Blackpool's £1.8m losses no surprise to Oyston

Blackpool chairman Karl Oyston says it may be 'no bad thing' that the club hesitated to invest in recent seasons.
Karl OystonKarl Oyston
Karl Oyston

One of the main criticisms levelled at the club’s owners, the Oyston family, is that they failed to reinvest the money gained from Blackpool’s sole season in the Premier League, which brought millions into the coffers.

Since dropping out of the top-flight in 2011, the club has been relegated twice more and is only now beginning to stabilise under manager Gary Bowyer, whose side stand fifth in League Two with seven games remaining.

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Asked by The Gazette to respond to this week’s publication of the club’s accounts, which showed losses of £1.8m for the financial year up to May 2016, Oyston said: “A club in the bottom third of the Championship will have a much higher turnover than a top-end League Two club.

“All we want to be able to do is provide a sufficient budget and be able to support the manager.

“We know exactly what we are looking at when it comes to what we can spend on players and the budget.

“In a way, it was no bad thing that we did not spend money in previous seasons because it gave us a bit of flexibility going forward.”

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The loss of £1.8m came in the season Blackpool were relegated from League One and represents a huge drop from the previous financial year, which saw the club make a profit of £7.5m while still in the Championship.

Oyston says people should not be surprised by these losses, adding: “Simply put, my family has owned the football club for 30 years or so, and for all but the last four or five years the club has made losses and has had to be subsidised.

“That is not something that is particularly unusual for a football club, so I don’t think you can draw too many conclusions from that.”

When asked what can be expected in next year’s accounts, when losses are predicted to be even higher, Oyston replied: “The general pattern going forward is not a particularly difficult one to predict.

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“If you are subsidising income from a drop in supporters and other avenues, then I think you can expect losses going forward. That’s the sad nature of football.

“I do not think any of it is surprising. After all, a lot of it is dependant on what division the club is in.”