By Paul Nicholson
March 2 – Queens Park Rangers (QPR) have announced reduced losses of £9.8 million for the year ending May 2014 – the season QPR won promotion back to the English Premier League. The previous year QPR had announced the largest loss ever recorded by an English club – £65.4 million to May 2013 – in the season the club were relegated from the top flight.
For the year ending May 2014 the club said it had reduced spending by £22 million and that this will continue “in future years as the club will continue to bring losses down”.
The club will need to bring losses down further to meet financial fair play requirements, but the recent figures are significant progress and will see QPR avoid the big fine that would have hit if losses hadn’t been reduced.
The club’s chairman, Malaysian Tony Fernandes, has already said that the club is changing recruitment strategy from being a buying club – former manager Harry Rednapp who resigned at the end of January was often a haven for players in the transfer market – to developing more of its own, young, “hungry” talent.
In its record year of losses to May 2013 the total wages QPR paid to all staff was £78 million, £17 million more than the club’s revenue of £61 million.
Reducing the losses in 2014 will have been helped by the club’s shareholders having strengthened the balance sheet by writing off a whopping £60 million of shareholder loans.
A club statement said: “The club is moving in the right direction and on track with its mid-term and long-term business plans. The impact of relegation and promotion inevitably has a material impact on the short-term financial results of clubs but the shareholders are comfortable that the medium-term outlook is positive with Premier League revenues growing and the club’s costs continuing to fall.”
Survival in the Premier League is the big gamble for the shareholders, and the long term objective. The club is currently in 17th in the Premier League on equal points with 18th placed Burnley. Staying up is crucial to the balance sheet, it will be even more so in 2016 when the Premier Leagues £3.1 billion domestic TV deal comes into play.
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