I expected worse from our accounts to be honest but I dread to think how they will look at this point next season.

Just on Cas and their ground I think that is a loophole that can be used for the IMG rankings that will help them on the financial part of the gradings. The sceptic in me also wonders if longterm leases are allowed to be manipulated in the same way and could we see the sale of the lease back to Bradford go through before the final IMG rankings and see them also revalue the lease to a much higher amount than they will be gifted it for.

As before there’s hardly a club that isn’t affected and the game should be renamed Super Debt and clubs can manipulate the figures all the like but it won’t alter the truth which will come out sooner or later.

Just shows you though what sort of system is in place where you can gain an advantage through corruption by manipulation and the integrity of clubs if they would stoop to doing that.

Don’t Whitehaven own their own ground. They might get in to SL

Certainly help their IMG score.....

Won't make any difference to Bradford's score this year as finances are for the 3 years up to the end of Nov 2023.

I'm not sure about the rules regarding leasehold disclosures. All a lease is, is a glorified rent entitling the lessee benefits of ownership for a finite period of time, and if they disclose it as an asset they'd have to disclose the lease payments obligations thus effectively cancelling out the asset. But I stand to be corrected.

Dewsbury have a lease agreement with the Council but the only disclosure in their 2023 accounts is £10k worth of "improvements to leasehold property". Incidentally, they lost nearly £100k in 2023 and have net liabilities of £345k.

Well, I could be wrong about leasehold disclosures.

Looking at the 2023 accounts for St Helens, they include a 50 year long term leasehold valued at an eye watering £31 million. However, strip out this leasehold and the net liabilities stand at an astonishing £29 million. Leaving out the surplus on revaluation, Saints lost £2 million in 2023. Blumming heck. And Saints' ultimate parent company, Crowther Street Holdings Limited, is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands

Its funny listening to some Town fans go on about how much of a mess our club is in, and there is no doubt looking at the accounts that it is a long way from being rosy, but you take a look at Town accounts and by the time the timelines line up they will likely have more debt than us but the simple difference is having a person who is willing to keep pumping money in to service that debt. Pretty much all sports clubs are built on foundations made of quick sand and for the most part it just takes one person to walk away to ruin a club.

TF posting some of the account details from other clubs just shows how fragile everything is and London normally ends up looking the worst and people still think having a club in London should be a big part of the RFL strategy yet those sets of accounts just help show a club in London at a decent level is just not sustainable.

Yes, one of the conditions of SKY signing up was the inclusion of Paris and London in SL. Well, almost 30 years on and London are getting hammered with crowds less than 2k but the powers that be still seem obsessed with expansionism and including French teams even though their national team is as bad as it's ever been.

SKY'a involvement was supposed to transform Rugby League and spread the geographical compass, but ironically the advent of full time rugby has made the whole financial situation far worse and it doesn't bear thinking about what mess will be left if they do pull the rug, even though I have no sympathy with the SL clubs whatsoever.

If SKY would have left us alone I'm sure we'd still be playing at Thrum Hall and the sport as a whole would still be part time, finacially more stable and probably more entertaining to watch.

Hull FC lost nearly £1 million in 2023 and had net liabilities of £2.8 million. Included in the balance sheet is £1.5 million "player valuations"s" valued on a player compensation value basis. Well I never! I didn't know they could do this. A junk asset imo. So if that's stripped out the net liabilities would be over £4 million, with the main creditors being trade creditors of £1.2 million (what on earth could that be? Rent?) and £2.8 million "other borrowings".

I must admit, I didn't think clubs would be so heavily in debt. Surely one of the main IMG criteria would be that clubs should be solvent, as creditors (even directors) can never be relied upon to not call in the debt.

Aye, but as I've said elsewhere, IMG are setting questions to suit the answers. Solvency would obviously be beyond IMG rigging a question.

Hope I'm not boring you all digging up all the clubs' accounts.

Now it's the turn of Hull KR. Not much detail re the creditors breakdown because the accounts are abbreviated, but they lost over £360k in 2023 and had net liabilities of £5.4 million. As the 4 non blondes once sang ..... "What's going on?"

Keep going, it's very interesting.

Not sure how to classify the accounts but under the outside info category it’s up there with the best of it, keep going.

Pretty sure that's not true (Sky have denied it) but it was what Lindsay wanted