Latest Yeovil Town News (Page 2)

On Friday 15th October, we broadcast a long interview with Nicholas Brayne, Chief Strategy Advisor at Yeovil Town FC, which went on for almost two hours and covered a huge range of topics which we at the Gloverscast felt fans wanted answers on. Since the interview was broadcast, there have been a wide range of opinions (both positive and negative) about some of the things which Nicholas said and  a request for a transcript of the interview to be made available.

You can still (and forever) listen to the interview in here – click HERE is you want to do that – and here the unedited, unfiltered words which Nicholas spoke. However, to try and make it easier to understand and digestible, we have broken this down in to sections which cover the wide range of topics which were discussed.

In this second posting, we bring you Nicholas’ comments on off-the-field matters including the investment under owner Prabhu Srinivasan, the latest on the ownership of land at Huish Park and his thoughts on the club’s community outreach since the takeover.

Investment by the ownership group

“I have heard people say a few times ‘why doesn’t Prabhu put money in to the club?’ That one irks me a little bit because we are losing a significant amount of money every year, I know how much money he is pumping in to this club. If anyone does not think it is significant, please turn up at Huish Park and we will talk about investment. The elevation on the budget is sizeable in terms of what he has put forward. That went forward under Danny (Webb), but he obviously did not have time to spend it so we are investing it now, so there is a lot of money going in to this club. The question is are we spending it properly. I know what Halifax’s budget is, I know what Barnet’s budget was last year, I know what people are spending.

• Energy: I have become an energy expert because of these price rises. We had a five-year locked in contract and we are facing a cliff edge in November, so I have been working to get us a better deal in terms of energy and a better mix. We are looking at a situation where our energy prices are going to double. 
• Sport England Loan: Under <NAME OF FORMER CHAIRMAN REDACTED>, a loan was taken out with Sport England, but to the best of my knowledge not a single penny has been paid off that loan until last month when we put down £117,000. To try and eat in to that capital, we paid £117,000 off the loan. There are twice a year payments which we pay. There is a payment plan in place for a period of time to take that away. I have to be fair to Sport England and where we are at the moment, we will be paying that off for a considerable amount of time. There are things we would like to do to make that more manageable, but we are facing two very sizeable payments every year that are just shy of £100,000 each, then they peter off.

Now we are dealing with a cocktail of crap, but we knew we were going to have that. We went in to it with our eyes open.

Q. We know of Prabhu, his wife Bhavna and son Sahil, executive chairman Stuart Robins and yourself, is anyone else involved in ‘the ownership group’?
A. “No, that is everyone. There are no other investors other than Inflection Holdings (the company which Prabhu Srinivasan used to take over the club in May), we are pumping the money in. This is all coming from Prabhu, Bhavna and the family. Most owners value a football club at how much money they have put in over the years and how they want to get that back which is the easiest way of it. Most people know they are pumping money in knowing they are not going to get that money back. You would potentially make money out of promotion to the EFL and perhaps Yeovil returning as a League One club. You can look at cultural factors of football becoming more sustainable, the academic perspective is the appetite for debt is lessening because there are fewer investors coming forward. Whether that is true or not is an interesting debate. So, to answer the question, this is money going in to keep the club going rather than an investment where you are seeking a return.

“There is no-one else, there is no-one in the wings. We have not had this conversation, but that is not to say if someone rocked up and said ‘I have got transformative money that could do something amazing for the club’ I am sure we would want to have that conversation. I talk to people all the time who have an interest in football. 99% are there to waste our time, 1% may come and have a meaningful conversation and 0.5% might transact, so it’s a low conversion rate. But we have not had any of those conversations at Huish Park and nor have we introduced anyone like that in to the conversation or sought to have those conversations. I am leaving the opportunity open for future years, but it is not something we have done up until this point.”

Q. We have not seen or heard much from Prabhu since he was last in the UK, why have they not been back?
A. “It is difficult for the family when they want to be there to provide support. Bhavna and Prabhu are mainly in the United Arab Emirates (specifically Dubai) and you have Sahil who is in New York, so it is challenging for them to do this from afar. What prohibits them from being here more is that their visa allows them to do 90 days in the UK and they are now around 55 days each and we have only had the club three or four months. They want to be in the country as much as possible, for example, they are coming over for the Mayor’s Ball (held on Saturday 15^th November). They have to look at when something significant is going to happen and leave something in the bank for unforeseen circumstances.”

Companies House filing

A little extra context on this point because those supporters not on social media may have missed it, but on October 9th the Companies House listing of Yeovil Town Holdings showing the allotment of £500,000 worth of shares in the business. We asked Nicholas about what it means.

“We have a holding company that owns the football club and we are pumping money in through Yeovil Town Holdings Ltd to flow down and meet the challenge of running the football club. The difference in the costs are variable, for example, if we have more home games in a certain month the difference will be less, so what you are retrospectively seeing is the mechanics of the money coming in and how it has been allotted in terms of shareholding in the company as it filters down.

“This is an injection of capital coming in. Nick Crittenden (the club accountant) will do a forecast of what we need every month and we will pump the money in and it falls like rain in to the football club. That is how we keep it funded. Football clubs make a significant loss, a fantastic month for us would be writing a cheque for under £200,000 to keep it going, we have been writing cheques north of that for quite some time.”

Ownership of the land at Huish Park

“If you knew what the council had done in terms of the transaction to keep the football club going, their adaptability with the current group, they have been fantastic. It has always been our extend the terms of the buy-back option, we wanted to push that back to give ourselves a bit of breathing space. The question is ‘why don’t you just buy back the site?’ The truth is when you are looking at a site like that and the amount of money it would cost to buy it back, it is right to put in place an assessment of what you can do with it. It is also important when you consider other partners who may come in and, for example, build a hotel, paddle courts or a wonderful trampoline park! We are working with and have had detailed work done with one particular party about what could be done on the site, and that helps us with where we go with the council and how we then bring Huish Park in to the ownership of the club. If we rushed out and did it overnight, it is no advantage to the club or the ownership group.

Q. Would supporters be consulted on any future development of the site?

A. “There has to be an element of consultation with reality underpinning it. We are open to creative thoughts, but there has to be reality in how we actually operate it. When there is a plan in place we have to have engagement because why would we want something in place where people turn up and say ‘that is just ghastly!’? As a slight caveat, there will have to be a statutory consultation and I don’t people to think their criticisms or support have not been heard because we have run a pseudo consultation, not the official one. So within the parameters of doing things properly within the parameters of planning law, I cannot see why we would not be talking to supporters. You would have extensive consultation, that would be communicated widely, and it is in our interest to run a public event where people can come and see the plans.

“On the site, there will need to be an element of residential development. The reality is to develop that site there are things you are able to do and things you are not able to do. Let us say we want to build a destination there, there would be objections there on a major scale because you are sucking business out of Yeovil town centre. What is needed at the moment is housing, but it doesn’t need to be the whole site. We could put forward a mixed development where you have some residential, maybe a hotel, some kind of leisure development which would make Huish Park a community focus point. There are certain boxes which have to be ticked and at the moment that work is being done and scoped by quite sizeable people who work in that area. We would then have to work with partners because as an ownership we do not know the first thing about building houses, for example.

“Will we see change at the football club? Absolutely. How will that change benefit the club? It will draw capital in to the football club, but the bigger challenge is how does that capital keep benefiting the club by having a residual tail on it? Because it could just come in to the club and it just gets burned because in football we burn money for fun. So we have to think how we do it cleverly, that is the conversation and that is why we extended the buy-back option. Those are the conversations we are having now. Long term sustainability is what we are talking about. For example, if you developed a hotel, there are lots of ways to do it. You could bring in a firm and buy in to that brand and the club runs the hotel as a number of clubs do or you could sell to an investor. This is not as simple as just throwing up a hotel, but there has to be a mixture of things that brings money in to the football club and things that may give us a one-off hit and gives us the money to invest in other things. At the end of this, I need to be able to point at things which have made us more sustainable than when we had this conversation on 15^th October 2025.

“What looks like successful ownership? Reuniting the club with the stadium is massive and if we came out of this and we are still in the National League but the club now owns the stadium, that would be frustrating but it does add a pillar of sustainability. These are the real things we feel we can do which is away from sporting jeopardy.”