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Surprised there are still Leeds tickets left given they've been on general sale since Friday. Thought it'd be quite popular given we've not played there on a Saturday for decade (with fans at least).
 
Couldn’t he have ****ing done it before today.
 

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Libby said:
Ooooh we've been waiting for these.

@Schad
Click to expand...

So, my short version:

- The topline loss figure isn't bad at all, mostly because of the shifting of revenues from FY 2020 to 2021 owing to the pandemic. But paper losses are just paper losses.

- The bigger issue, as it was always going to be, was the rate at which we burned cash. And we burned a lot of it. We had £86.7m in cash and equivalents at the end of the 2020 books, most of that from our ginormous loan. We only had £28.8m remaining at the end of 2021. And that's with no reduction of our gross debt.

- That £28.8m was probably all of our liquidity. Gao wasn't going to put in any money, and it would have been difficult to secure another large credit facility without putting up the stadium as collateral (which we didn't do for the previous loan), and even then it'd be at high interest. We were in real danger of running out of money.


In short, we were very much on the knife's edge. I don't know whether we're losing more money this year, but there's every possibility that if we didn't get sold we were going to have to finance the club by selling players on, with all of the risks inherent in so doing. And if we got relegated, there's a very good chance we'd have been in administration in short order, because we'd have been hard-pressed to finance ordinary activity, never mind pay back that loan when it comes due.
 
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You didn’t need to be a financial expert to realise we were ****ed financially when the sale price was announced. 80% of the value of the stadium, playing staff, training facilities etc for the price of one very good player in other teams? Obvious that the price was so low because of crippling debt being incorporated into it
 
Number 1 Jasper said:
So are we OK , or still at risk of going down the pan ?

Serious question .
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Our new owner has talked about clearing some portion of that loan, which would steady us substantially. It's still a question of how much they're willing to plow into the team, though: just getting back to zero net debt would take over £60m at this point, and any ambitions beyond that point will cost money, too.

That said, given the positivity from our holdovers in management, I get the sense that they do not see these as being major impediments. Some money, invested wisely, not only would help the club's performance, it would also likely improve our value as an asset. Just getting rid of the ridiculous interest rate on the loan will save us millions down the road.
 
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Number 1 Jasper said:
So are we OK , or still at risk of going down the pan ?

Serious question .
Click to expand...
Being a positive type of chap (until kick off usually) I would say that the finances have improved in 2021, still running up debt but a big improvement on 2020 when Covid laid waste to everyone in the football world
Would expect continued improvement this year but as always its the Players wages to Total Income that is for me most important and that improved due to the substantial increase in income. Hopefully that will continue this year especially if we can release/move on very expensive peripheral players in the summer
Not all gloom and doom
 
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