I think profitability is a bit distorted mate given that football finance is recovering from Covid, but i take your point in general. The following is an average over a good few years:
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When it comes to valuation though, while overall profits may be meagre - essentially football clubs by nature arent supposed to be profitable - what is important is that the business can sustain itself in terms of cost. As above you can see the likes of Mordor, Utd, City and Spurs can wash their own face by that i mean afford top wages transfer fees, be competitive for prizes and commercially and the owners dont have to worry about funding the club. Take the Glazers, they paid nothing for Utd, leveraged debt of 1 billion, paid a lot of it down with excess revenue from the club and now it may be worth 4-6 billion. They always have the insurance of selling players if they run into trouble. That is very attractive, so pay nothing, let the club fund itself, let the asset sit there for a decade, let it appreciate, let revenue grow and make a 400% profit on a billion. Same with Mordor.
Compare that to Everton above, we arent attractive for investment because essentially we have nothing of the above, we are a risk in need of huge capital to operate. Because we aren't attractive, we will attract the type of owner who will take us on as high risk with a specific plan to manage the club. We cant wash our own face at the moment essentially, so while we have appealing factors we are high risk for an investor. I wouldn't buy into us based on the above, so essentially that will bring down our overall valuation. Even if the business wasn't a basket case, i dont think we would be worth 1 billion - pre stadium, just my take.
The only game in town for us, is to become self sustainable. I personally think we are low hanging fruit for the wrong investor/owner at the moment.
