Premier League make shock £10m loss

The Premier League today blamed a £10 million pre-tax loss for the last financial year on their bitter legal battle with former television executives Sam Chisholm and David Chance.

It is the first time since the League was founded in 1992 that it has not made a small profit. Although the objective of the FA Premier League Ltd, the company who manage the country's top 20 clubs, is to distribute income to their members, any significant losses will have to be taken out of future sponsorship or marketing deals.

Former BSkyB directors Chisholm and Chance sued the league after they tried to tear up their three-year contract as media advisers, worth around £3m each up front plus possible bonuses.

They had been hired by Scudamore's predecessor, Peter Leaver, who was forced out by club chairmen over the deal.

The case did not reach the High Court, however, after the league agreed to settle with a payment of around £10m last February.

According to the League's financial report for the year ending 31 July 2000, that settlement is the main reason for the heavy pre-tax loss they suffered.

A new three-year TV deal with Sky and ITV is worth more than £1.2 billion and should ensure the league are back in the black by this time next year.

Turnover increased by seven per cent to £244.4m from the 1999 total of £228.2m. Those figures exclude income from the new TV agreements which do not start until August.

And despite the difficult financial year the Premier League maintained its support of community, grass-roots and youth initiatives which received a total of £12m in 2000. ENGLAND fans today accused the Football Association of "ripping them off" with their proposals for the future of the national team's official supporters' club.

The FA are reviewing the way the England Members' Club is run and are under pressure from the Home Office to tighten security to stamp out the alleged hooligan element attached to the organisation.

The EMC will be relaunched in July but angry members claim it is being revamped to make money and that its principal function of ticket allocation will become nothing more than a lottery.

Martin McKechnie, an EMC member and spokesman for a new campaign set up to fight the FA changes, said: "The FA are riding roughshod over fans and it's about time fans around the country showed them the red card. The club is being turned into a money pot and is ripping off fans. It's supposed to be a way of allocating tickets and should not be designed to make a profit.