Colin Graves is expected to return to Yorkshire County Cricket Club (YCCC) as chairman in the hope that he can refinance the ailing county. To date the Graves plan seems very short on specifics. The members are being asked to change the rules of the club at an Extraordinary General Meeting to allow Graves to be appointed as chairman and for him to hand pick his own board of directors.
What the club gets in return for this is not very clear. Graves has promised to lend YCCC £1m and there is talk of additional financing of £4m but a letter from the current board to members states: "the sourcing of the further investment of £4m is reliant on the new Board and there is no binding commitment to provide it or (as yet) information on the sources of these funds" I guess there is a tacit assumption that YCCC's principal creditor, the Colin Graves' family trust, will be amenable to some sort of resolution be it extending the loan, buying Headingley or turning YCCC into a private company rather than a member's organisation if Colin Graves is running the county but won't extend the same offer to the existing board To me this is an incredible and retrogade, development. But rather than range across all of the issues around his return I wanted to look at Yorkshire's financial record during the previous period of Graves' involvement with YCCC.
A good starting point is this article https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/colin-graves-the-man-who-saved-yorkshire-780157 by then cricinfo reporter, George Dobell. This was written in the aftermath of Yorkshire's 2014 county championship win, is very pro Graves and includes Graves' own summary of his impact of YCCC's finances.
"What would have happened had I not got involved? That's simple: they would have gone bust. The bank had already put a cross next door to the debt and Headingley was 48 hours from being written off. It was going to go.
"They wouldn't have been playing cricket there, that's for certain. It was owned by Paul Caddick. The rugby side had all the income streams, they had everything. Yorkshire County Cricket Club didn't own a blade of grass.
"When I took it over they had debts of £8 million and no assets. They had no ECB staging agreement. How they got in that position I will never know but banking was different to what it is today. I thought 'we have got a bit of a problem here.'
"We have turned it around financially. Yes, we have debts - about £20 million in all - but people have to realise that we paid £13 million to buy the ground. There is now a £15 million asset in the land alone."
Graves was first a director of YCCC in 2002 when he was appointed chief executive of the county. He stayed in the role until 2006 when he became YCCC chairman. Graves was YCCC chairman until 2015 when he took the same position at the ECB. I've had a look at all of the YCCC financial statements for 2001 - 2014 (see the FCA's mutual register).
Lets start with 2001 - the year before Graves became involved at board level. The financial statements don't look particularly bad. The county had embarked on redevelopment of the Headingley ground but £3.5m of the £6m incurred had been financed by grants and total bank debt was around £2m. YCCC had reserves of £1.7m. Graves came onto the board during the course of 2002 and by the end of that year debt had increased to just over £6m but assets were £13m.
Rather than go through all of the years until Graves left Yorkshire lets see how YCCC reserves fluctuated over the course of his tenure.
The reserves figure comes from the balance sheet at 31 December for each year and is the difference between all of the company's liabilities and all of its assets at that date, the movement in reserves from one year to the next is the profit or loss for the period. Over the period of Graves' tenure as first YCCC chief executive and then chairman Yorkshire, lost in aggregate across all years, £4.9m turning positive reserves of £1.7m into a retained deficit at the end of 2014 of £3.2m. (that's counting 2002 as a Graves year although he only came onto the board part way through the year - not sure exactly when). The county purchased the Headingley freehold in 2005 and for the next few years seemed to have improved its finances. But a disastrous 2010 covered in
this post sent YCCC back down the snake and by the end of Graves' tenure the county was losing £1m a year or so fairly regularly.
The last set of available accounts for Yorkshire were for the year ended 31 December 2022 and show a deficit of £2.1m and post Graves YCCC has made an aggregate surplus of £1.1m, even allowing for the financial fallout from the Rafiq affair. Still Yorkshire hasn't been in a significant positive reserves position in this century and throughout the 21st century, years when there has been no Test match at Headingley have been difficult to manage.
There is a tendency to put Yorkshire's current financial woes as solely down to the Azeem Rafiq affair, but I'd say it's more one of a number of causes and that one of the other factors is that Graves' plan to borrow, buy out the Headingley freehold and develop the ground didn't put YCCC on a firm financial footing.
There are a couple of good things to say about YCCC's finances during Graves' period in charge. Firstly he wasn't motivated by money, as far as I can see Graves never took a salary for his work as either chief executive or chairman and at various points he lent money to YCCC interest free or guaranteed loans to expedite third party funding. By the end of his term in office Graves and the Graves' family trust had lent significant amounts to Yorkshire and although interest was charged on these amounts the county may have gone under without that funding.
Secondly there is no doubt that the county was in a bind when Graves became chief executive in 2002. Not because of the level of debt but because the ground was in such a bad state. Any visit to the gents toilet at Headingley during a major international fixture in the 1990s would involve wading through a lake of piss. With the ECB encouraging Durham, Glamorgan and Hampshire to bid for international matches YCCC would clearly have to improve Headingley or give up on Test status. Yorkshire weren't the only "Test Match County" with a decaying ground but YCCC had an additional obstacle in that it didn't, until 2005, own the Headingley freehold. And the ECB using smaller counties as a stick to get the larger grounds to improve facilities resulted in a situation where there were more counties needing Test matches to make their financial projections work than there were Test Matches to be allocated. From 2005 onwards years with no Headingley test matches were a financial pinch point for YCCC.
So the point of this post isn't to say that Colin Graves made a mess of managing YCCC's finances whilst in charge from 2002 - 2014. Nor is to deny he faced some difficult problems. But there seems to be an emerging consensus in media coverage that he solved the problems he was confronted with. But from what I can see there is nothing in the YCCC accounts to support that contention.
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