WWFC 2022/23 Accounts
The WWFC accounts to 30 June 2023 are now available at Companies House.
Net liabilities are up from £1.45m to £3.8m. There's a comment that integral to the accounts being prepared on a going concern basis is additional investment having been secured in the post-accounts period.
There's not a huge amount of detail in the accounts (and I'm not an accountant) but 'Other creditors' increasing from £2.57m to £4.17m presumably reflects the money lent to the club by the Couhigs (via Feliciana).
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The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.
Thread here with bit more info
https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire/status/1770709160528658797?t=ZnIPrBYBhSeS8pBnCB-SHA&s=19
Wouldn't it relate to the charge by Lomtadze? Surely that is only needed because we borrowed from him?
The Lomtadze charge is on Feliciana not the club, and was after the period end. Presumably this relates to the additional investment after period end mentioned.
I suspect the impact of that investment would be to move a chunk of the creditors from ‘due within one year’ to ‘due after one year’ - in other words Feliciana will have used Lomtadze’s funds to lend to WWFC on a longer term basis to pay off shorter term obligations.
Gotcha, thanks
Very sustainable
No real surprises here with the club losing £2.96M last season. Derby posted losses of £10.6M for the same season.
Football is broken.
I assume this loss would have been much larger if it wasn't for the compensation for Gareth Ainsworth to QPR and the Mehmeti to Bristol City fee?
Loss of £3m after (as poster above says) transfer money received for Mehmeti (around £1m?) and Ainsworth. All of this money appears to have been paid. This overall performance is worse than the previous year (loss £2.5m)
The losses appear to have been funded by a reduction in amounts owed to the club of £0.75m (did we have a transfer sale at the end of the 2022 season ), share holder debt of £1.7m I(accounted for as less than one year but a largely meaningless distinction) and £0.6m invested in as shares (presumably when the Trust was diluted from 25% to 10%.
Dreadful figures but in line with expectations sadly.
Does the above also encompass the Derby compensation? I don’t recall that being included in the prior year accounts. That would make the underlying loss even worse.
Rob Couhig and his senior leadership team remain fully committed to fulfilling the club’s ambitions of achieving Championship football, financial sustainability and improved facilities at both its Adams Park home and Marlow Road training base.
Source: WWT
With a cut in playing budget (widely reported, not really substantiated) it is interesting. Does the P and L show a drop in wages?
There is no published P+L and the rumoured budget cuts take effect from this season whereas the accounts are for last year.
Hang on...we've got £10 -25 million. All these numbers are chicken feed.
After hearing Rob on the ‘Heroes’ pod I retract most of my sniffy comments about the Bearwood deal. That said I still don’t understand how he/felicia could afford to own it and maintain it. He said it didn’t make money for Reading.
I can see the argument that we need a better training facility than one that is unuseable for large parts of the year and possibly contributes to injuries. I can see a well established Championship club making good use of a Bearwood.
What I don’t see is how we become Rob’s vision of a sustainable club without spending much more money than Rob and Felicia have. Enter ML?
I’m probably naive but perhaps a club that can sell out a 15,000 seat ground every week and brings in revenue from using the ground for many other events (gigs, internationals, conferences and so on); revenue from decent merch and food sales; revenue from an academy and so on could break even year on year paying the wages of a squad good enough for mid table?
I guess if money was no object we could be that club, but the investment in time, never mind cash, would surely be huge. Add capacity to AP and an access road or break the lease to FALL and build a new ground, play for years in the championship to increase the home support season by season, buy the players every year to enable that, find that training and academy facility. How much does that run to? How long would it take?Is there an owner who would be happy to spend many millions and many years to get to no more than break even sustainability?
Perhaps that’s ML? We can but hope it is, happy to lose a lot of money to reach sustainability and pray it doesn’t become a loss chasing ego driven glory hunt to reach the fever dream of Premier League football.
I guess time will tell.
If Lomtadze is worth 5 billion (and counting) then throwing some millions at Wycombe wouldn't be a big deal.
To put it in perspective, a million seconds is 12 days and a billion seconds is 31 years. Lomtadze has a lot of seconds. 150 years worth of seconds if Forbes is correct.
But why us? That's the question I find more interesting.
The answer to "why us?" is always that someone played as Bayo on FIFA.
Now that the dust is settling a bit and the full inadequacies of our current training situation are starting to be understood, is there anything stopping us from going back to Reading and offering them some wedge to share Bearwood? I wonder if Wokingham Council would look more kindly on an arrangement under which Reading kept ownership and stood to benefit.
Reading FC don’t own Bearwood.
But they do own the company who owns it.
Rob Couhig had some very sensible comments about these accounts in his interview this evening
Don’t leave us in suspenders, @WanderingDays !!
Spill the beans.
https://www.youtube.com/live/RIZEFiZ-Vho?si=dheExW3cVgHEzdiu
It's in here! Watch the whole video if you have the time, but his discussion of today's accounts is about halfway through
Does anyone know who the winger who could be "worth some real money down the line" is?
As far as I can tell our owned wingers (Sadlier and McCleary) are great but unlikely to increase their value. Is a permanent deal for Campbell or Kodua a possibility?
Although he said winger I think he’s talking about Kone
I was wondering the same regarding Couhig's winger comments. I had a feeling when we signed Campbell that it may lead to a permanent deal in the summer. Otherwise, I still don't really understand why we'd have taken him back. He's not the finished article yet, even at League 1 level, but that said I think there is some talent there that could be developed and see him become a good player. I just can't see him troubling the Wolves 1st team anytime soon and he's not Championship level either.
My feeling, based on nothing other than a hunch, is that we'll see him join permanently in the summer.
Christie Ward? Jasper Pattenden? Know they have hopes for both
Has to be Kone as we either don't own any other winger or they are veterans.
But if we're millions in debt and losing millions it's a bit of a sketchy plan hoping that one day we might get a whopping fee.
Even with selling Mehmeti the unspecified Ainsworth compensation, two huge one offs we didn't break even.
Defenders plural was mentioned too.
Low we know we've turned down bids, but no idea what level. But Forino is out of contract isn't he? Nor sure there's another defender who is sellable.
"But if we're millions in debt and losing millions it's a bit of a sketchy plan hoping that one day we might get a whopping fee."
This is a concern. There are multiple things that could get in the way of selling a prospect: career ending injuries, career stalling injuries, players deciding to run a contract down, clubs taking advantage of a clubs circumstances and putting in low bids, a players form suddenly falling off a cliff and deterring bidders etc etc.
I thought RC's interview yesterday was really good. It's this point I'm concerned about...that if the balance sheet says say -£3m but you value 3 players at £1m each against it, those 'assets' are far from guranteed cash in the bank and could soon disappear or depreciate (see above).
-£3m can soon become -£12m.
Rob earned his money by being a good talker and spinning a story to present the best possible version for his cause. He’s good at it.
he was right with one key point though. Shareholder debt is not the issue. The big issue is contracts that can’t be escaped from after the guy paying the billls stops doing so. A guy on £200k salary on a 1 year deal is much less risky than a guy on £150k with four years left on his contract.