Brian Caldwell shares an insight into Town's 2019/20 financial year.
Shrewsbury Town Football Club’s accounts for the 2019/20 financial year have been released and shared with Salop's shareholders.
As with previous seasons, Town supporter Ant Thomas has prepared a full and detailed report to help explain the accounts to all of our supporters.
To view Ant’s full report, click to read it here: STFC Accounts June 2020
Town CEO Brian Caldwell sat down with iFollow Shrews to discuss Town's finances and gave an insight into the Town report issued yesterday.
"We wanted to get our accounts sent out to our shareholders and Ant's report out prior to this but they were filed with Companies House unbeknown to us," said Town's CEO. "We ran a loss of £723,000, which is the start of the effects of Covid. We had no income from March through to June that year and that has had an effect on where we were.
"The loss doesn't look good on paper and it's not something we wanted. It just shows, without match-day, commercial and hospitality revenues, how things can be affected. Going forward, it is a concern for the next financial year. The bank balance did go up at the end of June 2020 but that was partly caused by the interest-free loan against future revenues all clubs had the opportunity to secure from the EFL. That will need to be paid back over the next few years and that will affect our turnover.
“Clubs in the Premier League and Championship don’t quite rely on match-day revenues as much as we do. Come this time next year when we are putting out the accounts to June 2021, it will be a lot worse. The accounts we just put out are only three months into Covid.
“The Chairman has built up reserves over the last number of years to make sure we had a 'rainy-day' fund. The last thing we wanted to spend it on was a pandemic. It has been hard to watch cash drift away over the last 14 months and we had to pay additional funds over the course of last season with testing staff and players. We’ve had to take two coaches to each away game and hotels have been booked with single rooms. We took advantage of furlough as much as we could - that has helped us come through things.
"We are just fortunate that we have such a well-run club. Going forward, we need our supporters back to start again for the new season, and to help us re-build the Club.”
