Bristol Rovers accounts have revealed that the club made losses of around £65,000 a week for the year ending June 2018.

The Gas' losses of over £3.4m rank as the sixth highest in League One for the 2017/18 season.

Bristol Live spoke to Kieran Maguire, senior teacher in accountancy finance and accounting at the University of Liverpool and author of The Price of Football, to get the lowdown on what the losses mean for Rovers.

You can follow Kieran on Twitter at @KieranMaguire.

Steve Hamer (left) chairman, Tommy Widdrington new head of recruitment (centre) and Wael Al-Qadi (right) president of Bristol Rovers

What are your initial impressions of the accounts?

As a regular business, it's not really sustainable. They're paying out £97 in wages for every £100 that comes through the door and you wouldn't really run a normal business like that.

The motives of football club owners are different to that of most business owners and I think most Bristol Rovers fans need to be grateful for that. I think the delay in the publication of the accounts was auditors wanting assurances from the Al Qadi family, the owners, that they would continue to underwrite the losses. Going through the small print he's effectively said he's committed to covering all the bills at least until the end of the 2020 season.

So the good news is that the club is going to carry on, the bad news is that, as a business, it's not good. Bristol Rovers are not alone, they're in the top six in terms of losses in that division for 2017/18 but we've got Blackburn losing nearly £17m and Charlton losing £10m. It's a crazy division to be in because you've got so little money from the TV deals from the EFL and very little solidarity payments from the Premier League as well, so it's a tough league to survive in.

What was the biggest expenditure? Was it wages?

Very much so. Wages increased by 12 per cent and revenue was down by 12 per cent, so you put those two together and you've got a perfect storm of financial problems. You can't carry on with those as trends in the long-term - I think it was probably a disappointing season on the pitch, which affected attendances and had an impact on how to pay the bills, therefore the club became increasingly reliant on the owners to put in money, which to be fair they did do so.


Looking ahead, do you think it will be a case of having to cut the cloth a little more?

That comes down to a certain extent to the attitude of the owners. They must have set a limit on the losses they're prepared to underwrite. The other issue the club needs to be concerned about is that under the EFL rules, clubs effectively have a wage limit that they can't spend more than 60 per cent of revenue, player profits and owner injections on player wages. I gave you that figure of 97 per cent earlier but that was wages for everybody at the club - the nature of a football club is that the vast majority of wages go on players. If revenue continues to fall, then the ability of the club to pay wages will be impacted, and also the ability of the club to attract players over this summer in terms of the transfer window. It does have implications.

And these accounts don't cover the 2018/19 season, do they?

No, the accounts are out late. Under company law you've got nine months from your year end date, which in Bristol Rovers' case is June 30, to get the accounts into the public domain.

In terms of football as a whole, you say Rovers' losses are towards the top end of League One, is the rise reflective of football as a whole?

I've just published some research work that the total losses of the 72 clubs in the EFL is £388m in 2017/18. That's pretty eye-watering, it's managing to lose more than £1m a day. That's with Financial Fair Play, parachute payments, player sales and solidarity payments from the Premier League. What it would be without those, you'd shudder to think.