Craven Cottage Newsround

The second in a series of articles on Fulham’s Finances by b+w geezer:

Chris Coleman spent £11.9 million on transfers net of receipts during his second and third full seasons in charge – slightly more than Curbishley at Charlton.

During the same period, Blackburn and Bolton broke even on transfers – made very slight profits even.

All this is evident from the latest Annual Accounts for each club. These show the position for the year to 30 June 2006, with the equivalent figures from the previous year stated for comparison.

Fulham paid £10.45 million and received £0.85m from July 05 to June 06. So transfers cost £9.6 million overall. Those figures exclude signing-on fees, which are instead included in wages. But they do include transfer fee levies, agents’ fees and any other associated costs.

It does all add up without jiggery-pokery, but if you want to go through it for yourself, then see How £9.6 million is arrived at below.

In the previous set of accounts, Fulham’s net spend on transfers had been only £2.3 million. (6.6m paid, 4.3m received). If we therefore add 2.3m to 9.6m and divide by two we arrive at around £6 million as an average annual net spend in transfers for 2004-6.

By comparison, over the same two seasons, Charlton had an average net spend of £4.4m on player transfers, while Bolton had £0.3m average profit on transfers and Blackburn £0.4m profit. See `The small print’ below this post]

As will be explained in future articles, our £11.9 million overspend was money that could not be found out of operational income — all of which had already gone on other things unfortunately. Which meant….

(To be continued. This was the second in a series about the latest financial facts of Fulham in the context of rivals).

HOW £9.6 MILLION IS ARRIVED AT

The audited accounts for the year to 30 June 2006 state that the full cost of transfers came to £10.45 million while £0.85 million was received, hence a net cost of £9.6m.

The 0.85m bit is immediately plausible since the only players attracting fees during the period were Elvis Hammond and Darren Pratley. (Others were bought and sold in July/August 06)

But what of expenditure? Elrich and Droby arrived prior to the accounting period. As for the rest….

The two fees made public were Helguson, 1.1m and Bullard 2.5m. (Jimmy was registered on 16 May 06). As for the fees for Nic Jensen, Warner, Niemi and Brown, one has to estimate, but it’s hard to see how there would have been change out of 5.0m, raising the total to 8.6m.

The 5% transfer fee levy then raises the cost to £9m.

That would leave £1.45m or about 17% of the base transfer fees for the agents’ cuts. The previous season, in the Football League, agents took a fifty percent cut on transfers according to Deloitte. No-one’s suggesting the Prem would stand for that, but 10-20% (as estimated here) is plausible. Bullard’s agent above all would have expected a goodly reward for steering such a desirable property to us, at a bargain price, before any other club had a chance to muscle in. And while Elliott and Christenval arrived without any transfer payment as such, it wouldn’t surprise if the latter anyway had an agent.

The auditors have documents to go by for each transfer, but even if they didn’t you couldn’t make the gross amount much less than £10.45m without being unrealistic. [Well could you?] And remember that this doesn’t include signing-on fees to the player.

All this was just for a single year (the most recent for which figures are published) and it was a greater loss than previously. The average net spend on transfers for each of the two financial years 2004-6 was `only’ approximately £6 million. Charlton’s was £4.4m over that same period, while Blackburn and Bolton each made small transfer profits. (In case you were wondering, the former had similar and the latter had lower staff costs – more about that next time.)

THE SMALL PRINT

Information has been sourced from the latest annual accounts, to 30 June (or in Bolton’s case 2 July) 2006, as were recently lodged with Companies House. These can be downloaded by anyone for £1 each from http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/046b70ddecf833a93761334d9da24f43/wcframe?name=acc

The figures for annual profit or loss on player transfers can be found as follows:-

Fulham Football Leisure Ltd – Auditors’ Note 19 (page 26 on screen or 24 in print)

Blackburn Rovers Football and Athletic PLC – Auditors’ note 6 (page 21 on screen or 19 in print)

Bolton Wanderers Football & Athletic Company Limited – First item under `Operating Profit/(Loss)’, page 9 on screen or 7 in print.

Charlton Athletic plc – Auditors’ Note 22. (Page 31 on screen or 29 in print).

Bolton and Blackburn varied little between the two seasons.

Charlton’s two seasons differed considerably, but in the reverse order to Fulham’s. During 2004-5 they spent a net £9.1m on player transfers, but in 2005-6 they made a £0.4m profit. Hence £4.4m loss averaged over the two years.