I threatened to do it, so here it is...
Everyone loves "Blue" Bill Kenwright...
As an example of the fantasy land that English Premier League football lives in take my club Everton. No. please, take it, it'll only cost you about £10.58. Seriously though to say that the oldest club in Liverpool is ascloseasthis to going down the swanee is an understatement, and goes curiously unreported in the press. If Everton Football Club Ltd were a "normal" trading company panic buttons would be hit with some force, but since when has football lived in the real world? I suppose that because there must be at least half the EPL in a similar position makes The Toffees plight un-newsworthy.
This week Everton sold their current best player Steven Pienaar to Spurs for around £2.5M. In the last close season our then best player Mikel Arteta was awarded a new contract at £75K per week, smashing the club's previously rigorously enforced wage structure in the process, and "Peanuts" left because quite rightly, and leaving aside the ridiculous sums being paid, he felt he should be on a financial par with Arteta, as on this season's performances Pienaar has easily our-performed the Spaniard who has been strangely subdued since bloating his bank balance. Although it is thought he was offered an improved contract, it was not on a par with Arteta's and the prospect of a pay rise and Champion's League football at Spurs was too much to resist. I do not blame him and good luck to him, he has served us well since arriving from Borussia Dortmund in 2007.
The only striker we have who has a past proven capability of regularly scoring goals has been loaned out to Championship side Leicester City with an option to buy in May, as rumour has it to get his wages off the books. Another striker will probably be loaned to Celtic for the rest of the season. The only logical explanation for this is again, to get the wage bill down. It certainly makes no sense from a football perspective.
In the last umpteen transfer windows we have made either a negative or very small net spend, with around £6M net spent on players in the year to 31st May 2009, the last year for which accounts are available. Other clubs with a similar debt level to ours manage to continually sign new payers yet we struggle to even obtain loanees as we cannot afford the associated fees. We are now most definitely a selling club, selling a top player every now and then simply to balance the books. For a club that has come very close to breaking the top four glass ceiling on a number of occasions this is mighty disappointing from a fan's perspective. "Who will be going next?" - that's the question on fans' lips now. Actually "balance the books" is an exaggeration, it's more like to make the books look slightly less bleak.
A cursory look at Companies House website shows Everton Football Club Limited currently have listed forty seven (!) Particulars Of A Mortgage Or Charge (basically notifications of assets being secured against loans). How many of these are still outstanding is not known, but it gives some indication as to where the club's income is going, namely loan repayments and financing loan interest. Virtually everything the club own, including future revenue streams from season ticket sales and television money is in hock.
The company is unusually late filing its 31st May 2010 accounts at Companies House, and has until 28th February to do so without incurring a penalty. It could be that the delay is down to the auditors asking for a plan to show how the company intends to remain trading for more than the following twelve months, which is a duty of the appointed number crunchers, and until they are satisfied with the club's answers will not sign the accounts off.
Looking at the 31st May 2009 accounts may give some clue as to the company's plight. On a turnover of almost £80M, 61% (!) of which comes from TV money, £49M was paid out in wages and the accounts show a loss for the year of £7M. The total amount of monies owed was nearly £79M (fig A), coincidentally almost the same as the turnover. The total of fixed assets (mainly the wonderful but seriously dilapidated stadium) plus intangible assets (mainly player's registrations) plus monies owed to the club was nearly £54M (fig B). If you subtract A from B you can see that the club has a balance sheet value of minus £25M. Says it all really.
On the same day as Peanuts went to Spurs, Aston Villa, a club of similar size if slightly inferior history to Everton splashed out £18M on striker Darren Bent, a position Everton would love to fill but are financially unable to. The disparity in the two clubs access to funds could not be more starkly highlighted, Of all the new breed of owners Villa's Randy Lerner is probably the most respected, and why Blue Bill in his much trumpeted (by him) "24/7" hunt for new owners or investors with clout has not found anyone since becoming the second largest shareholder in 1999 and subsequently becoming the largest single shareholder now with just over 25% of the shares remains a mystery; especially when the likes of Blackburn, Sunderland, Villa, Manchester City and numerous others of lesser tradition have had no problem in finding new owners. One suspects Bill's various share acquisitions in Everton over the years since he first became a director in 1984 were at least partly financed by his mega rich friend Sir Philip Green who although never a director or shareholder at Everton seems to be pulling the strings through his connection on the board, Robert Earl a known Kenwright ally. Earl at 31st May 2009 owned just over 23% of the shares and Sir Philip Carter, long time club servant owns just over 2% of the shares, so together with Bill these three make up a majority. This is all speculation but my guess is Green will not let Bill sell until his private loan is repaid, with interest. Ironically, Green, being Jewish is naturally enough a Spurs fan, and I think Earl might be too.
Until Bill is in a position to sell his beloved train set, even if only to someone or business that will only clear the debts à la Liverpool then the best the long suffering fans can hope for is mid table water treading and the worst does not bear contemplation. With David Moyes publicly stating that he has not enjoyed the last four or five transfer windows as they have "been difficult for us" is also a worrying sign, given that Moyes is very loyal to his chairman, and this kind of language from him, a man of Presbyterian understatement, is quite alarming.
To end on a more positive note, the money from Pienaar's sale seems to have been used to secure new contracts for the impressive Seamus Coleman and the not so impressive Victor Anichebe, and the loan signing of defender Eric Dier from Sporting Lisbon, who is eligible for dual Portuguese/British nationality.
The only way is....sideways?
Footnote - today's draw with bottom of the table West Ham shows us to be without a leader on the pitch, and our one attacking outlet down the left has gone. We are an average team with an over cautious manager. We will stay up this season, but things need to change, both on and off the pitch.
No comments:
Post a Comment