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The financial year was our second season in the PL where we made an operating profit of £9m but incurred a debt of £45m. The key point is that our TV income fell from £100m to around £45m. The cut in wages will have covered some of that, quite a bit of it, I’d hope but until last season’s accounts are issued we won’t know exactly how much.
We benefited from having supporters back in the ground but unfortunately lost some of that in having to pay off Slav and his team.
Any overall shortfall and the cost of bringing in the loan players and Guediora will have been covered by the sale of Ramsdale.
This season we’ll take a hit of around £10m to our parachute payments. As you’ve said, a lot of this will be covered by getting the likes of Mouse, Freeman etc off the books. We can now add Burke to that and we might have even got a small fee.
My take is that there is likely to be a shortfall between our total expenses and our total income, the extent of which will be dependent on how much we’re reducing our debts by (because we’ll struggle to service any debts if we don’t go up and the parachute payments stop). I think that, in order to bring players in, we’ll probably have to sell a player for a reasonable amount, £10m+. That’s most likely to be Berge.
For the record, I’d rather we didn’t. He’s a good player but in my head, I’m resigned to him going.