Financially speaking… The City Football Group, the parent company of Manchester City, has put another 23 million euros into Lommel. De Tijd found it in a deed in the Moniteur belge: a capital increase by conversion of debt. Sixth time. Since 2022, that makes 98.8 million.
I read it on Monday, with the third provincial division (Belgium’s Sunday amateur leagues) table next to me, and I got my folder out. Not the team-sheet one, the other one, the treasury folder. At our place, the summer transfer window is a ball and a set of bibs, paid for by the clubhouse bar. A good bar season is when it doesn’t pour on home Sundays.
So I did the sum every gaffer does in silence. 23 million, in mugs of coffee. I stopped at the third line, the biro couldn’t keep up.
Tactically, I understand Lommel. The club has belonged mostly to the group since 2020, and it came up into the top flight last season through the promotion play-offs. Going up is good. Then you have to stay up. I stay up too, with a sloping pitch and two players who leave on the hour to pick up the kids.
What I mostly take from it is the technique: you don’t give, you convert debt into capital. I proposed the same thing to the committee on Thursday. The treasurer has owed the club three cones of chips since September. We convert them into shares. He said he’d think about it, which at our place means no.
The case also has a serious side. Virton challenged it in 2023, talking of unfair advantage and possible state aid. The Cepani arbitration body found no evidence of foreign subsidies distorting the market and threw out the complaint. Virton also went to the European Commission. That I leave to the lawyers, all I have is a UEFA B in progress.
Freddy, your treasurer is my brother-in-law. He still owes me a cone of chips from 2019.
My budget has one advantage: I know it by heart. It fits on one page of the folder, front only.
It’s true, we checked: Walfoot.
