The accounts don’t exactly make comforting reading. As usual they’ve filed in abridged form, so we don’t get the full profit and loss account, which means no clear view of turnover, wages or the full trading picture.
What we can see is that the club’s net liabilities have gone up to £4.49m, from £3.76m the year before. So the overall financial position has got worse, not better. Accumulated losses are now around £13.56m.
The cash figure is probably the bit that really stands out: just £21,694 in the bank at year end. That’s tiny for a football club. At the same time, the club had £1.64m due within a year, with only £123k in current assets. So on the face of it, there’s no way the club could meet those short-term debts from its own resources.
Long-term debt also jumped from £2.03m to £3.03m, which is a big increase in one year, which suggests the club is still relying heavily on outside support just to keep going.
After digesting the accounts my take is thus: the club is still going, but financially it still looks very weak. There are one or two small signs of short-term improvement, but overall the bigger picture is that the hole has got deeper. It doesn’t read like a stable club financially, it reads like one still needing backing behind the scenes to survive from season to season.
