Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2013

40 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society I have been Finance Director of Yorkshire County Cricket Club since January 2009 and can safely say that there hasn’t been a dull moment. In just under four years I have experienced the Club making a record surplus, a record deficit, relegation, promotion, our first venture into Champions League cricket, not to mention the Club’s sesquicentennial year to look forward to with celebrations kicking off in Sheffield in January…and some say cricket is boring! The structure of Yorkshire’s finances are well publicised. In a nutshell, back in 2000 Headingley was desperately in need of investment and without it there was a real risk of losing top flight international cricket. As a result, the Club borrowed the money to buy the ground back from Leeds Cricket, Football & Rugby Ltd (LCF&A) and started a programme of capital investment, culminating in 2010 with the opening of the Carnegie Pavilion. The commitment to invest was the catalyst to being granted the long term staging agreement with the ECB, which gives certainty to the incidence and cost of staging England Internationals until the end of 2019. Having a fixed cost to stage international cricket is essential as these matches are needed to generate the required levels of profit that enable the debt (capital and interest) to be repaid. A simplistic view could be that the staging of international cricket takes care of the debt, and everything else – memberships, sponsorship, gate receipts, ECB distributions and so on generate the revenue to take care of the cost of maintaining Headingley and producing a successful Yorkshire team. Bear in mind that currently, with the exception of Graham’s catering operation ‘Stumps’ in the Yorkshire Cricket Centre, receipts from the sale of food and drink within the ground go to our neighbours LCF&A. Balancing the Books Charles Hartwell, FD YCCC