I'll apologise in advance for another Brown rant (especialy since football life does feel a bit better for us hammer fans lately)... Reading over 'the chairman's' statement on the O/S and it says... "If it were not a fact of football life no one would believe that twenty businesses would sign up to a round of Russian roulette that consigns three of their number each year to penury at best or administration at worst... Having said that, we did sign up to the process and we are now faced with the challenge of achieving success on the pitch whilst ensuring sustainability of the business off the pitch." Well there's the problem. Aparently 'the Chairman' didn't realize that we needed to achieve success on the pitch and off until NOW! That would explain the lack of investment after we finished 7th. I don't care how much money the club turns, Terence Brown is not the man to run West Ham United FC or even West Ham United Plc. It seems every time I hear his comments it just reinforces for me his incompetence. And I still believe the only "operating profit" he cares about is the one in his bank account. BROWN OUT!
Profit!!! West Ham chairman Terry Brown has announced the club made an astonishing pre-tax profit of £11.8million for the year ending May 31, 2004. The club's net bank borrowings has also fallen substantially, from £44.1million in 2003 to £33million this year. I´m speechless.
No doubt PooBoy only cares about his wallet, but at maybe he want to gain stature and wealth by gettting us back where we belong.
Wealth is all Brown care's about panic, I'm not a shareholder but I'd like to know how much of a financial loss the leggo towers hotel he had built has incurred, as much as I love this club, and with loads of fond memories from growing up in the area, no one in their right mind would normally book into a hotel in E13, not for too long anyway!
Brown's not a great business man, but he has to want to make money - therefore getting back to the EPL has to be his goal. If not, then he's a bigger fool then possible.
So we made an £11.8 M profit. So did we do that? By selling £24.8 M of players and buying £5.1 M. So we made a "Profit" on transfer dealings of £19.7 M - So without this firesale of our assets we would have made a £8 M loss. This is the last season that we the parachute payment so basically if we don't go up this season we will probably stay in this Division for a while.
Turnover of £35.1m (2002/03 - £51.1m) • Pre-tax profit of £11.8m (2002/03 - £5.3m loss) • Net assets of £39.7m (2002/03 - £13.4m) • Net bank borrowings of £33.8m (2002/03 - £44.1m) Can someone who's more of an accountant than me please explain how these figures add up? The way I read it we turned over £16Mil LESS but made £17.1Mil more profit and, at the same time increased our assets by £26.3Mil and paid down our debt by almost £10Mil. All that adds up to an overall gain, in one year, of c.£53,000,000 on a turnover of £35,000,000. I assume that the £35Mil does NOT include player sales and the resulting reduction in wages but even if you factor that in it means that our operating costs are virtually NIL and every penny that came in was profit. I don't care how good a business person you are, that is simply NOT POSSIBLE. I'm all in favour of creative accounting but Hans Christian Andersson couldn't have dreamt this up.