That doesn’t sound a million miles away from what an average NL budget might look like and what ours is, but clubs very rarely release specific figures – and even full accounts are oblique enough not to reveal the actual number.
Wrexham ran at nearly £7m the year they went up and Oldham and Southend are rumoured to be at around the £3m+ mark.
Other end of the scale, some clubs will be running significantly less at sub £1m.
The perceived wisdom is that player salaries should be between 60/80% of turnover – assuming no special factors are in play – such as a wealthy backer or, conversely, chronic financial issues.
Pre Covid – our turnover was running in the 3.5m region but that is misleading – because I believe League 2 clubs receive circa 1.5m each in solidarity payments from the PL whilst NL clubs get next to nothing.
I suspect (and this is mere speculation) that our net turnover (leaving aside VAT on sales etc) currently sits at somewhere in the region of £2m+, so £1.1m would be say in the region of 50%, which given our precarious financial position seems about right.
The issue besides that is that if you have say 20 players all on £1k a week that doesn’t mean your budget is £1m a year – it is significantly higher when taking into account NI contributions, pension contributions, incidentals such as bonuses etc.
The last set of figures I looked at indicated only 2 NL sides broke even that particular season……meaning the majority are living beyond their means which is always possible in the short term but not sustainable in the long term – as we’ve recently found out.
So, we will probably have to accept that there will be clubs in that league who aren’t getting our numbers through the turnstile but are operating on bigger budgets for whatever reason at the current time.
The perfect example is Kouogun going to Hartlepool – a side getting a fair number less through the turnstiles than us but who are clearly able and willing to pay more at this time (because it’s fairly obvious he hasn’t gone up there for the weather!)
