Ouch! Is somebody in Bray covering these losses for them?
Back of the Business section in today's IT
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...328078796.html
Lost €170,000 last year, cumulative losses of €1.5m
Ouch! Is somebody in Bray covering these losses for them?
#NeverStopNotGivingUp
Latest accounts for League of Ireland minnows Bray Wanderers have just been dropped into the Companies Registration Office and they indicate that the club made a loss in 2011 of €170,000. It had accumulated losses of €1.5 million at the end of November 2011.
Do the accounts say how they are managing to fund those losses? They must be borrowing money from somewhere.
Absolutely no excuse for managing the club so badly. I genuinely believe heads should roll over this, but they won't.
I don't think that 'not managing the club so badly' needs to equal 'making a profit'. There may be acceptable and unacceptable levels of debt.
Simple maths?
Money spent<=Money earned
Have Longford made this sort of a loss? Have Waterford? Or Drogheda? Or Athlone? Then why should Bray be any different? If we're spending interest-free money from directors' gifts, fair enough. If we're making a loss equal to the entire club's gate receipts, and being expected to pay it back with interest, questions have to be asked.
Removing loans from Irish clubs books, are any club solvent? The FFP implementations are going to hit clubs hard, though I can see massive amounts of fudge from UEFA letting clubs away with all sorts. It just seems impossible that an Irish club can operate at break even without subscriptions and decent crowds, plus maximised sponsors, added to prize and tv money.
Sorry I should have clarified by saying run at their current level maybe.
Obviously they could only spend what they earn but you'd be supporting a middling first division club if they did.
It's a toughie. At least three of the four examples you mentioned have someone writing a cheque. The problem at Bray seems to be that you don't.
Irish football isn't solvent.
They do to an extent. They've cumulative losses of E1.5m (as per the article), but they've share capital of E800k and other reserves of E450k. So the directors (I assume) have bought E800k of shares to cover the losses, and have put in another E550k of loans to the club.
They have liabilities in excess of assets of over E250k, which I'm fairly sure was explicitly banned under licencing (unless you had a note from your mummy saying that it was ok this time). So potentially we're going to have another heap of fudge here while the FAI tell us how great licencing has been.
FFP will have absolutely no effect on Irish clubs, not even Limerick. As long as the clubs are tax compliant, which is already covered by existing legislation, Irish clubs will be subject to the exact same pressures they always have. Irish clubs aren't going to be losing much more than six figures, which is comfortably within FFP's acceptable parameters.
I think there's a E5m turnover limit as well, which completely removes all LoI clubs (bar Limerick of course) from FFP.
There would still be appetite to reform under a new name and keep the show on the road so I don't see what you are worried about.
My point is, there will always be a club for you to support so they might as well keep doing what they are doing.
At vrious stages, yes. All of them have. You can add Pats, Derry, Cork, Shels, Rovers, Bohs, Galway, Dundalk etc etc etc to that list too
I bet you not a single one* of them would hand back any of the trophies they won. Thats how being a football fan works. They might bitch and moan on the internet about things, but not one* of them would swap a couple of years in the doldrums and their titles for consistent mediocrity
I'm not saying its right. I'm saying football fans in the main care about results on the pitch more than financial stability, save for a couple of crackpots here
*Exageration for effect. A handful might.
54,321 sold - wws will never die - ***
---
New blog if anyone's interested - http://loihistory.wordpress.com/
LOI section on balls.ie - http://balls.ie/league-of-ireland/
Peadar1987 ‘’Absolutely no excuse for managing the club so badly. I genuinely believe heads should roll over this, but they won't’’
What the club will probably do is write back loans that Mr. Cox said had been written off into the P&L account and therefore able to show a profit.
A deal which I now believe to be null and void, where loans that directors gave to the club in good faith and were FORCED to write off by an individual who acquired 300,000 for €30 which is a transaction which is contrary to the clubs own Memorandum & Articles of Association which prevents shares being sold at below their face value. The same individual also indemnified the club from any legal costs in relation to that transaction.
It appears that it is in the best interests of the club for one individual to acquire his shares in this way but then decide that it is not in the best interests of the club for others to try and buy shares at face value.
It says so much about the club and the goings on behind the scenes.
Last edited by Dove; 24/12/2012 at 12:25 PM. Reason: typod
Bookmarks