Rob Fielding says the latest club accounts are a major cause for concern and argues that supporters are right to ask searching questions of the owners.
Rob Fielding writes…
Introduction
This article comes on the back of the latest Port Vale accounts. These were for the period of 2024-25 when the club achieved promotion from League Two under Darren Moore.
The club recorded a loss of £6.1m. This is after previous losses of £3.8m and £3.4m meaning the club has lost over £13m in the last three financial years.
This article looks at whether those losses are symptomatic of financial pressures affecting all Football League clubs or are the Vale’s losses bigger than average. It also comes up with some suggestions on how to address these losses.
Your comments are welcome at the end of the feature.
How does Vale's loss compare?
Should Vale fans be concerned or are these losses just an example of how Football League clubs are performing financially?
You’ve probably guessed which way my answer will go… this one Vale fan is very definitely in the “concerned” corner.
I’m grateful to OVF forum member ValiantHan who posted a tweet which showed of the eight League Two clubs (remember Vale were in League Two when these losses were made) to post their 2024-25 accounts, showing that Vale’s losses are by far the biggest.
The average amount lost is £2.57m – so Vale’s losses are more than double the average. The table is below.
League Two club losses for 2024-25
During 2024-25 Port Vale were in League Two. The eight clubs who were in the same division during 2024-25 who have also submitted accounts are:
- Port Vale: £6.1m loss
- Gillingham: £5.5m loss
- Swindon Town: £2.57m loss
- Chesterfield: £2.3m loss
- Walsall: £1.97m loss
- Crewe Alex: £1.16m loss
- Wimbledon: £0.6m loss
- Cheltenham: £0.32m loss
- Average: £2.57m loss
Are these losses justified?
I could answer this in a single word – No. However, to expand on this… my answer is “no” because…
Football
- Have the club improved football-wise? Well, two promotions and (what is looking like) two relegations suggests not. A £13m loss over four years has taken us back to where the club was.
- Have we forged a football identity? Again, no. We’re not a club with an emphasis on developing youth players. We don’t have a set style of play. We don’t scour the non-league for hopefuls. We seem to bounce from one philosophy to another. It suggest money is thrown at the latest Vale football fad.
Commercial
- Has there been major infrastructure improvements? This is a more nuanced argument. The commercial side has benefitted from corporate facilities being improved (which begs the question why is the club still losing money hand over fist), there have been some improvements pitchside (a new scoreboard, turnstiles, new toilet blocks) but hardly enough to justify being £17m down. Furthermore, the expensive pitch improvements seem to have catastrophically failed.
- Are these losses a symptom of a wider malaise among Football League clubs. I would argue – no. There are undoubtedly clubs in worse condition than us (Sheff Wed or Reading for example). But there are also lots of similar clubs in a far better position financially (Walsall or AFC Wimbledon, for instance). For example, Lincoln City, currently pushing for promotion to the Championship, recorded a loss of £2.9m at the same time Vale recorded a loss of £6.1m. Not only is Vale’s loss above the League Two average of £2.57m* but it’s above the League One average of circa £5m**.
* figure an average of those eight clubs who submitted accounts (see table above)
** admittedly this is a 2024 figure taken from this Deloitte report
Lincoln City, currently pushing for promotion to the Championship, recorded a loss of £2.9m at the same time Vale recorded a loss of £6.1m…
Hold on, is criticism of our owners justified?
I’ve posted concerns about Vale’s recent finances earlier this year and a typical response I get is along these lines…
Be careful what you wish for. The Shanahans are the best owners we could have and there isn’t exactly going to be a queue wanting to take over a club with £17m debts.
So, let’s deal with the last part first. Who created those debts? The club wasn’t debt-free when they took over (there were three years of payments to former owner Norman Shanahan) but we are talking around 2-3 million pounds owing – not the £17m the total now stands at. We haven’t even had the accounts for the current season which, even allowing for the cup run, are likely to be losses in the millions. At the current rate, the club is losing £4m on average a year (remember the average in League Two of £2.57m) and surely it is the owners’ responsibility to be fiscally responsible? If they are not then as supporters we should be able to be concerned and ask questions.
Now onto the first part. It’s important to know that criticism of club losses does not equate to a call for new ownership. I’m not saying the Shanahans should go, far from it. What I’m asking instead is (to give a spoiler of a future part of this feature) is for them to try and run the club more sustainably and to be more transparent with the fans about the finances.
Let’s also face a fact. The Shanahans will not be around forever. It’s in their interests and the club’s that Port Vale FC is an attractive prospect for the next owners (or should that be custodians) of our club. Even if the loans are cancelled as many think they will be – spending beyond the club’s means is putting the owners out of pocket and its just financial good sense to not waste money.
Amend: this article was corrected on 31st March to correct a sentence which said the club was “debt-free” when the Shanahans took over.
Solutions
I wouldn’t want this article to just pick faults and not at least try to offer solutions. Here is my three point plan:
- Be more transparent. I’ve already mentioned this in previous opinion pieces but I feel the club needs to take the time to explain the accounts. It doesn’t have to be everything (some things are commercially sensitive) but an overview would be good (AFC Wimbledon do a nice one link here and screengrab opposite). Explanations won’t stop the losses but if they show a justification (or simply a reason) then they make stop ill-informed conclusions being made (and I bet some of you at this point will say – that’s an ironic comment to put in a mere fan opinion piece). They may allow more understanding of financial considerations and a more informed debate.
- Have an honest internal review. The fans don’t have a right to know everything going on at the club and some things should be inhouse. I would hope that in the light of such losses, the club are taking a good, hard look at themselves. What is causing these losses? Do people need to be replaced? Is there a specific problem? Is there a clear path to lower losses?
- I suspect one issue that may arise from an internal view is an issue with the football side of the business. I think a great proportion of the £6m losses are football-related. The Shanahans have previously admitted that they are not footballing experts. Does the club need to recruit a senior figure with in-depth football knowledge? Before people shout “David Flitcroft” and “not another wage” this could save more than it costs. For instance, if a football-savvy person can reduce the losses to the division average of £2.57m it would be well worth the appointment.
Have I got it all wrong?
This is merely one Vale fan’s opinion. I’m no financial expert but I do care deeply about my football club.
These opinion pieces are not a closed shop. I really welcome your comments, your corrections and your own thoughts. Your comments add to this article and I always like reading them.
So, if you’ve got thoughts, suggestions or ideas of your own on how to address this issue, please post them in the comments section below.
The owners should be asked to make available the full Management Profit and Loss Account and not just the Balance Sheet that gets filed with Companies House.
The Management Profit and Loss Account would show clearly why we are making such a huge loss
Flitcroft was a mistake, Flitcroft’s final act to appoint Darren Moore was a mistake not just on a football front, but due to his like of large squads a mistake on a financial front. Giving him a 5 years contract was also madness. John Brady seems to be the first sensible appointment in quite some time. I don’t know what budget he will be given for next season but I trust in his ability to assemble a squad on a reasonable budget. He has done this before. I have two concerns. 1. Given that Brady was out of work for a year, how many of his previously trusted contacts are relevant or available. Will he be forced to retain the services of coaches or the recruitment team as he has no alternatives. Which brings me to my second concern which is the people that are still in place; namely Hancock and the recruitment team. The recruitment team in particular have a lot to answer for after assembling a large, imbalanced squad on wages that have never been seen before at Vale. What was the plan? I hope they take some of their expensively assembled dross with them on the way out of the door at the end of the season.
I’m also cautiously optimistic about Brady. He seems to have his head screwed on and given the hand he was given, I think he has improved the team’s performances noticeably. However, I think seeing where we sit after the summer window will be the major test for him. He faces a massive job to both trim down and strengthen the squad.
Is it possible that the owners are using Vale’s losses against profits from their other companies meaning they dont pay tax. So they could be losing less personally than we think. I agree that losses are still ridiculous
I think the club just needs to decide what kind of club (football wise) they want to be. In the past there was all the talk of being ‘championship ready’ which was never realistic, but I agree that on the football side there isn’t much of an identity, which makes the losses more mysterious. We could be a club in the ‘punches above its weight’ category – like Lincoln, Wycombe, Stevenage or even Accrington in recent years – a club with a small, focused squad that spends its money wisely. Or we could be a club that tries to spend its way to higher divisions. But we’re neither of these kind of clubs – we’re of presumably similar ambition to the likes of Wimbledon, yet we don’t appear to have as much financial common sense even though we have a bigger fanbase. I agree with the article, but am still incredibly appreciative of all that the Shanahans have done and continue to do.
Dan R – great comment thanks. Your “identity” remark was what I was trying to aim at in the article and I think you’ve expressed it far better.
Rob, you do deserve a pat on the back, once again you’ve put together a good educated article which the club should not ignore. Firstly can I say, while I don’t agree with you about bringing in a footballing brain. If Vale can find a candidate on a part time basis who can reduce Vale’s losses by £3-£4 million a season then that’s a no brainier, but he wouldn’t be at the Vale very long. Personally I don’t understand how these massive losses are actually football related. I thought your playing budget was set by Football League Rules, a certain % of your income. Also if on your average league two losses (I know it’s a bit selective) but if you take both Port Vale and Gillingham who have massive losses out of the equation, the average loss between the other clubs is just £1,48million, less than a quarter of Vale’s losses. As for the scoreboard I’m sure one of our main sponsors paid for that. The Railway toilets, I was told work wasn’t started for 12 months because the club was waiting for the insurance claim to come through, if this wasn’t the case, WHY wasn’t the rebuild started immediately, save paying out thousands on portaloo’s on the car park? The Running of the club is an absolute mystery to me. Any other sort of business being run like this would be closed down, yet the owners still seem very reluctant to allow anyone to buy into the club, if rumours are correct.
It feels like a bit of a hatchet job this. Carol is not daft and she has invested heavily in recent seasons to try and achieve success. There is no indication whatsoever that Vale themselves will be saddled with this debt. It was an investment following our first relegation which sadly twice hasn’t paid off.
It also defies logic that the Shanahans don’t have end goal to make the club sustainable. It would go against everything else they have done in business.
Port Vale has always had difficulties with sustainability, yet the Shanahans have speculated to accumulate and I thank them for it.
Let’s just hope things can eventually settle on the football side and then attendances will hopefully stay around the 8000 mark. Maybe then, with the odd cup run and player sale, we can reach that sustainable holy grail.
Mike, so we go on blind faith? I’ve actually no problem if the owners want to do that but I’d rather have that as a firm commitment from then than simply hoping it’s true. Otherwise, you’re just hoping our £17m total debt (and that will surely be higher if they stay around for some more years) will handily go away because the owners come across as good people.
Second point… speculate to accumulate. Where has the £6m loss taken us? Did it establish us in League One or are we back in League Two wheras Doncaster and Wimbledon (with tiny losses compared to us) stay up? In my view, there’s speculating to accumulate and then there’s throwing money at a problem hoping it works. After three years of “speculation” costing the club millions what have we got to show for it?
As for your third point… well we’ve just had £1m+ player sales this year and a £2m+ cup run. So, on the sustainable logic we should be somewhere near break even when the next accounts come out. I’ll see you next March to see if that is the case.
I’d make it clear. I’m very happy for the Shanahans to succeed and for the club to be successful. However, as a fan you can’t just clap everything good or bad. The fanbase should praise the good things and criticise the bad. I cannot see how being concerned about racking up £13m of debt in three years is a “hatchet job” and not genuine and deserved criticism of the club for failing to control their financial situation. If you’re not worried about a League Two club losing £6m in a season then, in my view, you’re burying your head in the sand.
What opinion piece did you want? From your comments I can only gather it should be “Thanks Port Vale’s fantastic owners for speculating and accumulating (and by the way do you mind not calling in the £17m debt when you call it a day)”?
Lets face facts the budget isn’t going to be there for brady next season. we need to decide as a club what to do over next season, 3 seasons and 5 seasons. For me we need to start as a club been pro active in every area instead of reactive, footballing decisions made at the board level with every decision questioned healthy discussions and pennies counted for (E.g. signing of Marvin Johnson when we had Headley, Gordon, Clark and Sharrock who can play LB/LWB). A Director of Football might be or might not be the answer, if it is please not Flitcroft, but we need to start looking at players we can develop and sell on for a profit, a sort of Peterborough model from the late 2000’s to early 2020’s. picking up players from the national league such as Tolaj, released players from prem academies such as Kyle John and academy players like Dipepa and Tommy McDermott, develop them and selling them on for a profit. The next accounts may look a little healthier with the sales of Cole, Curtis and Tolaj plus 3 big cup runs, but with the potential relegation looming and loss of revenue from the league like broadcasting and prize money wont help. Brady feels like the right man for the job but its a big job on his hands of reducing the size of the squad but also improving the quality of it. so far what we’ve seen is that he has improved the quality on the pitch with a limited budget in January and minimal time working with the squad on the training pitch.