What challenge, I'm just pointing out my viewpoint.
You said I couldn't use the Tranmere accounts to do anything more than STFC.
Interestingly, their football revenue has grown 58% in the past 4 years against an increase in total attendances of approx 6%, however, their commercial income showed a 47% decline in the same period. Their football based income grew 50% per paying customer (that, as I understand it is all football related income, so includes prize money as well as gate receipts).
If I were at the club, I'd be looking in the Commercial Revenue to determine what that drop was influenced by.
You would look at the football income and like to extract prize money to see what the real average per spectator was, but it certainly looks like they have improved in increasing the spend per customer.
Over that same period, the wages paid to staff have decreased by 4%. Against a backdrop of a 32% total income increase, that is good news. Employee costs account for over half the total expenditure of the business.
The football staff numbers have declined from 57 to 44, and given the largely static nature of the total wage bill for all staff, it seems likely they have achieve their performance by reducing the squad size to account for higher average salaries (which is now 19,4k per employee in the business, up from 9.2k in 2019). They have also limited the non playing staff, having 378 before Covid and only returning to 144 in the time since. Given the limited change in total staff costs, those non playing staff can only account for a very small % of the total spend (their numbers fluctuated significantly, but only small changes were seen in total wages). Looking at the league table, one might be able to hazard a guess that it isn't helping them on the field.
Don't get me wrong, it still leaves loads of questions unanswered, but I cannot do that with STFC's accounts.
Also, as a footnote, if we remove Depreciation charges, their average loss per year for the last four years is..... -55k per year.
It seem like they revalued their ground in 2020, adding a massive chunk to the Balance Sheet. The associated depreciation charge is making it look like they lose money, but they seem to trade at a profit. Ours isn't expressly identified in the P&L, but looking at our Balance sheet, we have a zero depreciation charge.
