Here’s a very brief review of the recent club financial statement.  It is well reported that the club made a large financial loss of £800k after receiving transfer income of £1.3m. Crewe Alex have been held up as the bastions of financial prudency in the past, it looks like this has come to an end.

Unfortunately, the demise on the pitch has been mirrored by a demise financially and our mini spending spree under Steve Holland has come back to bite us. Turnover was down by £1.9m, now of course some of this is the transfer income reducing in the year, but a fall in gate receipts and commercial income is also a key factor in these losses. Whilst costs have been reduced – wages by £750k, this has not been enough and our wage bill of £2.7m is simply not sustainable.

On to the Balance Sheet and at June 2010, we no longer were a cash rich club(not that we were in 2009 also). Since 2009, the cash balances have reduced by £379k with £900k owing to the club in transfer fees. Now here is where there is some conjecture, on the face of it this £900k is probably from the sale of Brayford and Bailey, since this happened in May 2010. However, it is being reported that these accounts do not include the Brayford and Bailey transfer – maybe they were not registered until July 2010? This is key to the financial situation since at June 2010 directors had introduced £240k to keep the club going. Surely an early season ticket offer would have been the better way of raising cash?

The demerger is a strange case. Why did the club create the companies, group them and then 3 years later demerge? Stranger still is that the assets have been transferred into subsidiaries of the football club when the normal situation is to have a holding company hold the assets, which in turn owns the football club. These assets have not been hived out of the club since the demerged companies have issued share capital pro rata to the shareholdings in the football club. This has been by way of issuing £6m in shares though, which is effectively mortgaging the assets with the shareholders being the lenders.