There are a number of ways at looking at assets and liabilities.
The analysis in this section is on the overall club issue, not just the footballing side of things.
The assets are made up of the ground and the like, these are known as fixed assets. There are also the players, these are known as intangible assets. The worth of a player can go up or down and is less dependable than a fixed asset of land, or a building. The assets are shown below.
This shows that the assets are fairly flat from 2002. Before the construction of the Ricoh, Highfield Road was sold and rented back. This meant that the owned assets went down to under £1m. Most clubs seem to do well out of selling an old ground and starting up afresh in a new one. There is no evidence that this is the case for Coventry.
As well as fixed assets there are things that are called current assets. Current assets covers money you could easily get your hands on. So this would be things like cash at the bank, or money owed to you that you expect to get in soon.
On the opposite side of things is how much the club owes, its liabilities.
These can again be split in to two, current liabilities and long-term
liabilities. Current liabilities are things that need to be paid within the next
year. Often these are not paid off within a year, and are just re-financed later
on. Long-term liabilities are things like mortgages, or other long term loans.
Long-term debt is less of an issue than short-term.
The first graph below show the balance between current assets and current
liabilities. The improvement in 2002 came from the sale of Highfield Road. So
the graph above shows the fixed assets going down by about £18m and the
intangible assets reducing by £8m, the graph below shows the liabilities
reducing by ~£22m. The 2003 figure also improves as more players are cashed in.
The drop in 2004 and each subsequent years comes from the club losing money every year.
The next graph shows how all the assets of the club look like when compared to what has to be paid in the next year. This shows a severe problem. If everything was sold, all the assets, all the players, absolutely everything then in 2007 the club would be left still owing £22.8m, just in the next 12 months, with things getting steadily worse all the time.
The last way to look at this is looking at all the assets against all the money owed. This is obviously worse than the previous graph as it also includes long-term money owed. In Coventry's case this is steady at about £13m. So the overall position was that £36m would be left over being owed.
