Cash flow. Cash flow. Cash flow!
Whatever happened a year ago or even six months ago genuinely isn't relevant currently. It's a question of what is available now to meet the costs that must be met. Season ticket money, sponsorship money, TV money......it has all been allocated. Companies have to plan for the future. They have to invest. Clubs don't hold cash for the sake of it. At least, not enough to allow for such a wholly unprecedented crisis as this. Whatever they do hold will quickly be devoured by the costs that they have to honour in the absence of further monies coming in. And there's no telling when this crisis will end. It might be a year or more from now.
Whilst you are quite correct, it’s a matter of cash flow, Clubs cash flow shouldn’t be a major issue. They keep plenty of cash in the bank for a start and clubs are currently only missing out on match day revenue which is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else.
Using Liverpool as an example with some very rough figures , Firstly they had around £40 million in the bank come the start of the season not doing anything, then turnover for them last season was something like £533 million , their matchday revenue was about £80 million, let’s assume those figures were similar this season, they’ve already received the vast majority of that 80 million, a lot of season cards are paid upfront, direct debits are still being taken out for those that haven’t paid upfront. Let’s say there’s 30 home games a season, individual match day tickets are a minority percentage of the attendance but let’s be overly generous and say it was as high as 50% we’ve had 2/3rds of the season already again, so again, incredibly roughly, the amount they’re missing out on is 1-1.5 million per game. The actual figures aren’t that relevant, the point is what they’re currently missing out on in matchday revenue is relatively nothing and certainly wouldn’t be keeping the staff payed alone even without the Coronavirus so they’d have to have cash in reserve anyway.
Now I don’t know how media revenue and commercial revenue is paid, perhaps there’s a large payment due that’s being withheld and they are struggling without that but I think it’s more likely its paid at the start of the season in which case they’ve already got it, or it may be common practice to pay it at the conclusion of the season in which case they wouldn’t have it either. If they were missing out on a substantial payment, Clubs do take loans from banks against future income when it suits them, they’re commonly usually for accounting purposes more than anything else but I imagine would be an option for them if they really were struggling for cash flow, and the fact that they don’t do that regularly suggests cash flow isn’t as tight as you seem to be indicating throughout the season.
They’ll likely be doing their end of season annual financial accounts whilst this football suspension is still in effect, I wonder if Liverpool and indeed other clubs will be paying back loans due and interests on loans they’ve taken from parent companies or whether they’ll be deferring such payments and whether dividends will still be paid out as they’re clearly struggling so badly.
