Or is it that Union is better than League from every possible aspect?

Including the level of debt at certain clubs !!!!!

did anyone notice this story about Wasps when we were being put through the mill in Dec ?
[url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/article-2257719/Hard-Wasps-fail-pay-players-run-Christmas.htmlhard up wasp fail to pay players[/url
the coment 'Wasps are far from the only Aviva Premiership club suffering financially' is telling' but no BBC hack would want to end his burgeoning career by taking on the greys at Twickers with a bad publicity story ..
[url=http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/chiefs_aim_for_financial_parity_through_share_purchase/chiefs aim for finacial parity[/url
' Despite this financial disadvantage, Exeter has posted a profit for the second year running and is one of only four Aviva Premiership clubs to not be operating in debt.'
in 2007/2008 Rugby Premiership clubs were reporting an annual combined loss of 10M a year . Like in SL there are clubs like Gloucester & Leicester that report a surplus , and the RFU are always keen to promote that.
trouble is with a bumper BT deal ( 152M ) for Heineken Cup games there is more money around to offset these debts than in SL.

Can't wait for BBC Southern regions inside out this week where they will be running the same story about Union and the huge debt its clubs are in.

Oh wait a min

If 2 teams are carrying £41 mill debt between them, it has to be including stadium financing. Saints had Zero debt going into last season, but will be paying what equates to a mortgage of £20 million for the stadium. Thats not real debt as the directors have paid for it and will never ask for it and can never get it back, but technically is a debt, i assume Warrington have the same situation

This gets to the core of the issue - there are accounting matters that means you have to be VERY careful with how you deal with this, and what conclusions you arrive. I haven't looked at any SL clubs account for a few years (previously needed to due to the job I had), but there's very limited information in them, as clubs can take a lot of exemptions due to their size (they are not 'big' companies as classified in law). With access to only publicly available information, I would suggest if would be nearly impossible to draw an accurate assessment of the health of the clubs' finances from this.

I would disagree on a technical/legal point that Saints' debt isn't not 'real' (I would say it most certainly is), but I take your point. There are different types of debt, and this kind of asset backed debt is less of an issue that that arising from cumulative losses. I'm not fully up to speed on Saints' specific situation, but I would be surprised if the Directors have bank rolled this, and expect these are external loans - though I thought Tesco were involved, and paying for a large portion/funding was coming from sale of KR, so maybe Saints aren't carrying any debt re the new stadium? I'm pretty sure Warrington aren't, as Tesco paid for our ground



Also, lots of sports clubs end up in the situation where an owner who spends money is not technically spending his own money, but is instead giving a loan to the club (or rather the company that operates the club) who then spends it. (There are other ways to do this of course, but this is one possibility - how this is actually done will most likely depends on the tax affairs of the owner/club, and other factors such as impact on credit ratings, etc). This will show as debt in the clubs book though. Whether they ever have to repay this or not is a moot point, and ultimately depends on how the current owners exit the business. Without having a lot of (private) information, it's difficult to say whether there is an issue at a particular club, and ever single club will be unique here.

It's a complicated area - no doubt the BBC will make this clear to the lay person who watches tonight, and they won't be running with irresponsible headline grabbing tabloid journo type flannel...

i'm just trying to see how any club could possiby be in debt over £20 million, it simply has to be stadium financing, but as you say tesco and the sale of KR covered a good portion of Langtree Park, and at the start of last season we were completely debt free, this was made categorical fact by our chairman. and i doubt warrington, or wigan or leeds have much if any either.
I'll watch this program (its on sky 957 outside of yorkshire) to see though

Well that's 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

What a useless programme.

George Riley needs to take a long hard look at himself. He had the opportunity to deliver a really good piece on RL prior to the new season, and he chooses to do a half- d negetive effort on club debt. Cheers George.

That was spectacularly clueless. Off the top of my head we know that Saints and London and Huddersfield have relied on millions of funding from directors via loans but in no way does that present a present threat to the financial viability of any of those clubs. The directors are rich enough to fund it and don't want repayment. Even at Hull KR they viewed it as a sort of fact of life.

This isn't to say that, as with Bradford and Salford, things could go wrong - but those clubs did not have backers of the size involved elsewhere in the league. Hull KR and Cas are probably (at present) most similar. But the vast majority of this £69m debt is not debt that anyone expects to ever have to pay - therefore it is not a problem for anyone. That piece was just financially illiterate without placing any overall context on who the debts were owed to or for what purpose they had been incurred.

Not "Mr. Rugby League's" finest 10 minutes there. Scaremongering over nothing we didn't already know, based one just one expert. Poor. He was got better results with his flirting over Gabby Logan than whatever he wanted to achieve here.

Completely agree. The debt figure wasn't put into any kind of context. Very sloppy piece.

Very poor, i hope that alledged "finacial expert" is embarrassed to be involved with it

On the contary, he seemed to thrive on his 10 mins of fame.

Cheers George mate, keep banging that drum for TGG.

Wonder if he will get any freebies from Twickers H.Q?

Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?

Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?

Quote ="TrentBarrett"Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?'" I was thinking the same thing - a desperately ill-informed piece of scaremongering, completely missing any context or meaning behind the big scary numbers. Poor show by all concerned; I'd suggest @georgeyboy stick to reading out the scores on 5 Live - investigative journalism is clearly not one of his strengths.

Quote ="TrentBarrett"Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?'" I was thinking the same thing - a desperately ill-informed piece of scaremongering, completely missing any context or meaning behind the big scary numbers. Poor show by all concerned; I'd suggest @georgeyboy stick to reading out the scores on 5 Live - investigative journalism is clearly not one of his strengths.

Tesco didn't help to fund Langtree Park at all but I am quite sure the company contributed towards the cost of the site cleansing and the archeological/other scientific stuff that had to be done before building work could start, just as I'm sure Saints contributed, although the primary funders for that element of the work were the now defunct NWDA plus St Helens Council. The Council also landscaped the site and paid for the bridge linking the site to the town centre plus the lighting and pathway construction. Tesco paid for Tesco to be built; Saints paid for Langtree Park to be built - in part from the sale of Knowsley Road, perhaps with unknown investments also but definitely with the assistance of director loans. One loan alone was £3 million, but that was to pay for all the fit out. I think Saints ran out of money at the end! I get the impression the stadium turned out to be more expensive than it was scheduled to be.

Without Tesco, it is unlikely Saints could have built the stadium but the opposite also applies. Without both those developments taking place, it would not have been financially possible for the site to have been developed as the Council could not have justified the outlay and the NWDA would not have been attracted to the project.

Meanwhile, the Inside Out programme was just a cheap shot by the BBC. I have no idea why they did it. I think journalists should hold the RFL and clubs to account but to do what they did on the launch day just came across as a tad vindictive. And the item itself wasn't up to much anyway. However, mud sticks. The Gruniad online has already picked up on it.

Quote ="TrentBarrett"Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?'" He won't be able to. He's lost the cig packet they were written on.

Quote ="TrentBarrett"Do you think if I email r.j.wilson@shu.ac.uk "financial expert" he will provide me with the data he used to form his sensationalist headline?'" He won't be able to. He's lost the cig packet they were written on.

The links below may shed some light on the financial status of some of our clubs Saints https://www.duedil.com/company/00331905 ... ub-limited Leeds https://www.duedil.com/company/00028301 ... ny-limited Wigan https://www.duedil.com/company/00174692 ... ub-limited Warrington https://www.duedil.com/company/03683966 ... gs-limited Castleford https://www.duedil.com/company/00214373 ... ub-limited Hull https://www.duedil.com/company/03555364 ... ue-limited Hull KR https://www.duedil.com/company/00085808 ... ub-limited London Broncos https://www.duedil.com/company/05322378 ... ue-limited Huddersfield Giants https://www.duedil.com/company/01810029 ... ts-limited I havent used Bradford, Wakefield, Widnes or Salford as they have all recently been in financial bother so have reformed under different names. You can however find their old names on this site.

The links below may shed some light on the financial status of some of our clubs Saints https://www.duedil.com/company/00331905 ... ub-limited Leeds https://www.duedil.com/company/00028301 ... ny-limited Wigan https://www.duedil.com/company/00174692 ... ub-limited Warrington https://www.duedil.com/company/03683966 ... gs-limited Castleford https://www.duedil.com/company/00214373 ... ub-limited Hull https://www.duedil.com/company/03555364 ... ue-limited Hull KR https://www.duedil.com/company/00085808 ... ub-limited London Broncos https://www.duedil.com/company/05322378 ... ue-limited Huddersfield Giants https://www.duedil.com/company/01810029 ... ts-limited I havent used Bradford, Wakefield, Widnes or Salford as they have all recently been in financial bother so have reformed under different names. You can however find their old names on this site.

Quote ="The Chair Maker"The links below may shed some light on the financial status of some of our clubs https://www.duedil.com/company/00331905 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00028301 ... ny-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00174692 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/03683966 ... gs-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00214373 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/03555364 ... ue-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00085808 ... ub-limited I havent used Bradford, Wakefield, Widnes or Salford as they have all recently been in financial bother so have reformed under different names. You can however find their old names on this site.'" That should come with a health warning really... A word of warning to anyone using this information - be extremely careful what conclusions you draw. This is pulled from publically available information, and as with all privately owned sports clubs, the legal structures behind the clubs is likely to be complicated, and you are not seeing the full picture here.

Quote ="The Chair Maker"The links below may shed some light on the financial status of some of our clubs https://www.duedil.com/company/00331905 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00028301 ... ny-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00174692 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/03683966 ... gs-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00214373 ... ub-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/03555364 ... ue-limited https://www.duedil.com/company/00085808 ... ub-limited I havent used Bradford, Wakefield, Widnes or Salford as they have all recently been in financial bother so have reformed under different names. You can however find their old names on this site.'" That should come with a health warning really... A word of warning to anyone using this information - be extremely careful what conclusions you draw. This is pulled from publically available information, and as with all privately owned sports clubs, the legal structures behind the clubs is likely to be complicated, and you are not seeing the full picture here.

To echo the sentiments of others here, that was a disgraceful piece of television, what a pretentious so and so Riley really is. Dare I say the BBC is a bit miffed at the RFL using ITV for their advertising campaign?

Couldn't agree more with the sentiments above. It seems to me they BBC have thought - hmm, RL clubs seem in a sticky spot (after Bradford & Salford), George, you're our RL man, go do a piece on it. Then he, and some other financially clueless bods have tried to pull a piece together, found a self-styled academic 'expert' (who is listed on Hallam's website under their media contacts section), who has given them some headline grabbing strapline. No self-respecting professional would have spouted the that he did; it was ill-advised, ill-informed, ill-intended.

I don't subscribe to the usual paranoia about RL's media coverage, and the same applies here - I just think this is out-and-out poor reporting of the worst kind.