- Nov 24, 2013
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Bloody hell, I didn’t even consider the CL revenue. Pity they don’t do parachute payments.I think mug is a bit strong. It's quite common for long term capital commitments to have minimal impact on short term activity. Most of us here will have had experience of that with mortgages.
I believe the annual debt servicing has been reported at around 30-40m. The majority of that could have been covered by the naming rights (unlikely now!). The increase in revenues from the stadium were to be at least double that, so in reality we were better off than at WHL despite the scary looking debt figure. There was also the situation with the project that a lot of money was put down prior to the completion of the stadium. The loans were for £600-700m despite the cost being over £1bn. In many ways some of the austerity was front loaded.
I think there were merits to what Levy and Collecott were saying at the time. The outlay last summer was also significant.
That said this has also made us one of the worst hit by Covid-19 and playing games behind closed doors. We have a much higher % of turnover from matchday income than pretty much any other PL club I'd imagine, and are now probably 2nd behind Utd in debt repayments. Couple this with missing out on the CL windfall and it paints a pretty bleak picture.