Club Finances

TrevorAylottsHeadband

JonnyBiscuits The worry is that if they don’t pull it off and eventually decide it’s no longer worth the investment and pull out, what happens then?

Therein lies the rub. Football history is littered with owners who can afford to pump unsustainable sums into clubs, until they can’t. The problem then is that the cost base is structurally embedded into a club and becomes very very difficult to unpick. Soft debt has a habit of suddenly become very hard when the owner becomes unwilling or unable to carry on with the level of funding - for example, Brooks Mileson at Gretna.

One thing I would like to see from the new football regulator is a limit on the level of debt which can be carried on a club’s books, particularly in terms of directors’ loans. Anything over a certain amount (whether that’s a hard figure or percentage of turnover, I’m not sure) should be done through equity investment and not loans. That would ensure that clubs aren’t at risk when the taps get turned off.

brinyhoof

What are the Tim Williams rumours?

TrevorAylottsHeadband

brinyhoof There are two. One saying that he was sacked along with the Head of Finance (I believe this to be less likely), the other that he has been signed off with stress. Either way, his prolonged absence from the club has been noted…

brinyhoof

TrevorAylottsHeadband I guess the assumption would be that a sacking is announced formally so yeah, that seems unlikely.

If he is off ill then I wish him well. I suspect many won’t though.

brinyhoof

Only just read the oxvox email. Says “We will be chatting with Tim Williams on his return from flying out to meet our owners and taking a well earned holiday” so who knows the reality!

TrevorAylottsHeadband

That’s the same email which describes the financial issues as being down to a ‘young member of staff’. Carlos Power the (former) Head of Finance is mid-30s…

brinyhoof

TrevorAylottsHeadband could be referring to an admin person? But the head of finance has been sacked then?

JonnyBiscuits

The error probably was a relatively junior member of staff (junior in the organisational sense, I’m really not sure OxVox bringing their age into the conversation is fair or relevant - one of the most diligent and competent people I work with is 21 years old for example) but ultimately, given the severity of the sanctions for that kind of error, it’d be madness to allow responsibility for it to fall to a relatively inexperienced member of staff without appropriate checks in place. Which presumably is why - if true - the Head of Finance has been given the boot.

So I guess I’m not all that reassured by the line that this was a single admin error by an individual because I’m not really sure that ought to have been possible. However I am fairly relaxed that it’s probably not the kind of mistake that happens twice.

TrevorAylottsHeadband

The detail is all in the independent panel’s written judgement which is available on the EFL website. Basically, Sunderland sent the invoices to Vanessa Gomm, our club secretary, who then forwarded them on to Carlos Power. There were five invoices sent and not paid between 6th March and 7th June. It was only when Tim Williams was looped in on 7th June that the invoices got paid.

Decision

JonnyBiscuits

Fair enough. I’ll be honest I’ve already exhausted my interest levels in this story 😁

brinyhoof

https://www.oufc.co.uk/news/message-our-ceo

JonnyBiscuits

brinyhoof This is a reasonable update in general, but as always, pretty frustrating that it has come quite a long while after it was needed.

Clearly a few of the more hysterical rumours from those ITK around Williams’s absence (that he’d quit/been sacked for example) were - as always - miles away from the truth.

Not sure I’d be enormously satisfied with the low key explanation/apology for the season ticket fiasco if I was one of those new ST purchasers who’d been waiting for payday etc. to buy one so I hope they’ve had a better one-to-one customer services apology. I wonder if they’ve got a waiting list in case anybody doesn’t renew, as the deadline is today.

Eitther way, there’s also still not enough information on the ticketing section of the website to say something like “We’re sorry, but our season tickets for the coming season have sold out”. These are low priority issues, but yet another example of the lack of a coherent comms function at the club and/or just not having enough staff.

That said, 7k+ season ticket sales is fantastic, even though the prospect of 10k+ attendances every game brings me out in a cold sweat vis a vis matchday logisitics. It’s great news and more demonstration that we need that new stadium.

brinyhoof

JonnyBiscuits agree on all of this. Being ultra-forgiving, I guess summer communications are sketchy because people are on holiday? However, to be repeatedly triumphant about it being 25 YEARS SINCE WE WERE IN THE SECOND DIVISION surely means you then have to act like it?

TrevorAylottsHeadband

JonnyBiscuits That pretty much mirrors my thoughts. It felt like a) an attempt to quell rumours of TW’s absence and; b) a lot of stuff which should have already been on the website as news stories in their own right.

I’ve said it before and, no doubt, I’ll say it again, there is so much to be positive about the club at the moment, but they are letting themselves down on the communication side of things.