Football News: Wolverhampton Wanderers Accounts

Re. The Wolverhampton Wanderers Accounts. Basically there are 4 things to think about:
Turnover – Made up of 4 main categories tv rights, league distributions, commercial activities and gates.

Costs – Largely made up of wages and the impact of transfers, (see below) and
Transfers upon which we have less than perfect visibility and which impact in two ways;
a) The amortisation of the fees paid over the life of the contracts awarded and the profits on the sale of players sold both of which are taken through the profit and loss account

b) The cash paid / received either up front or deferred in which case it is accounted for in debtors and creditors on the balance sheet.

Clearly we can all read the numbers in the latest set of accounts, so what is more useful is to look at what the accounts for the year ending May 2023 might look like, as that is what will impact what we can / have to do this summer.

Turnover: Likely to be similar to this. TV and league distributions are likely to be at best unaltered as at present it would appear that we are unlikely to be have been on TV more or have finished higher up the league this year than last year.

Gates are modest and again won’t change much and sadly, commercial activities are also likely to be largely unchanged. (Commercial activities which have basically flat lined for several years now are Jeff’s greatest failure – astonishing given his impact on the team! – and compared to teams like Leicester who are now well ahead of us and moving forwards rapidly and Villa who despite having been in the league for less time than us have already caught us up – it is extremely disappointing. I hear about all our ventures into music, fashion and E-sports and am told that these will bring about untold wealth at some point but remain highly sceptical!).

Costs: The wage element is likely to be markedly higher both due to the changes in the squad and and the cost of removing Lage and his team. The amortisation of transfers element is much harder to quantify. We will have made large profits on the sales of Gibbs, White and Dendonker plus others perhaps even 40m+.

The amortisation of the pre existing squad, players here at May 2022, will also be much lower as much of the squad will be fully amortised but the new players will add markedly to that figure. A figure of 30m for the pre existing and £35m for the new players seems fair.

Net losses will be similar or slightly lower but losses there will be surely…