Following the publication of Norwich City's annual accounts, finance director Anthony Richens spoke to canaries.co.uk about the progress that has been made in the past year.
canaries.co.uk: Anthony, we’ve today released our annual accounts. Can you tell us the key points from this year’s report?
AR: The key point for us to highlight is that the club has continued to move forward. We’ve continued to invest and, despite the pandemic, which would have made it very easy for us to stop projects or investment into things, we’ve continued to invest, whether that be into our facilities here at Carrow Road or at Lotus Training Centre.
We now have the SoccerBot, which we’ve just launched two weeks ago. We’ve got new offices here for our staff at Carrow Road. We continue to invest and actually, despite the pandemic, the club is in a better position now when it comes to facilities and infrastructure than it was two years ago.
The key message for everyone here is that we’re proud that we continue to move forward and that we continue to grow.
canaries.co.uk: How much of an impact has the Covid-19 pandemic had and are you pleased with how the club has responded to that?
AR: We anticipate now that the total impact of Covid has been around 30 million pounds. The longer the pandemic’s gone on, the more hypothetical that number has become, so it’s hard to put a full number on it.
We’re very proud of what we’ve been able to do and we’re very proud of our achievements last season behind-closed-doors, getting promoted back to the Premier League.
I touched on it earlier but we’re very proud that we’ve continued to invest in our facilities.
We’ve also shown a profit this year, which shows that the model that we run with our recruitment strategy of recruiting players of a certain age and with resale value highlights the importance of that model when it comes to the results this year.
Take out our player sales and we would’ve posted a loss of around 26 million pounds. For us, it shows that the model works and we’re very proud of that.
canaries.co.uk: Do you see there being further developments at Lotus Training Centre and at Carrow Road within the next year?
AR: For sure. We never stand still. We continue to invest. There is a balancing act to be done between investing in short-term performances on the pitch and long-term assets when it comes to our infrastructure.
That discussion is had at every board meeting and it’s had throughout the week every day at the club.
There are projects ongoing, so we’ve recently had planning permission for a recovery hub and an admin building at Lotus Training Centre. Over the next twelve months, we hope to start one of those projects, so we continue to invest and hope to improve our facilities again.