There is an excellent interview with Sunderland CEO Steve Walton at NEBusiness.  Walton came from a long career at Barclay’s bank handling the finances of clubs before actually stepping into the management himself.  He discusses, among other things, the widely divergent picture of football business painted by the press and the reality of commercial survival for a club.  Below are some of the more interesting quotes from the article:

“It’s not true now, but only four or five years ago, the average Premier League football club turned over less than the average BMW dealership.”

“But the profile and the PR around it is just totally out of kilter with the size of it and it just shows what the passion there is for football.”

“Football clubs are largely a collection of businesses rather than an individual business,”

“Clubs get £750,000 per place in the Premier League, so if in the last day of the season you move from 12th to 13th, you’ve suddenly lost three-quarters of a million straight off your bottom line.”

Check it out the full article here.