Explained: Dissecting Portsmouth's finances, Michael Eisner's shares and funding by loans
Portsmouth Supporters’ Trust treasurer and chartered accountant lifts the lid on the Blues’ key financial changes.
Simon Colebrook is a chartered accountant with 30-plus years of experience and presently works as a chief financial officer.
He joined the board of the Pompey Supporters’ Trust in 2015, later serving as chairman for six years before standing down from the role in 2023. He is currently the Trust’s treasurer.
Based in Fratton, Simon has held a Pompey season ticket since 2002 and also sits on the national council of the Football Supporters’ Association.
On behalf of the Trust, he regularly produces a review of Pompey’s annual accounts, most recently last week when the club’s financial results for the year up to June 30, 2025 were released.
As one of the Trust’s three representatives on the Heritage & Advisory Board, Simon has had the chance to question Michael Eisner via Zoom about the reasoning behind the succession planning and also the switch from funding through equity and to loans.
In an interview with The News, he explains what the changes will mean to Pompey and the Fratton faithful…
Latest Accounts
‘It is odd to say that, when looking at the financial performance of a business, that a £4.3m loss is good. However, in the context of every other club in the league, then yes it is a very healthy set of figures and comfortably within the ability of the owners to maintain the level of spending.
‘If I look at it from an accountant's point of view - and clearly with an eye on the past at Pompey and understanding where we have come from - there’s not really anything to be concerned about.
‘From a Trust point of view, that’s kind of where we start from. During a difficult period in our history, we were part of the process which rescued the club and got it back to stability. Our responsibility is to keep an eye on the ownership and make sure there’s no risk of us going back to where we were in the past.
‘A lot of people are concerned about the future and the level of investment and level of support and I do address that to some extent in my latest financial report.
‘But the primary aim of my review is to talk about sustainability, risk, and making sure the club isn’t under threat of any kind of return to the past.’
Michael Eisner’s succession planning
‘The Heritage & Advisory Board were informed of Michael’s plans in December and, at that stage, went into quite a lot of detail with Michael about the reasons why.
‘In fairness to Michael, he was completely transparent in this and explained in very great detail, including his personal tax situation, which was more than I would have felt comfortable putting into the report. For most people it is a private affair.
‘In any normal circumstances, as an accountant, I would never talk about these things in public, but we had to get into it to some extent, so fans and our members understood the reason why it was being done.
‘We wanted to make sure what terms the loan was under, what terms it was going to be repayable, what the interest rate was, whether interest was physically being paid.
‘I was satisfied with his explanation. While people can be critical of the level of investment, nearly everybody I speak to - bar a very small minority - accepts the Eisner family are good, decent people who aren’t going to threaten the future of the club.
‘Even if somebody feels the Eisners should be investing more money, they accept that they are decent people and I continue to feel that.
‘The honesty and transparency that Michael gave in our discussions provided us with the confidence that there is nothing here, this is not anywhere near the same as the situations which we’ve had in the past.’
Shares
‘Looking at the transfer of the shares, they have been gifted to the sons as part of the succession plan. From that point onwards, funding would be provided via a loan mechanism.
‘Funding for the club is still coming from Michael via Tornante, but it’s still effectively Michael's money.
‘Considering how they have split the shareholding across Michael and his three sons, if he then bought another tranche of shares to provide his funding, that four-way split would become broken because he would end up owning more shares again.
‘In order to preserve that balance of the shareholding across the four of them, his money would need to go in as a loan - otherwise it unbalances the shareholding.
‘This will carry on for the time being and then, at some point in time, the shares or Tornante ownership will pass to Michael’s sons. At that stage they will have to decide how they want to provide the funding in the future and what they want to do with the existing loan.
‘What technically happens in many instances is that loans get turned into shares at some point in the future - and that may well be a route the sons go down once the estate is settled.’
Loan
‘What I will say is that, at the time of the sale (in 2017), we produced our information booklet and one of the things we said in that booklet was that we had asked Tornante to make commitments about the form of investment, either debt or equity, and the level of investment.
‘The response that we received, which we put into our information booklet, was they didn’t want to make any commitments because they wanted flexibility. We sold the club knowing that.
‘So no promise has been broken. It’s great they have been doing equity for the previous seven years because that is the safest form of investment, but soft owner debt which is unsecured is not a huge degree more risky.
‘All the time it is unsecured there is absolutely zero incentive for the owners to force repayment of the debt. If they were to do so, the club goes into admin and they lose everything because they rank with the pie shop down the road rather than above HMRC.
‘The loan has had to pass a standard set by the American IRS to qualify as a valid loan for tax purposes. In order to do that, it must carry all the usual terms a loan would have.
‘It has to carry interest at a minimum, which they set around 3.6 per cent, and this interest has been added to the loan. It also has to be repayable, but you are completely free to set the payment schedule.
‘The loan is technically repayable on demand. However, the commitment made by Tornante is they will never demand it unless the club has the resources to do so without affecting its operations.
‘If you take £8m loaned last year and £9m loaned so far this year, the club has to be in a position where it has £17m of spare cash lying around to pay it back. I would suggest that is never.
‘The question comes down to whether we trust Tornante not to demand it unless the club has the money to pay it without affecting its operations. My judgement is we can trust them.’