Exeter City made £1m profit in League Two promotion season

Exeter City finished second in League Two last season earning promotion after a decade in the fourth tier

Exeter City made a profit of just over £1m for their promotion season to League One.

Figures for the 12 months to 30 June 2022, which have recently been released, show the Grecians' turnover increased by more than £2m to £4.5m, although costs rose by more than £1m.

The club's profits fell from a figure of more than £2.9m in 2020-21.

This was partly down to a drop in transfer income to £1.5m - City made just short of £5m in the previous year.

Exeter sold Joel Randall for a fee of at least £1m to Peterborough United in August 2021 while the club also received their share from add-ons paid to Brentford after former player Ollie Watkins joined Aston Villa from the Bees for £28m in September 2020.

The figures do not include the 'significant compensation' paid to the club by Rotherham United for the services of manager Matt Taylor and his coaching staff, nor the fee paid by Wolverhampton Wanderers for midfielder Alfie Pond on 1 September.

Exeter did receive a payout of just over £1m in business insurance in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in December 2021, which is included in the figures, while a second payment of more than half a million pounds was made to the club in November and is not reflected in the figures.

The club also spent £3m in new training ground facilities, which opened last month.

"The club remains unburdened by debt, and over many years has overperformed the base case budget by overperformance in the FA Cup and EFL League Cup competitions, player divestment (including sell-on clauses) and TV revenues," board chairman Nick Hawker said in a statement accompanying the accounts.

"Surpluses, where we have created them (for example this year), are reinvested into the club and its facilities.

"The most obvious statement of this in the year under review has been the approval of a major new investment at the Cliff Hill training ground."