Championship clubs are releasing their accounts for last season and the numbers don’t look good, but this is only one of the issues in the second tier.
To say that this season has been one of ups and downs for Queens Park Rangers would be putting things mildly. In the middle of October they were set fair, top of the EFL Championship under the management of Steven Gerrard’s former assistant Michael Beale; they’re now two places above the Championship’s relegation places and recently appointed Gareth Ainsworth as their third manager of the season.
Ainsworth might well already be forgiven wondering what he’s let himself in for at Loftus Road. On the pitch, his time as the club’s manager has started with little discernible improvement on what had preceded his arrival, with a 3-1 home defeat against Blackburn Rovers in his first game and a 3-1 defeat at relegation rivals Rotherham United in his second. It was Rangers’ fifth league defeat in a row and they’ve won just one of their last 18 games, a rotten spell that has seen them drop from third to 20th place in the table.
And then the accounts dropped. Published for the 2021/22 season, they made for grim reading. The club lost £24m, not that far short of half a million pounds a week, with almost £90m still owed in various loans and player transfer instalments, as well as an outstanding settlement over Financial Fair Play breaches. An increased playing staff accounted for a 10% increase in wage costs. And all these losses came despite the club increasing their turnover by 7% on the previous year.
Of course, Queens Park Rangers are far from the only club in the Championship in this sort of position. Indeed, although their position is without doubt precarious, they’re not in the worst shape, and by some distance. One such club in a worse predicament than QPR is Reading, who are reportedly sailing close to a second six-point deduction.
The club were deducted six points for breaching financial rules in 2021, with a further six-point deduction suspended until the end of the 2022/23 season, providing they hit targets outlined in a business plan agreed with the EFL. Such a punishment right now would drop Reading a point below QPR and into the middle of a relegation fight.
While Reading are at the extreme end of the scale, this type of financial oddness is all over the place. Clubs are losing money hand over fist, and we know where all this money is going. According to the Deloitte Annual…
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