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.

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.