I agree the main links are just giving a bit of an taster with snippets of info and not the full financial status, but they do link to the subsidiary and parent companies that such as Warrington have.
Drill down and you can view the actual accounts if you are so inclined which is what you should really be looking at , however even accounts can be structured in ways to hide things.

True, however I think most RL clubs accounts that I look at tend to give a decent broad picture as not many are bundled in with other operations - turnover levels tend to be just the operation of RL clubs and owned stadia so it gives a good indication and an understanding of direction of travel. At the margins you can chuck in all sorts of management charges etc that make the picture difficult to decipher but when looking at one year compared to another in the same company they are usually broadly understandable.

Comparing one club to another, especially on the Balance Sheet side is though particularly fraught with danger without knowing the full picture e.g. Headingley, excluding the East Stand, is in Leeds' accounts at a depreciated 1997 value (around £5m). This bears no relation to what the site is actually worth, either its value in use to the company or on the open market as a piece of property.

Quote: TrentBarrett "Do you think if I email We'll see - I've just e-mailed him. Will update people on here if he gets back to me...

Quote: TrentBarrett "Do you think if I email We'll see - I've just e-mailed him. Will update people on here if he gets back to me...

Its just cheapskate journalism knowing they can get away with it without any repercussions. If they tried that with a much larger influential governing sport body they would have been taken to task.
However there is concern that only 3 clubs have decent asset and book values in Leeds, Warrington and St Helens.

MjM, you're right, but obviously have some financial nouse to be able to work this out; the layman isn't. And the BBC have taken the BS approach (that's Balance Sheet, or Bull Sh*t, take your pick), which is as you say dangerous. £68m of debt - so what if you have £100m of assets?!

I'm seething over this...

I think this blog post sums it up perfectly. thersw.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/ ... y-in-hell/

I think this blog post sums it up perfectly. thersw.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/ ... y-in-hell/

Probably as embarrassed as KPMG were on their assessments at the last round of licensing.

I wouldn't worry. If there are many more like me they won't understand a word of what they have just read and so won't be able to draw any conclusions at all - other than they are totally ignorant when it comes to corporate finances!

Oh yeah I'm not saying this pillock they wheeled out from Sheffield Uni or wherever wasn't talking out of their backside. He could have validly made an argument that RL is persistently living beyond its means because most clubs rely on the benevolence of rich directors to prop them up. I would make a whole bunch of equally valid arguments as to why that's not generally a problem and why it's the nature of sport and RL historically.

But this piece just didn't make that case. It went all big on "debt" with absolutely no context or, seemingly, understanding of how sports finance actually works.

I have a lot of time for George Riley but this was shoddy and superficial beyond belief.

Now can anyone help me: on 2nd March 2000 BBC Radio Five Live ran a piece in their "On the Line" series which coincided with the start of the Super League season. It was based, would you believe it, on a Sheffield University student's thesis or dissertation or something and noted that RL had less viewers on Sky than it had had on BBC before Super League. And therefore Rugby League was doomed. I seem to recall it was under the flawed misapprehension that the Stones Bitter Championship was televised on the BBC. There are some amazing similarities between that and this - but does anyone by any chance have a copy of that programme which was a hatchet job of a much more impressive scale than today's? I had a tape recording ( )of it somewhere but all I can find now is an empty cassette case with the date & details.

Andy Wilson ‏@andywiz must be something about the bbc and sheffield hallam. i remember them doing something apocalyptic on this 13 years ago. books.google.co.uk/books?id=lGri ... CDwQ6AEwAg … not sure if that helps.

Andy Wilson ‏@andywiz must be something about the bbc and sheffield hallam. i remember them doing something apocalyptic on this 13 years ago. books.google.co.uk/books?id=lGri ... CDwQ6AEwAg … not sure if that helps.

Haha I used to go to Sheffield Hallam.

Quote: MjM "That's the one - the BBC based a whole half hour of national radio programming to a load of absolute rubbish.'" Here is the complete thesis: shura.shu.ac.uk/3161/ Basically anything which showed a positive trend was dismissed as only a tiny variance whilst anything going the other way was played up. Also completely oblivious to RL being on Sky pre-96 so compares BBC audiences before SL to Sky audience levels post-SL and concludes that the game had seen a massive reduction in viewers.

Quote: MjM "That's the one - the BBC based a whole half hour of national radio programming to a load of absolute rubbish.'" Here is the complete thesis: shura.shu.ac.uk/3161/ Basically anything which showed a positive trend was dismissed as only a tiny variance whilst anything going the other way was played up. Also completely oblivious to RL being on Sky pre-96 so compares BBC audiences before SL to Sky audience levels post-SL and concludes that the game had seen a massive reduction in viewers.