Walsall FC blog: Accounts and accountability

The football club's AGM takes place next Monday at 9 a.m. The annual report and accounts for 2010/11 came out last month. They threw up a few interesting statistics, here are some numbers that stood out: writes Saddlers blogger Mark Jones.

£9000 – The trading profit for the year in question. Apparently this 'reconfirms our promise to reinvest all profits into the playing side of the business.' Mmmm.

So that's enough to pay a player £250 per week (before tax) for the whole of a season - draw your own conclusions.

£200,000 – The size of the interest-free loan made by new director Leigh Pomlett to the club. I've been impressed by Leigh when he's spoken at Focus meetings and I'm glad that there's new blood coming on board. No-one should be ungrateful for his contribution.

£500,000 – The money Watford paid us for Troy Deeney, although not necessarily all of it up front.

£60,000 – The money Watford paid for Rene Gilmartin, according to Chris Hutchings at a Meet the Manager do in August 2010 anyway.

Undisclosed – The money we got as part of the sell-on clause for Matty Fryatt, he went for over a million so it ought to have been a decent whack.

Minus ¾ million quid – Add up Leigh Pomlett's contribution and the money from the above-mentioned transfers, all of which were one-offs, then subtract it from the nine grand profit. It equals an amount that to me is very worrying.

£145, 296 – A repayment of loans to J.W.Bonser. He's loaned the club money so he is entitled to it, however it does amount to a significant chunk of the Pomlett loan. Giving him his dosh back is not necessarily a bad thing though.

£1,793,530 – The amount of loans still owed to Jeff. Ouch!

£2,559,000 – The size of the club's debt as at 31.5.11. Ouch again!

£510,000 – The size of the loans owed to Directors Nigel Bond, Clive Welch and Richard Tisdale and fair play to them for putting the money up. Interestingly the bulk of the club's debt is owed to five of the directors.

£427,000 (or £1169.86 per day every day) – RENT, pretty much the source of all our problems.

It represents a £12,000 increase in what continues to be a very difficult financial climate.

I shudder to think how much the club has paid in 21 years. I wonder how close we'd be to buying the freehold if the landlord(s) had agreed to sell it back to the club over a fixed period of time in the early 90s, something which could feasibly have happened.

If only someone had done something about the rent years ago.

Here are some other numbers that are currently standing out too:

0.89 – The number of points per game Walsall have picked up in 2011/12. Projected across the season it gives a total of 41 (and a bit). No team has ever stopped up in this league with under 42 points.

0.92 – The number of goals per game Walsall have scored in 2011/12, which goes a long way to explaining the above stat.

0 - The net increase in the size of the squad after the close of the January transfer window. Florent Cuvelier, with us for a month, was the only bright spark in the abysmal showing against Notts on Tuesday.

However Claude Gnapka has left for Inverness. Ok he never really looked like holding down a first team place but if, as Deano hinted, he had to be moved on in order for us to bring someone else in then things are worse than we feared. Gnapka was a Conference player last year remember.

Jon Parkin, Anthony McNamee and Jonathan Forte were all players who would have improved our team who moved to clubs around us instead; while Mark Wilson's move to Oxford was just plain annoying, then again the 31^st January has never been particularly kind to us in recent years.

0 – The chance of attracting new season ticket holders on the basis of what was on offer the other night.

Minus something – The likely percentage increase in season ticket holders for 2012/13, and trust me that will have a big influence on next year's accounts.

Is there any chance that the AGM will provide fans (via the shareholders) with solutions to any of the above problems? On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say none.