FFP Explained

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Keiran runs through the figures on this thread, as you say, very grim and explains the 'lack of ambition'...

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I guess there wasn't a Leicester fan anywhere that thought they'd ever win the Premier League.
If we're to give up trying to achieve as much as possible, then we may as well fold.
The football league needs more financial help, but everything is tilted in favour of the Premier League.
Getting back there, however unlikely, must be our ultimate aim and ambition imo.
As I ended it mate, 'we can always hope'.
I agree with you, I don't see the point unless you strive to be in the top division at the top of your game.
 
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Keiran runs through the figures on this thread, as you say, very grim and explains the 'lack of ambition'...

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The club does have an ambition and that's to be sustainable. Through piss poor business sense, the Tony era has put us where we are now.
Any dickhead knows with a capacity of 17,000 and a small fanbase that you can't pay the wages of Robert Green and Julio Cesar !!
 
I guess there wasn't a Leicester fan anywhere that thought they'd ever win the Premier League.
If we're to give up trying to achieve as much as possible, then we may as well fold.
The football league needs more financial help, but everything is tilted in favour of the Premier League.
Getting back there, however unlikely, must be our ultimate aim and ambition imo.

I don't think anyone here disagrees with that ultimate aim and ambition. Everyone who is mad enough to post on this message board wants to see us win every game we play and win every competition we enter. I confess my enjoyment of football isn't dependent on us being in the PL and I had as much (or more) fun supporting us in L1 than I did in our recent PL stint, but that doesn't stop us agreeing we want to win and be promoted.

The question is how we go about achieving that ambition. Do we carry on paying £27m a year in wages to the current crop of players, which is eventually, without any change and especially if we invest more, going to lead to us breaching FFP. That could very feasibly lead to a points deduction & transfer embargo, and likely relegation. In that scenario it would be very hard to rebuild in L1 and could even lead to a further downward spiral.

Or do we try and do something different? Sell Dykes, Willock, Chair & Dickie for whatever we can get for them, release StefJo and the others on big contracts, and try and bring that wage bill down from £27m to something closer to £15m or under?

Reducing the wage bill doesn't have to signal a lack of ambition. Luton's wage bill is £14.1m. Coventry at £13.2m. (Rotherham's is £8.2m and they're not far behind us in the table. Millwall are on £20m.) We need to look at Luton and Coventry as examples - clubs that are well run and are delivering better results than ours for half our wage bill.

Ideally, we can get to what Luton and Coventry have without going through the pain of L1 like they had to!
 
It’s irrelevant who has what share in a football club tbh. Most hugely privately successful business people have some kind of negatives in their character. As you say Sb the aim of sustainable football clubs is a good one. But more has to be done.

If it’s about financial stability it all comes down to control of costs. And there are few opportunities. Raise TV revenues? Reduce wages or people? Increase matchday/season ticket costs? Or all of them?

If the EFL wants financial sustainability it has to do more than sit in the gentleman’s club and set rules. It has to help the clubs get there. It needs to provide better cost frameworks for clubs to have a reasonable chance.

Or just leave it to the creatives to ignore it, wangle their way through the rules or for clubs to just slide ever slowly downwards to closures, less professional jobs for footballers and football staff, reducing income streams from outside football and finally loss of interest in non-EPL football (it’s bad enough now with minimal exposure on all media channels).
Who the owners are and how they behave is relevant to me, maybe not others.

To be fair to him Rick Parry has been working for years to get rid of parachute payments and have a much bigger and more equitably distributed ‘solidarity’ payment from the PL to the EFL, which seems to be agreed in principle but they will never get enough PL clubs to vote for it as too many fear they will need parachute payments at some stage….
 
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I don't think anyone here disagrees with that ultimate aim and ambition. Everyone who is mad enough to post on this message board wants to see us win every game we play and win every competition we enter. I confess my enjoyment of football isn't dependent on us being in the PL and I had as much (or more) fun supporting us in L1 than I did in our recent PL stint, but that doesn't stop us agreeing we want to win and be promoted.

The question is how we go about achieving that ambition. Do we carry on paying £27m a year in wages to the current crop of players, which is eventually, without any change and especially if we invest more, going to lead to us breaching FFP. That could very feasibly lead to a points deduction & transfer embargo, and likely relegation. In that scenario it would be very hard to rebuild in L1 and could even lead to a further downward spiral.

Or do we try and do something different? Sell Dykes, Willock, Chair & Dickie for whatever we can get for them, release StefJo and the others on big contracts, and try and bring that wage bill down from £27m to something closer to £15m or under?

Reducing the wage bill doesn't have to signal a lack of ambition. Luton's wage bill is £14.1m. Coventry at £13.2m. (Rotherham's is £8.2m and they're not far behind us in the table. Millwall are on £20m.) We need to look at Luton and Coventry as examples - clubs that are well run and are delivering better results than ours for half our wage bill.

Ideally, we can get to what Luton and Coventry have without going through the pain of L1 like they had to!

The problem is that doing what you suggest would very likely result in league one obscurity as well.
Unfortunately, the way things are, there's no solution on the horizon.
 
A loss of £25m, is that all? Why aren't they spending more?

No ambition.
Think we have done this, the ambition is to sell our best players every season for profit to help us closer to sustainability. Unfortunately our whole squad isn't even worth that put together so it ain't going to happen any time soon.
 
£25m really isn’t much for these billionaires - a bit of fun and small change. We need to look at the positives, QPR is a great London club with good history. Maybe we need to be smarter. Grow our international fan base - sign a Korean or do a Wrexham.
 
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Agree it's a bit damned if you do, damned if you don't. I suppose I prefer the idea of doing it on our terms than it being forced on us by the authorities.
I agree Raving (about damned if you do, damned if you don’t). But the EFL need to create leagues that do allow clubs to be ambitious - that is negated by always looking over your shoulder at FFP rules. Sustainable clubs = great principle. But the other side of the coin is for the EFL to build more income for clubs to be ambitious, create competitiveness and get more fans in. Yo-yo clubs, with their parachute payments, are mostly like the top six of the EPL a distance apart from the rest of the league.

The quicker salary caps are brought in the better. It might give players a kick up the ar$e and a bit of fight as they get close to relegation and a wage cut (they will still be earning much more than the average man in industry). With a period of adjustment required to implement, someone needs to get clubs on board and bite the bullet and be creative and ambitious for the future of non-EPL football.
 
Interesting that the Mittal share has risen from 3%. Not good news for me, Mittal is an odious person, this must have been the price of his son in law being made chairman.

What is it about Mittal that makes you think he is “odious”?
Stinking rich from being a ruthless businessman?
 
What is it about Mittal that makes you think he is “odious”?
Stinking rich from being a ruthless businessman?
It’s all relative I suppose, but google Mittal Co Cork/Irish Steel or Mittal cash for questions or Mittal Kazakhstan if you are interested. Plenty of others just as bad but he seems to have a particular disregard for his own workers. Fines galore around the world for poor health and safety standards, an impressive death toll in Kazakhstan and Liberia etc etc. Probably lots of things he could have fixed relatively cheaply, but when you spend $60m on your daughters wedding (to Amit) perhaps spare change is short.

That’s why I find him odious. It’s just a personal opinion.
 
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FFP has totally f*cked this club, added to incompetence of naive owners. Any worth our best players had has dissolved as we have slid down the table. I think whatever happens this season we need a complete clear out of the underperformers and sicknotes. I'm even beginning to think relegation might be in the best interests of the club for a complete reset, Gazza knows League One so I'm sure he'd know which players would give value. Much as I'd hate it we are in a financial nightmare that is deemed 'fair'...
 
https://www.fansnetwork.co.uk/football/queensparkrangers/news/52087/accounting-for-success-–-column

Link from Loft For Words on an article explaining FFP by Simon Dorset (Roller)
Great read, beautifully explained and a mythbuster.
Perhaps people can at least understand what a mammoth achievement SLF and Lee Hoos have done with our club, and the football is also better.


With the club’s latest set of accounts mixing an improved picture with still stark realities of the club’s situation, our resident grown up Simon Dorset assesses where we are with FFP.


We’ve all become so accustomed to the pace of change at QPR that is barely registers anymore. In just the last 12 seasons the club has employed 13 full-time managers liberally interspersed with a sprinkling of seven interim or caretaker appointments. The average tenure of those full-time managers has been just over 300 days each – removing Messrs Warnock, Redknapp and Holloway from the equation halves that statistic – which cuts a stark contrast to the previous 102 years when, according to Wikipedia, the club’s 34 managers averaged over 1,000 days each. QPR changed division four times during those 12 seasons and such has been the phenomenal throughput of players, that only four of them, Nedum Onuoha, Clint Hill, Ale Faurlin and Massimo Luongo, have started in 140 or more league matches.

However, the most startling change over that period has been the football world’s attitude in general towards money. The reason I’ve used this particular frame of reference is because it is just 12 years ago that QPR finally repaid their £10m loan from the ABC Corporation. Under the threat of expulsion from the Football League if the club attempted to start the new season while still in administration, QPR took out the exorbitant loan from the Panama registered company in May 2002 secured against their only significant asset - Loftus Road. While servicing the monthly interest payment of £83,333 stretched QPR’s resources to the limit, the prospect of having to repay the principle sum of the loan by July 31 2008 threatened to drag the club under. When Flavio Briatore, QPR Holdings Ltd.’s chairman, announced that the loan had been settled, albeit by taking out another, cheaper loan, a great weight was lifted from the club. The fact that the new loan was from a company, Amulya Property Ltd, which was connected to Briatore and Amit Bhatia made it seem far less daunting.

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Considering that QPR’s 2017/18 accounts reported a loss in the region of £37m, that loan of £10 million now seems relatively modest but, of course, the financial landscape has changed dramatically in the intervening years. Television rights have more than quadrupled and fantastically wealthy foreign businessmen have adopted the Premier League as their playground; both of these have had a detrimental effect on football in this country as a whole. The competitive edge that once stood the Premier League apart from La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A or Ligue 1 is slowly being eroded, while the owners of Championship clubs are making highly dubious short term decisions and jeopardising their clubs’ futures in desperate attempts to jump on board the gravy train.

For a few seasons QPR were unrivalled in the madness stakes. The club haemorrhaged money at an incredible rate in a frenzied attempt to maintain their presence in the world’s most lucrative league Their accounts have shown the battle scars of that wretched failure ever since, but slowly and surely the club has been getting its house in order and with today’s publication of the 2018/19 accounts we finally get a chance to see how successful Lee Hoos has been in positioning the club to start life without parachute payments.



2018/19


The first figure that jumps off the page is the loss for the year and that at £10.3m it is considerably down on the previous year. As the previous year included the FFP fine and costs that was a given but after allowing for those exceptional items the loss is still around £12m less. There are four factors which have resulted in this: revenue is up, player sales are up, wages are down, player amortisation is down. To briefly look to these in turn

Revenue: remarkably this is not just up as a whole, all but one of our individual revenue stream has been increased. Gate receipts, broadcasting rights, sponsorship, commercial income and other income have all increased, only sales of inventories have slipped. Overall up £3m.

Costs: In most businesses payroll is the largest cost, and football clubs are certainly no exception and it is here that the club have made the greatest saving. According to the football finance guru Keiron Maguire, QPR are now third best in the wages to revenue ratio at 69%. Does anyone still miss Jack Robinson? Player amortisation is also down. For those unfamiliar with this term, it is to do with the treatment of the cost of buying players. When a player is bought the whole of his cost isn’t immediately debited to the club’s profit and loss. Instead he becomes an intangible asset on the balance sheet and his cost is debited to the profit and loss account equally over the length of his contract. So if a player was bought for £4m and his contract was for four years, he would be shown as costing the club £1m per season. This is called amortisation. Costs overall down £7m.

Player Sales: Virtually unheard of in recent years when we’ve had to pay-off players to get them off the premises. In this era of undisclosed transfer fees in it hard to pin down, but the accounts show a profit, presumably for Smithies and Sylla. It should be born in mind that the profit is the difference between the transfer fee and the residual value of their original cost – the unamortised part. Overall up £2.5m.



FFP


While I’m sure that we are all pleased to see the right trends in the accounts, the burning question is where does this leave us with regard to FFP. Slotting these figures into the table from my Tough Battle Ahead in Ongoing War with FFP article from the beginning of the season, the answer is very encouraging.

As a reminder, I’ve adopted the £4m per season estimated by the excellent Swiss Ramble (who provides detailed analysis of QPR’s accounts every year as they are released via Twitter).

Secondly, the 2017/18 loss has been adjusted to remove the cost of the FFP fine levied against the club and the payment of the initial instalment of it along with the payment of the EFL’s costs. I’ve not adjusted the 2018/19 figure to remove the latest instalment of the fine as I think there has been some wizardry in the accounts and need to understand that before doing so. There is a difference between cash flow and profit and loss; just because £1.7 million went out the door, it doesn’t mean that is how it will show in the accounts. The loss for 2018/19 will be less than shown.


FFP (Beth EDIT: see original article for the table)

Season (figures in £1,000s) 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 2018/19
Financial Loss -45,675 -10,964 -6,443 -22,535 -10,387
Est disallowable costs 4,000 4,000 4,000 4,000 4,000
Rolling 3 yr FFP loss - - -51,082 -27,942 -27,365
Permissible season loss -35,000* -13,000 -13,000 -13,000 -13,000
Rolling 3 yr permissible FFP loss - - -61,000 -39,000 -39,000
Headroom - - 9,918 11,058 11,635



* QPR were in the Premier League in the 2014/15 season. The Championship’s FFP regulations allows for a contribution of £35 million per season spent in the Premier League to the club’s rolling 3-year permissible loss as opposed to the £13 million per season in the Championship.

The obvious question is with headroom of £11m was it necessary to sell Luke Freeman last summer? My answer would be yes. There are two factors which need to be considered.

Firstly this season we do not have a parachute payment. Our broadcasting rights revenue will drop by £12m, that being the difference between out last parachute and the solidarity payment which will replace it. Secondly we have the smallest loss we’ve made since FFP’s inception rolling out our reporting period. Projecting forward onto this season, in simplistic terms, if we assume that the headroom will be eaten up by the loss in broadcasting rights revenue, then we need to reduce or loss to replicate that £6.5m. Without any doubt, this is the toughest season we will face in regard of FFP, but on the plus side, we do have the profit from the sales of Luke Freeman, Darnell Furlong and Massimo Luongo safely in our back pocket.

Having watched and admired the way that Lee Hoos has successfully set and adhered to budgets to keep us within our FFP limits over the last few seasons, I have no doubts that he will steer us through this final transition. As hard as it is to countenance, especially taking that massive loss into account, QPR has emerged from the financial madness at a time when other clubs are looking like imploding. For the first time since long before the heady days I referred to in my opening paragraphs, QPR now controls the money, not vice versa and while it may be a fragile existence, I doubt there are many teams in our division who wouldn’t swap positions with us without hesitation.

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Football is, of course, about more than just achieving financial goals. At the same time as Hoos has maintained a tight grip on the expenses, Les Ferdinand has presided over a complete rejuvenation of our academy and development squads to the point where we now have a number of highly sought after young players featuring prominently in our first team and the promise of more to follow in their footsteps. The pair of them, along with their many deputies will have performed a minor miracle if we escape from this season without breaching FFP and with a stronger team than we entered it.

Take another look at that table, particularly the loss that will be rolling out of our reporting period once we are through this season. £22.5m! That will be the loss we can afford to make next season if we get through this season losing no more than £6m. If we achieve that there is no way on God’s earth that we HAVE to sell Ebere Eze or anyone else. That doesn’t mean we won’t, but it should be at the right price for QPR.
Can we ask Roller to do an update on this (relatively) rosy summary of a few years ago, once he has done his podcast with Clive of course.

Seems to me out attempt to support Warburton’s promotion push has really done us no favours at all going forward. Not that it was the wrong thing to do, but seems like a one off attempt which can’t be repeated for some time.
 
QPR have reported an annual loss of almost £25m – largely the result of gambling in vain on promotion last season.

The club’s holding company’s audited accounts for the year ended 31 May 2022 show a loss of approximately £24.7m for the 2021-22 season. That is a loss of around £474,000 per week.


The alarming figure represents
It appears to image mage Rangers has sought to portray; one of a club that has learned from past financial mistakes and been focused on steady progress and reducing losses.

The smaller loss for the year ended 2021 is largely because of the sale of Ebere Eze to Crystal Palace

It was initially hoped that sale would herald an era of sustainability, achieved through developing and ultimately selling players for a profit.

However, an excellent run during the second half of the 2020-21 campaign, when QPR, then managed by Mark Warburton, struggled badly before a major upturn, led to a belief that promotion the following year was achievable.

That upturn was largely inspired by the loan signings of Stefan Johansen, Charlie Austin, Sam Field and Jordy de Wijs, who were all signed on permanent deals in the summer of 2021.

Over the course of the year, QPR bought players for £2.8m and sold for just £250,000 during the same period, while wages rose by around 10%.

The club also dismissed enquires about the likes of Ilias Chair in the belief that reaching the Premier League was a realistic ambition.

That approach initially seemed to be vindicated and Rangers were in the thick of the promotion race.

However, a spectacular decline in results led to them sliding down the table and Warburton losing his job.

In short, the gamble did not pay off.

“The increase in losses is mainly due to the decision to retain players and not to be active in player sales in the 21/22 season as the club focused on challenging for a play-off position,” admitted QPR chief executive Lee Hoos.
 
So people asking on here for us to gamble and go for it.

We did.
We lost
We are now ******* for another 3 years.


No idea where we are going to go from here
 
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