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. What has not been shown that is in the accounts is "goodwill". Goodwill is the amount recognised in the accounts for having bought a business for more than it seems to be worth when you look at its assets.
This shows that the fixed assets are fairly flat as you would expect unless a new ground, or stand is built. The valeu of the players goes up and down a bit more. The player value only shows the value of players bought in.
There are some wonderfully optimistic comments in the accounts from the board. One of these is what they value the players at. So in 2005 for example the books have a value of £5.8m for the players, the board say that they believe the players are worth "approximately £26m".
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.
If you take all the club assets and all the club liabilities you get another picture of how the club is doing. In the case of Palace you can see in the graph below that if the club sold all their assets they still wouldn't have enough money to pay off all the people they owe money to. This doesn't look very healthy, but it also masks the fact that the "goodwill" mentioned earlier. All the figures shown below included over £6m worth of this goodwill that makes the figures look better than they really are. This means that if the club sold the ground, and all the players they would probably still be left £17m short of paying off everyone they owe money to.
