NUFC accounts finally released.

Newcastle United have finally released the accounts for the 2009/2010 season, and they make for some positive reading. Better late than never I guess.

I'll be perfectly honest, these accounts are much much better than I was expecting. Perhaps it's the fact that I was preparing for them to be so bad, that actually they have turned out to be a rather nice surprise by comparison. Anyway, that's enough of me waffling about how suprised I am, let's get down to some facts and figures.

The headline figure is that the club made an operating loss of £33.5 million although after player trading this loss was actually £17.1 million. Turnover was down 39% from £86.1 million to £52.4 million, which isn't too bad for the Championship. I estimated that our turnover would be around the £50 million mark, so I wasn't too far off. How was that turnover comprised though? Let's have a look..

Season ticket revenue was down 29% to £11 million (from £15.6 million) although gate reciepts were actually up by 18% (from £5.5 million to £6.5 million) which is possibly due to the fact that people bought tickets for individual games instead of a season ticket perhaps?

Down went TV revenue from £37.6 million to just £16 million whilst income from corporate boxes fell 58% to £2.8 million. Commercial, Catering and Sponsorship revenue was down 21% and fell to £15.4 million.

With regard to what was paid out, wages dropped from £71.1 million to £47.5 million giving us a wage/turnover percentage of 90.6. Basically, nearly everything the club brought in last season was paid out in wages. Other associated costs, such as travel, maintenance, upkeep, safety, stewards, policing, travel, hotels etc remained unchanged at £26.9 million.

Some people may wonder why I say that these results are positive when all you've read so far is basically a list of losses. Well to put it into perspective the losses were limited to roughly what they were in previous season where we had a Premier League income. That in itself is an achievement.

Ashley has now spent £285.8 million on NUFC since he bought it. Call it protecting his own investment or covering up mistakes or whatever, but I dread to think what would have happened had we not had his money to bail out both his mistakes and the mistakes of the previous regime. I'm not saying that Ashley is our knight in shining armour, in fact at times he has been more like a tosser in tinfoil, but at least he has the cash to pay his way.

Managing Director, Derek Llambias has given himself some breathing space and has emerged from kissing Mike Ashley's backside for long enough to talk to the official club website. Owlheed had this to say about the financial results:

"Our overriding aim in 2009/10 was to secure promotion back to the Premier League at the first attempt. Relegation presented a considerable challenge to us financially. With such a marked reduction in turnover, largely due to reduced TV and media revenue, we needed to cut our operating costs accordingly without jeopardising our ability to return to top flight football straight away."

"We succeeded in reducing our wage bill considerably whilst maintaining the basis of a Premier League squad. It has been a significant achievement to keep our overall loss at a level similar to the year before despite the impact of relegation, and our ability to do this has been helped immeasurably by the continued support of Mike Ashley, who injected a further £42 million into the club last year interest-free."

The current debt level at the club is £150 million although only £11 million of that is bank debt.

So what does this mean going forward? Well I would say that this is pretty much conclusive proof that club is now technically self-sufficient if we can maintain our Premier League income, but I'll detail that more in the next article which will focus mainly on the current financials and not those of last season.

It's good news, honest!