| Club | Points | Profit/Loss (mln. £s) |
|---|---|---|
| Manchester City | 423 | (254.67) |
| Liverpool | 407 | 145.98 |
| Tottenham | 363 | 57.02 |
| Chelsea | 351 | (345.23) |
| Manchester United | 348 | (187.44) |
| Arsenal | 335 | (199.13) |
| Leicester | 286 | (24.52) |
| Everton | 260 | (292.23) |
| West Ham | 240 | (52.23) |
| Southampton | 236 | (102.16) |
| Crystal Palace | 219 | (36.11) |
| Burnley | 188* | 79.83 |
| Newcastle | 170* | (19.41) |
*denotes only 4 seasons in the league
By which time that recruitment was several years overdue and we had to tighten our belts and go without fixing our long standing issues at CB. We keep having to put problems off to future seasons because we don’t have the money to fix them but then 18 months later, by which time everyone has forgotten the previous cautious stance, the books come out and there was more room to operate.
We’ve got a great recruitment team, they get a lot of bang for their buck. Other teams are shit at recruitment and therefore waste huge amounts and don’t achieve as much. How does that mean us spending more (with our recruitment team, not theirs) would be a negative?
I don’t understand your comment ‘by which time it can’t, because it is another accounting year’?
I think you maybe overstating the club’s profitability against that of it’s rivals. The club makes a small profit from its operations, the bulk of its profits being from player sales over the last few years. The club’s expenses have been increasing as we have been awarding higher contracts and bonuses.
If you look at Swiss Rambles September 2020 he shows that the club owes more in future transfer payments payable, than receivables, and the gap has been growing.
While other clubs are showing losses, a lot of that will probably be down to high levels of amortisation - they spend a lot more on players than we do, so they have large writedowns appearing for tax purposes. In reality that gives them much stronger cash flows than us.
The other clubs also have far larger cash balances than we do while running higher levels of debt - which is easier to do if you have higher cash flow.
To build a financial structure that can maintain a sustained challenge, it has to do so cautiously. Considering the club wasn’t expecting a pandemic, we’re probably lucky that they did.
I don’t think this is accurate. The club have attempted to fix issues within the squad through buying players but for one reason or another it hasn’t always proven successful.
Fabinho was bought in part because they felt he could play CB. He has said himself the club had him training to play in that position from when he arrived. Secondly, we know the club had several youngsters on the books that they wanted to give a pathway to the first team to, and we don’t know what other players the club had discussions with about joining (for example there were links to Kabak last summer).
In 2018 we brought in 3 midfielders (including Fabinho). Unfortunately, the other two have struggled with injuries for much of that time but unlike with Ox, I don’t think that could have been expected to have been an issue with Keita and Shaqiri for as long as it has.
We bought Minamino last season - unfortunately, while he has largely been remained fit he hasn’t worked his way into regular playing time.
You have absolutely no evidence that he has been denied the opportunity to sign players through his tenure.
The only thing you can point to is the way managers usually are.
You keep saying that there is no way Klopp wouldn’t have wanted to improve the squad faster. This is a manager who turned down a £35m signing in his first window because he wanted to see what he could do with the players he had at the club first.
Klopp has repeatedly said he doesn’t like the transfer market, he prefers to look for solutions already at the club, do his work on the training pitch, and his ideal summer is one in which there are no players in and no players out.
Your position is fundamentally a cowardly one. You think the club should have spent more money, moved faster, churned the squad more. That OK. It’s your opinion.
But you continually place the sole blame for this at FSGs door, concoct a fantasy about Klopp wanting to sign more players but not being allowed to, rather than accept he is very much part of the approach you disagree with.
So you kick at FSG as the sole custodians of LFCs approach and strategy, despite it accumulating a points total second only to Man City in that time (not by much), and being the only club in the league to become the European and World Champions.
And the irony is all it would have taken in that time would have been for club to be less brilliant in the transfer market - more willing to overpay for players, less able to extract mad fees out of clubs for our cast offs - for the whole pretext to you argument to fall apart. You are essentially criticising the club for being really, really well run.
Forgive me for thinking this is batshit.
If I were running City, United or Chelsea, I’d fire the respective recruitment teams for paying fortunes for what Liverpool accomplished at a substantial profit.
Interesting that AC Milan came knocking last year for some advice on how we conduct our business.
The reports of the demise of FFP may not have been premature!
Reports suggest that European football’s governing body UEFA are to scrap the Financial Fair Play (FFP) system that has been in effect for 10 years in favour of a new system of financial control in Europe that would allow more freedom for the richest clubs to spend big in the transfer market.
Respected Italian journalist Tancredi Palmeri, a correspondent for beIN Sport, tweeted: “UEFA (are) to blow final whistle over Financial Fair Play. It will be announced a new system of financial control that will leave much more freedom of spending to clubs”
I have no idea as to Palmeri’s reliability, but it wouldn’t surprise me if UEFA had thrown in the towel on FFP.
For clarification I spelled out what I meant when I used the term, to basically say it would be extending yourself in the transfer market a little more than you might have been comfortable with, in order to reap a mid to longer term reward. It would carry some risk, that’s the speculation part, but I believe the risk factor is greater if we do not have a good summer in the transfer market.
I wouldn’t advocate reckless gambling, at all. I also agree that the biggest upturn to our fortunes next season will be in getting injured players back.
The club has been run prudently and it has worked. No argument there, whatsoever.
Will the same sort of prudence be as effective, in the current moment, as we look to emerge from covid? It might, but I’m not so sure.
As we look ahead and plan for next season, I would advocate a temporary suspension of our normal business model to ensure we emerge from covid with momentum. The model that has worked to date might need a special temporary boost so we don’t lose ground.
It will be interesting to see what happens. I won’t complain if the owners carry on the same way throughout, but I do believe it will come with its own risk factors in this peculiar climate.
The effective application of FFP looked doomed to me the minute Man City defeated UEFA. I can’t remember all the details, but it’s all there on the record. Basically they didn’t cooperate, and then let the time limit expire, so the weightiest sanction could not be meted out.
It was an important fight, and UEFA lost it. From that moment on the die was cast.
I still don’t understand why UEFA can’t exclude whoever they want. Their competition, their rules.
Their rules weren’t good enough. Also, the CAS decision was batshit.
how is that even possible, that entities can lose that much money and still operate?
from a financial standpoint, this makes no sense to me. Not talking about oil money, but how do they stay afloat.
Because up until now you knew the money was coming in…
I think Newcastle could potentially struggle if they head down, won’t surprise me if we see some top clubs across Europe not come out of this.
some fat envelopes being floated around for that steaming pile of dogshit
Because the figures are probably measuring accounting profit, not necessarily true profitability. When a company invests in an asset, it can write off the cost of the asset spread over the life of that asset for tax purposes. For a footballer that is usually the length of his contract (i.e 5 years). So the clubs in that chart have probably spent heavily across a season or two on players or stadium/training development, which reduces their tax bills substantially and leaves them with lots of free cash flow to continue spending in future years.
Probably like how cable tv companies in the 80’s (or firms like Amazon and Netflix now) could run losses but keep expanding.
Although as @mattyhurst says the consistent growth in TV revenues has probably helped keep a lot of middling clubs afloat.
WOW! Talk about a cash infusion…
…into FSG.
The possible good side effect is FSG might be able to take any losses from last year and this year on the chin now. Let LFC spend what they make in the 2021/22 year (without having to use our revenue to recoup the previous losses) with revenues due to return practically to normal and fans due to be back in the grounds combined with the benefits of the Nike deal. That would allow us to have a good backing in the transfer window whilst still being self sustaining.