Finance trouble

Hi there

I'm currently Southampton in the first season, i've only played around 7 games or so but after the first month the board confidence update shows i am losing approx 1.17 million, but i have kept the players wages down by approx 127k difference so how do i avoid losing money basically? noob question :o

thanks

You don't.

Club finances in modern football are based on TV money, prize money and season tickets - most of which are earned during the close season and pre-season spring-autumn period. The rest of the year match-day income won't be enough to go with a profit so most clubs will lose money from September to April.

Pay attention to the season-by-season profits. If you lose money in the course of a whole year, you have a problem. If not, everything is fine. In England, you will need an 50-60k attendance figure, win your CL matches while paying your players less than 1m a week in order to go with a profit every month. Maybe even that won't cut it. The Non-Football Costs are devastating.

In Italy and Spain it is much easier to bathe in money, since the former has very low season ticket sales compared to match-day tickets - which will increase greatly with success, and the latter has a very pyramid-shaped distribution of a giant sack of TV-money so once you eat chunks of Real and Barca's loot you're set for life.

Everything seems to be in tact, i've had a look at the expenditure and last month compared to this current month and we're keeping the costs down considerably, but there is the 20 million loan tied to the club so i suppose it's that

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That's what you need to pay attention to. After getting the CL and PL payouts, I suppose I will go with a healthy profit this season too, even though I'm 4.5m in the red right now. By November my new stadium will be ready so things are looking good.

The point is that out of 221m in total costs last season, only 43m are player wages. This means that even cutting my wage expenses in half, my profits would only go from 16m to 36m, just about enough to sign a world class player. In any case I wouldn't see profits every month then either...

Also, look at the board update, on the message it will tell you something on lines of despite returning a loss the club is in good financial state, noobish way of understanding you're doing ok