Financial impact of Huddersfield Town’s relegation revealed as Kevin Nagle makes Terriers swear

Huddersfield Town owner Kevin Nagle has admitted the club will “lose millions of pounds” as a result of relegation to League One.

The Terriers find themselves starting to prepare for a first top-three campaign since 2012 after finishing second from bottom in the Championship.

Despite the harsh financial reality of relegation, Nagle vowed to continue to “invest across the board” to prepare the club for a return to the second tier.

Read more: Early League One promotion odds after Huddersfield Town and Birmingham City’s relegation

“We knew if they got relegated last year or this year, we were going to take it and invest in it, and we did,” the Terriers owner said in his end-of-season diary on X.

“I would say that it continued, even if on the field, the team did not perform very well. The reality is that we continued to invest.

“When I got here, we didn’t have a chief executive officer, a chief financial officer, a chief operating officer, a chief revenue officer, and a lot of the infrastructure that went under that, all of that was filled. These are all filled out, ready to go, really working right now, that’s for now and next year and the years to come for that matter.

“That doesn’t include what I actually did from the club side. We are really starting to invest in the training ground. If one were to go there today, one would see extraordinary changes taking place between the grounds being changed, the infrastructure, the buildings being moved and replaced, and this is because we are building on the present and the future of our academy.

“There’s a lot of other things that aren’t happening on the ground now, but will definitely happen in the future, and as we’ve said all along – rightly or wrongly – if you want to go up, you’ve got to have an infrastructure in place and that’s what we’re building .”

Asked what the impact of relegation would be on the club’s finances, Nagle said: “We’re going to lose millions of pounds, there’s no doubt about that, because there’s funding coming from the Championship which will now cease.

“The reality is that there are also some changes that are happening at the same time, where wages and other things go down, for players and coaches and so on.

“Then there is a part that will be absorbed by me and we engage in that. Those are not our problems, as I said earlier, we are investing, we will invest everywhere like we have now and I feel we will prepare a really strong club next year.”

City struggled throughout the campaign, with the Terriers hovering above the relegation zone until the latter part of the season before finally succumbing to the drop.

The Terriers have won just nine times in 46 games, as well as drawing 18 games, and Nagle admitted how costly the draws have proved to be for his side’s campaign.

Town have drawn 11 of those games under Darren Moore and Nagle admitted he should have sacked the manager earlier in hindsight to give his side a better chance of avoiding defeat.

Asked if he wished he had done anything differently in his first year at the helm, the boss said: “I would say the second coach, I probably waited a little too long (to make a change).

“You might remember, without rationalizing too much, I had a lot of injuries during that time. Honestly, when I talked to Darren, who is a wonderful human being by the way, we talked about bonding a lot.

“The real point we talked about was moving those ties to wins and that’s what he said his goal was and he said it was going to happen. Unfortunately, it just didn’t happen.

“It looks like we’ve been relegated by (six) points, those are two games you’d either win if you lost or you can figure them out (by other means). I finished tied for first, tied first relegates you. I’m not laughing at this, but I don’t like ties. I may like road ties, but we have to win.

“We’ve had some bad luck and you often hear people talk about (us) a series of bad events that happened, I don’t want to hide behind that. The reality is that I didn’t make it, so let’s just move on from here and I’m ready to go.”