Last week the financial accounts for Yeovil Town Holdings, the company which owned the land around Huish Park (before we flogged it to the council), were published.
However, the accounts relate to the 12 months up to the end of June 2021 which is almost two months before the club registered that it had loaned £689,538 from Sport England at the end of August.
For this reason, the accounts do not feature any of the almost £1m in loans from Sport England or the sale of the club’s stadium and surrounding land to South Somerset District Council for £2.8m.
YTFC Holdings, which lists chairman Scott Priestnall as its only director following the resignation of Glenn Collis at the end of May, owns shares in Yeovil Football & Athletic Club (YF&AC), the company which (until the sale to the council) ran the football operations and owned the Huish Park stadium site. Still with us?
As we know, YF&AC was heavily loss-making in the same period – the year up to June 2021 – due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic keeping fans out of the stadium and therefore the shares YTFC Holdings held in it were worth considerably less.
How much less? I hear you cry. Okay, you probably didn’t think that, but in case you did it were interested, it appears they went down £707,214 in value to just £1m. As ever with the club’s accounts, the details are very scant and (even with a little assistance from those who understand balance sheets) there’s not a lot of insight we can draw from them.
So, in terms of what new we can tell from these latest accounts – very little. We already knew that the ongoing viability of the club as at June 2021 was a serious concern, so whether the company owning the club decided it was worth £1, £1m or £100m it doesn’t impact on the club itself.
Add to that the fact we’ve piled on nearly a million in debt and sold Huish Park and surrounding land in a deal worth £2.8m, we won’t know the impact of this on the balance sheet of YTFC Holdings until around this time next year.