Which to me seems daft. Surely you either include/exclude both, not one or the other? Otherwise I could say we made a profit of £3 million, by including profits from sales but not factoring amortisation etc.
Edit: not having a go at you, more a general comment on picking the 53m number. It catches the eye, but is misleading
Operating profit comes from the profit & loss account, which is the sum of income minus the sum of expenditure
For accounting purposes players are intangible assets.
Tangible assets are things like plant, machinery, buildings, inventory, debtors etc.
So a FC's asset value is measured by the sum of it's assets.
Tangible assets normally depreciate in value & are written down over a period of time.
Players, on the other hand can appreciate in value, so profits from successful player trading can provide significant additional income (added into the P &L account).
The way Swiss Ramble shows this on his spreadsheets is to subtract the cost of player writedowns (amortisation etc) from the profit/loss sum, & then add the income from player sales back in. (suspect it's to simplify his model, he does a figure for every club)
The more conventional method is to calculate profit/loss from player trading & then add that result to the P & L account calculation.
As I demonstrated above WBA made an operational loss (income less cost of sales & administration) of £27 million.
Offset against that was a profit on player trading of £3.3 million
So a net loss of £23.7 million.
As Swiss Ramble pointed out, we sold some comparatively high value players last year (J Rod, Craig Dawson & Salomon Rondon). We're not expected to get anywhere near that income this year & we've paid out around £46 million.
Even with parachute payments, it's difficult to see how were going to generate enough cash to make major changes to the squad without some inward investment
