Meanwhile, across town, Chelsea's chief executive, Peter Kenyon, is diligently spinning the latest set of company accounts. Turnover up . . . huge progress . . . hoping to break even by June 2010. Oh, by the way, we lost £65.7m in the year ending June 2008.
This is represented as a major triumph, since they lost £74m in the previous year, which was a big improvement on the £80.2m lost the year before, and heaps better than the £140m lost in 2004-05. And another thing, they would have done even better last year if they hadn't been hit by 'exceptional items'.
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'Exceptional item': Scolari's compensation will be adding to Chelsea's debt, but as long as they only incur less than £65.7m debt next year Kenyon will be happy
Kenyon is referring to the £23.1m paid out in compensation to two previous managers, Jose Mourinho and Avram Grant, and five coaches. Since Chelsea have had four managers in 17 months, 'exceptional' is an interesting choice of adjective.Now, I admit that high finance is not this column's strongest suit. The jargon always seems deliberately obfuscatory, while one nought tends to look very much like another. And yet my instincts tell me that all is not as well as they say.
When Kenyon makes his bullish case I am reminded of those suburban dinner parties, circa 2003, when people greedily guesstimated how much the price of their properties had risen between the prawn cocktail and the After Eights. The bubble was bound to burst.
But if Kenyon is wholly unpersuasive, then he is not alone in the Premier League. There may be countless good reasons why a previously debt-free club like Manchester United can be landed with more than £660m of high-interest debt by its new owners. But, in my financial innocence, I cannot think of one.
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