In all honesty in the cold light of day other than RL fans (who on the whole love to knock the sport and not build it up) who the hell will take the slightest bit of interest in this programme? It might be a tool for the Beeb to use in their next round of TV rights negotiations, but cant see many others being bothered.

Potential sponsors if they are affected will I am sure do their due dilligence and make their minds up accordingly.

I suspect that the levels of debts are affected by the sugar daddies at each club. Hull for example have made losses since the Heatheringtons departed the scene, but this will be written off over the long term. London are supported by a rich benefactor, who admittedly could walk away at a moments notice and leave them high and dry. Its a problem most sports clubs of any level have, yet it is one that always seems to be resolved.
Wire are used as an example, but lets face it that could be considered to be a house of cards as well. If Moran goes (no sign of that happening I know) who will take the club on.

Lets all start building the game up and stop knocking it for the sake of knocking it. The RFL are announcing new partners at the moment and have a World Cup which should bring in some good publicity. (Though I fear another cock up there with the venues chosen for games) But thats for then not now in the build up to the start of a new season.

Game should grow a thicker skin. Fed up of people who see concerns or criticism as "running the game down". Call it that if you like, but if a player wasn't performing and got shouted at by his coach we wouldn't be happy if his response was to say "stop running me down, talk me up!".

The sport is massively underperforming, it's administrators are a bunch of clowns and the more people make this point the better as far as I'm concerned. Great sport, let down by incompetent leaders.

Without the beeb providing any detail on the breakdown the headline figure strikes me as somewhat tabloid journalism... The total figure feels wrong (almost 5m per club) so has surely been inflated by long term sustainable development debts such as those from building new stadiums. Also the total number includes at least a 20% fudge factor since it is based on the accounts of only 11 clubs.

I'd be interested to hear how they have justified the headline if anyone watches it (am down south and probably won't be bothered to be sucked in by their headline and seek it out on the iplayer)

I've already posted in the Wire forum as to why I think this is shoddy journalism.

However, I have a burning question that I hope someone can answer: two clubs apparently have significant debts, that mean that the others (nine clubs) have an average of £3m debt each. So nine clubs have £27m between them, meaning the other two have £41m?!?! Who are these clubs, are how are they structured to allow them to carry so much debt without folding??

Its just a cheap shot at RL, timed to impact on the start of the season.
As mentioned by another poster, you wont "rugger" mentioned in a bad light, not ever.
Is it the old school tie that prevents them getting a bad press or, the threat of the 6 nations being moved from the Beeb.

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 ?
rlhard up wasp fail to pay playersrl
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 ..
rlchiefs aim for finacial parityrl
' 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...

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.