Bluedell

I enjoyed replying, mate It's always good to have someone question your analysis as I may have missed something. I still may have done due to the extreme lack of information in our accounts. I do feel a little pessimistic about the whole thing. We broke even 2 years ago after qualifying from the CL. I thought the CL income had increased and our cost base had decreased so we should have been looking at a small profit pre-Hutton. However it seems that our cost base has started to increase again, unless the club have written off more of the transfer fees than I think.

I'd like to rebut your rebuttal if that's OK? The cost of the players purchased does not hit the P&L immediately. The cost gets capitalised and written off over the period of the players contracts. If we say that we spent �£12m on players in the summer and the average length of a contract is 4 years then the amount charged to our profit for the 6 months is �£1.5m (12m/4 years * 0.5 of a year). Given that this is the position then the profit of �£2.3m looks less impressive. I don't have the exact figures of the total spend and the length of players contracts, but hopefully you get the idea. The Hutton deal is certainly impressive from a financial viewpoint. My issue with it is that it is a one-off gain. If we are can come up with a Boumsong or Hutton every season then we don't have anything to worry about, but I don't believe that we can. I am more concerned about the underlying situation, looking at future years, which is a bit concerning. We wil make a profit this year but that's against the general trend. Yes, we have a net spend on transfers and a profit equvalent to most of the Hutton transfer (as this is where it is coming from), but it's concerning that we are having to rely on Hutton to make a profit. No. We would be looking at making a loss this year with the CL and without the Huttton transfer. Even with the Hutton transfer, I suspect that our debt may be slightly worse at the year-end (but it's difficult to assess due to the lack of information). To be able to finance an annual net spend of �£5m on players, we would need to be looking at an annual profit of �£5m and unfortunately we are not close to achieving that. I hope that you are correct and I am wrong, and we will have a far better idea when we see the year-end accounts come out, but I believe that your analysis is flawed in that you are assuming all of the summer spend has already hit the P&L account.

My pleasure, mate. Cheers.

Davis shaded it for me.

Negotiations are still to take place on that one...

I wouldn't hold my breath to wait to find out.