Creative accounting’s undisputed champions

When someone takes over a football club you would imagine their to-do-list is packed with all manner of human resource issues they want to tackle. Do we need new players? Shall we change the manager? Are the coaches the best we can afford? That sort of thing.

However, I strongly suspect that when Todd Boehly took the chair at Chelsea he put all of that on the back burner while he focussed on the most important thing: recruiting a crack team of accountants.

Why, because in modern football history I don’t think we have ever seen more creative, cunning and crafty methods of balancing the books than those being used by the London club over the last couple of years.

First, they found a loophole in the way they signed players by giving them ridiculously long contracts and spreading the fee over the course of that contract. That allowed the club’s new owners to go out and spend £30 billion on players during their first couple of transfer windows... without falling foul of financial fair play.

Of course, the football authorities realised they were being taken for a bit of a ride and closed that particular loophole, but not before Chelsea had accumulated enough high-value players to fill a stand at Stamford Bridge.

But hey, all credit to the number-crunchers for exploiting a loophole that should not have been left open in the first place.

While I am full of admiration for people who find a way to bend the rules without breaking them, I do wonder where it will all end

The next example of creative accounting came last year when the club sold two hotels to BlueCo 22 for more than £75 million. However, BlueCo 22 just happens to be the same company that actually owns the club. So, they essentially sold the hotels to themselves but still managed to cut costs, improve revenue and reduce overall losses at the club. Instead of losing £166m in that financial year, they only lost £90m.

But the greatest example of creative accounting must be the latest one – selling their women’s team. Again, they have sold it to BlueCo 22 (themselves), again generating a massive chunk of revenue for the club. Experts suggest that the majority of the £198.7m marked in their accounts as ‘profit on disposal of subsidiaries” was down to this selling of the women’s team.

Ultimately that enabled the club to post a profit of just over £128m. Nice.

While the Premier League approved the hotel sale and allowed it to count towards the club’s profitability, the sale of the women’s team has not yet been cleared. But I get the distinct impression it will be.

And, if that happens, you can expect every other club that operates a women’s team to follow suit, allowing them to alleviate some of their financial fair play concerns by having the owners essentially investing a large chunk of money into the club through the ‘backest’ of back doors.

While I am not against any of this, and I am full of admiration for people who find a way to bend the rules without breaking them, I do wonder where it will all end.

Are we looking at a future where clubs syphon off their reserve teams into separate entities or form offshore corporations to manage the tea ladies?

It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest because Chelsea have opened a massive can of loophole worms here, and there could be no way of getting those wriggly little suckers back in the tin...

A growing Arsenal

When Arsenal opened their shiny new Emirates stadium back in 2006 it was modern temple of Premier League football that moved English grounds into the future.

Almost 20 years later it still looks the business, mostly thanks to constant updates and improvements. And those enhancements are not all cosmetic either. In a magnificent display of dedication to the average football fan, they spent £2 million ‘improving beer delivery’ at the ground.

However, while the look and feel of the stadium is still right up there and the amenities are top notch, the size has always felt a bit on the small size. In fact, Arsenal sell more than 99 per cent of available tickets on match days, which suggest a lot of people are missing out on the superb beer supply.

Not only that, but other clubs are slowly growing their stadia – Manchester United recently announced plans for a new 100,000-seater stadium; Tottenham, West Ham United and Liverpool all now have slightly bigger grounds than the Gunners; Manchester City are looking to expand their own stadium; and it is surely only a matter of time before Newcastle look to add another layer or seven to St James’s Park.

And all that means it makes sense that Arsenal are looking to expand the Emirates.

At the moment the idea is still at the planning stage, so the exact details of how it will happen or when it will take place are not yet known. But reports suggest they are thinking about taking the capacity beyond 80,000.

Just think, that means another 380,000 people a season will be able to share the disappointment of watching Mikel Arteta guide the club to second place...

Swe vs Den

There’s nothing I like more than quirky nuggets of useless, borderline pointless, trivia. And here’s one I learned last week.

When Sweden play Denmark in an international game, the little abbreviation at the top of the TV screen shows SWE vs DEN. Which rather nicely spells “Sweden”.

And the plot gets thicker, because the letters left over after that abbreviation just happen to be DEN and MARK. I’ll let you work out what that spells…

As I said, useless and pointless, yet strangely interesting.

E-mail: Jamescalvertmalta@gmail.com

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