Shrewsbury Town still facing some financial pain says chief executive

The club’s chief executive Liam Dooley sat down with the media last week to discuss a variety of topics – but the club’s financial security was high up the list of pressing questions.

Ultimately, there is no quick fix. The chairman Roland Wycherley has led the club responsibly for an extended period of time, but the £3million worth of losses, announced in April, are going to take a while for Shrewsbury to overcome.

Dooley says you cannot ‘click your fingers’ and suddenly it goes back to normal.

“We are very much up against it,” Dooley said. “You cannot turn around a business that has been losing money hand over fist as it was during that period and in the period leading up to it because of Covid and not necessarily all miss-management, but the victim of circumstances, you cannot click your fingers and change everything overnight.

“You have to put a set of policies and strategies in place to try and save money as best you can right in front of you and also further down the line have a plan for what we are going to do.”

And Dooley says supporters should be prepared for further losses in the next set of accounts because situations like this do have a ‘time lag’.

“Day-to-day, due to the nature of how contracts work we continue to make losses,” he added.

“The financial year that we are in now will show a loss due to the hangover of the player’s contracts and anything else that we have that is more longer term.

“That will always have a time lag. We have just got to deal with the ones we can deal with as and when they come up to make sure we are making the best decisions we can at every opportunity.”

Dooley has now been at the club for more than eight months since he was appointed in mid-October last year.

“There has been challenge after challenge,” he said when reflecting on his time in the job so far.

“What I am hoping now is that the firefighting that we were doing is getting less and less and we starting to do more future-facing stuff.

“With it being the off-season as well it helps, and we can start to look at what we can do for next season that will help to improve the finances of the football club, the supporter experience.

“We can give a bit more time to those things now that we are not playing Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday each week.”

Some of the financial restrictions on Shrewsbury should be lifted this summer with a number of players on bigger contracts being let go at the end of last season.

They have offered some fresh terms to other players they want to keep.