Depreciation is a real incurred cost. Its just a means of averaging capital expenditure over the likely lifetime of the item. It can't be ignored.

Agreed 6mdm. Would love some more detail on why the stadium is costing more to run and what other increases are being made in our overheads.

* depreciation .... should not be ignored, not should be ignored. Freudian slip?

The problem is none of us know what is driving the overheads. We can reasonably accurately guess what is driving cost of sales but you can chunk all sorts of things into admin expenses. What we also don't know is whether we would incur most of these costs regardless of owning versus leasing a stadium. I agreed moving to Plough Lane has accelerated the decision we are being forced to make now because we built a stadium we couldn't afford but player salaries would have killed us too eventually by remaining at Kingsmeadow with lower revenues.

Yes SA but higher stadium running costs and increased general operating expenses are core factors as well.

Isn't most of our annual loss the depreciation cost of the stadium? Wooden dollars really as we maintain the stadium as a cost as well.

I enjoyed the KM days in non-league it was a crap stadium but it was ours it was home especially before a return to Plough Lane started feeling like a realistic possibility rather than a dream. But for all the things I dislike about our new stadium and how much it cost and continues to cost there’s no part of me that wishes we’d stayed at KM.

Most (?) Clubs have already fully depreciated their stadiums with some exceptions of course. The annual non-cash cost of providing depreciation is about one million

At KM, income would be about 2/3rds of what it is now, so we would already be under pressure with what we could spend on players (the 50% rule)

I thought we showed that our revenue was pretty good compared to other L1 clubs but our player wage bill is quite low? If so, what else is causing our annual loss?

Trig. He has a lot of pseudonyms

The reason we are uncompetitive and loss making is most likely because of the amount that wages have increased in L1/2 as a whole, not because of the costs of the stadium. The stadium has probably put us in a much stronger position than if we were still at kingsmeadow.

Pint of Harveys £5.25 is fine by me.

Under Sam Hamman's stewardship, planning permission for a new site in the borough was allowed to elapse. Read into that what you will but I will always believe he shafted us.

Nice pub the little Windsor, bit pricey though

There is a lot of work being done on it.

I believe so Spit ... it's going to be a Sports Bar. My new local is The Little Windsor.

Thanks Airsy :) Didn’t know Bertrand had joined the channel.

Just read in the paper that Wimbleball reservoir in Somerset is at 13% capacity. What a great name that would be for our style of play ... whatever that is?

6MDm – I don’t disagree with you that there is an emotional aspect to having one’s own ground – but it comes at a significant cost. One which I have repeatedly stated I am happy to pay my personal share of. The Independent Football Regulator found that 17 EFL clubs are currently spending more than their total revenue even without player’s wages. So to blame everything on the playing budget doesn’t tally with the facts. I suspect that our own men’s players wages are substantially less than 45% of our revenue (but someone may have an accurate figure). The rest presumably goes on running the stadium, academy, Women’s team etc. I believe our revenue puts us in the top half of League 1 Clubs but our playing budget is second from bottom. Whatever the benefits of owning one’s own ground versus ground sharing, I’m sure that we can both agree that the move to PL has increased our losses and accelerated the need to “sell out”.

Agreed 6MDM, no criticism of your post implied. Owning your own stadium seems important to me but I have no issue with WIJG starting a discussion about it.

OI - I agree the stadium does have to generate enough surplus income to cover player salaries, which ours does not and we cannot keep relying on fortuitous cup draws and player sales to plug the gap. My post was purely in response to the suggestion by WIJG that we'd be better off not owning our own ground as we'd have those salary costs to cover and no sources of revenue other than admission prices to do so as no doubt a landlord would keep any profits from concessions or other matchday income. We'd still have to pay the matchday costs like stewards and would probably lose a lot of our volunteers that save us money. All this assumes someone else would be prepared to buy and own a stadium and lease it to us on acceptable terms as if we couldn't make a profit owning it then how would they without doing something drastic and unpleasant. The Italian examples were of teams sharing a state owned ground as opposed to one of them owning it and another one leasing it. I doubt the Merton taxpayers would be too pleased if they bought our ground and leased it back to us. Other than WIJG, I doubt any of us would be in favour of being tenants as someone else's ground in another location not in Merton.

They sell poppies in there each year.

I didn't was being sarky:-)

STD- why did you believe the internet about W’spoons?