Bristol City announce record £11.8m loss
Bristol City have announced record losses of £11.8m for the year ending 31 May, 2010.
The Football League Championship club have blamed the losses on investment in the playing squad as they bid to gain promotion to the English Premier League.
The club’s chairman Steve Lansdown added that delays on plans to build a new stadium "have not helped our position either".
While Bristol have planning permission for the £92m at Ashton Vale, the local council have also received an application for the land to be transformed into a town green, which has been recommended for approval.
Should that plan be approved by the council, the football club’s attempts to build a stadium in the area would have to be scrapped. A decision on the town green scheme is expected by the end of November.
Lansdown added that the club would have to control its expenditure over the next several years and put an end to the multi-million pound losses.
'Club will need to increase turnover and control costs'
He told reporters that: "In the short term the support of the board will see the club through these difficult times; in the longer term, however, it needs to increase its turnover and control its costs.
"The stadium is key to a lot of things because if we're suddenly in a situation where we can't build our 30,000-seater stadium then we have no option but to look at plan B which is to re-trench to [current
ground] Ashton Gate.
"The figures you're seeing now and the sort of income shows that Ashton Gate can't sustain the levels we're aspiring to at the moment."
Bristol reinforced their playing squad in the 2009-10 season (the period for which the financial data covers) by bringing in players including Scotland cap David Clarkson from Motherwell, Jamal Campbell-Ryce
from Barnsley and Patrick Agyemang from Queens Park Rangers.
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