I have been told that the admin deal was 2p in the pound for all creditors, and I've been told that the new owners paid all the debts in full even though there was no legal obligation to, and I have little idea whether either or both is true.

 

Was the stadium sold to a third party, then?  Who did you pay the rent to - the builders if they claimed it back for unpaid debts?  The banks who took it in lieu of mortgage?  (That sounds the more likely.)

[st albans fox]

45 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

That's the point - I don't know.  I have been told that the admin deal was 2p in the pound for all creditors, and I've been told that the new owners paid all the debts in full even though there was no legal obligation to, and I have little idea whether either or both is true.

 

Was the stadium sold to a third party, then?  Who did you pay the rent to - the builders if they claimed it back for unpaid debts?  The banks who took it in lieu of mortgage?  (That sounds the more likely.)

was owned by 'Teachers', a USA pension fund as i recall (not the scotch)

[Spudulike]

Sadly, the one thing they couldn't buy back was the hotel plot outside (now Holiday Inn Express) which is a shame as King Power would've done a superb job on it. 

[bmt]

19 hours ago, smudger63 said:

Indeed, even after all these years, we still hear it, and yet they are basically coming out with stuff that they have no idea about in terms of what happened.

It`s often said that we went into administration to avoid paying our debts, and yet the truth is, we were trying everything we could to stay out of administration, and had struck deals with alll of the people we owed money too, except one, a football agent of a former player, who we had sacked for breaking the jaw of one of our other players during a pre saeson trip.

His agent refused to accept the offer we were putting to him, which of course he was entitled to do, but then threatened us with a winding up order, which then meant that we had to go into administration to protect the club.

The thing is, that 6 months later Ipswich Town went into administration, voluntarily or forced into it, they will know, i don`t, and still no points deductions in force at that time, and yet they never seem to get mentioned by other fans.

Another myth of the time, was and still is, that we kept all our best players, when we should have sold them to help pay off the debts, but the truth is, we actually sold Robbie Savage, Gary Rowett, and also against what he wanted, Matt Piper.

All our players were up for transfer, Muzzy Izzett for instance had talks with Villa, but chose to stay here.

We were actually trying to offload players!

We could only sell if a club came in with an offer and the player chose to leave.

As you have stated, we certainly did not pay 2p in the pound on the stadium, i`ve even heard fans of other clubs saying that we got the ground for nothing, when actually we paid a significant rent on the stadium for a number of years before the owners bought it, for alot more than what it would have cost us.

Neil Warnock, who was with Sheffield United, one of our promotion rivals that season, was constantly coming out with nonsense about us having an unfair advantage, and stuff like that all season long, and i think some of these myths are actually what people were hearing and believing from him!

He was one of those who said that the least we should have got was a points deduction, but as the points deduction when they brought it in was 10 points, we would still have been promoted anyway.

Finally and ironically, given the state of them now, the Bolton Chairman of the time Phil Gartside,who`s  Bolton sat happily in the money trough that is the premier league at the time, said Leicesterr should have been chucked out of the football league altogether for the financial mismanagement, and then a few years later, was suddenly all for a premier league 2, because of the pitfalls of getting relegated from the premier league with players still on premier league money, and not being able to get rid of them, and the financial pressure it put on the relegated clubs.

He obviously seen it from the other side once it was his club that was having to deal with it!

 

Good post, was too young to know/remember some of this.

[tylesta]

On 14/01/2020 at 13:25, dsr-burnley said:

Rightly or wrongly, what other fans remember is that by the end of 2014, Leicester City had received approx £140 million in share capital and loans from the owners, and that under previous owners you had paid 2p in the pound towards the cost of the new stadium.  (Is that second part factually accurate?  It's certainly widely believed.)

 

I know Sean Dyche is widely mocked for mentioning (perhaps more than once!) that Leicester had financial advantages over Burnley, but it's undoubtedly true that they did.

I think our squad that day cost no more than 10 million that's including subs

[grobyfox1990]

On 24/01/2019 at 17:13, Foxy-Lady said:

Just to add a little perspective, you do realise that if we increased our capacity by 20k and we sold EVERY ticket for EVERY game @£30 avg per ticket, it would only add an additional £13-15m per annum which is effectively the annual wage bill for another 2 high earning stars in todays PL.

Increasing the stadium capacity is NOT necessarily the answer it once used to be in terms of increased profitability.  In todays PL era, annual expenditure on players salaries account for >70% of the Total revenue from ALL income streams for most PL clubs so the additional £15m we MIGHT see from increased stadium capacity(assuming we sell EVERY ticket) would soon be swallowed up.....before we even start to consider the capital interest cost of any funding loans

 

.....And if we want to qualify for European football to boost our income as we did 3 years ago, we might need to invest very heavily in transfer fees and player salaries to recruit higher calibre players to boost our chances of breaking into the Top6. 

 

Which investment would you suggest should be prioritised......player recruitment or the increased stadium capacity?

It's the hospitality section that would bring money in. In an expansion i'm sure there would be a large amount of hospitality, which would sell out every game at far far more than £30 a game. This is why Chelsea are so desperate to expand and why Spurs have expanded (with a huge amount of corporate seats). Looking at the analysis, Spurs will stay at the top table for a long time, even if they don't qualify for the champions league, because of the huge boost in matchday revenue they now get. To me, expanding the ground must be a priority to take the next step.

 

Also this table is based on revenue, not profitability, so wages, transfer fees etc don't come into it when looking at this table alone.

[filbertway]

6 hours ago, tylesta said:

I think our squad that day cost no more than 10 million that's including subs

How about the wages?

[urban.spaceman]

16 minutes ago, filbertway said:

How about the wages?

Still very low. When Pearson came back we'd allowed Sven to splash the cash and pay players well over the odds for a mid table Championship club. So Pearson and Walsh were left with the task of getting rid of those players, starting off with a blank slate and bringing in players who wouldn't cost as much and wouldn't have high wage demands. 

[tylesta]

1 hour ago, filbertway said:

How about the wages?

Many pound notes I'm led to believe 

[filbertway]

2 hours ago, urban.spaceman said:

Still very low. When Pearson came back we'd allowed Sven to splash the cash and pay players well over the odds for a mid table Championship club. So Pearson and Walsh were left with the task of getting rid of those players, starting off with a blank slate and bringing in players who wouldn't cost as much and wouldn't have high wage demands. 

Any figures or is this you making an educated guess? I was always under the impression we still spent quite highly on wages in comparison to others in the league.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/mar/05/wage-bills-leicester-city-nottingham-forest-losses

 

[st albans fox]

5 hours ago, grobyfox1990 said:

It's the hospitality section that would bring money in. In an expansion i'm sure there would be a large amount of hospitality, which would sell out every game at far far more than £30 a game. This is why Chelsea are so desperate to expand and why Spurs have expanded (with a huge amount of corporate seats). Looking at the analysis, Spurs will stay at the top table for a long time, even if they don't qualify for the champions league, because of the huge boost in matchday revenue they now get. To me, expanding the ground must be a priority to take the next step.

 

Also this table is based on revenue, not profitability, so wages, transfer fees etc don't come into it when looking at this table alone.

Spurs match day income at old WHL was £45/annum

 

new stadium is £100m/annum

 

Increase in seats approx 24k.

 

 

[urban.spaceman]

55 minutes ago, filbertway said:

Any figures or is this you making an educated guess? I was always under the impression we still spent quite highly on wages in comparison to others in the league.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/mar/05/wage-bills-leicester-city-nottingham-forest-losses

Educated guess mainly - but the article you shared points out that the wage bill issue was from 2012-13 season, which was when we still had a lot of players on the books that were on high wages and Nige was trying to get rid of as many as he could. Plenty of players around that time kept getting loaned out or sold, and we had no choice but to scout properly and spend very little. Hence bargains like Vardy for £1m, Wood for the same amount, Knocky for £800k and 4 Man Utd academy graduates in one window - De Laet and James for £1m each, and Lingard and Keane on loan, not forgetting Kane on loan too. Worth noting too that by the time the rules had come into effect, we'd already broken them.

 

I found this bit quite interesting in retrospect:

 

 

FFP still isn't really fit for purpose, seeing as so many clubs have no choice but to fall foul of it. We lost £13m more than was allowable in 13/14, but we rightfully argued with the EFL for 4 until finally agreeing: “In reaching the settlement, the EFL acknowledges that the club did not make any deliberate attempt to infringe the rules or to deceive and that the dispute arose out of genuine differences of interpretation of the rules between the parties.” 

Edited 16 January 2020 by urban.spaceman

[dsr-burnley]

1 hour ago, filbertway said:

Any figures or is this you making an educated guess? I was always under the impression we still spent quite highly on wages in comparison to others in the league.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/mar/05/wage-bills-leicester-city-nottingham-forest-losses

 

Leicester's wage bill in 2013-14 was £26.9m plus £9.4m promotion bonuses.

Burnley's wage bill in 2013-14 was £15.4m plus £6.1m promotion bonuses.

Nottingham Forest was £27.2m.

 

Edited 16 January 2020 by dsr-burnley