The Championship seems to be the target that we aspire to as a minimum? Here are the figures for 2015/2016 which are the latest available. Of the 24 clubs listed only one showed a profit with another (Bolton) not submitting figures at the time of the report. How on any level is a football club supposed to be an attractive investment? Just to give you some idea of what some are claiming. Let’s just suppose the club was to show a 10% profit? That would be a staggering achievement based on the figures here? In the event there was 10million spent on the ground it would require a turnover of over 120 million after corporation tax to get your money back. The club currently turnsover 4 million with no profit on gates of 6000. If you doubled the gate to 12,000 as a rough figure the turnover would be 8 million. Assume another 2 million for tv etc and in the event that the club could perform a miracle in comparison to this report and show a pretax profit of 10% for 12 years straight after corporation tax an “investor” would get their money back. That’s right, not have anything to show for it, just get their money back and that’s if the club performs a miracle. This is also based on the fact that the ground was completely sold out every week (using the 12,000 capacity target) and not taking into account the fact that you have got to build the development in the first place which could add a year or two? Alternatively the investor, and I use the term loosely because they would have to be an idiot, could stick it in the Nationwide and get 3% guaranteed? Hopefully this will give a bit of clarity to the discussion, but I’m not holding my breath?
https://www.insidermedia.com/insider/national/football-finance-championship-club-by-club-2015-16