SOCCER: It has not quite reached the stage where Leeds United's supporters are rattling tins and collection buckets outside Elland Road, but it may not be far away.

Yesterday's disclosure that the club lost £49.5 million in the last financial year, or £952,000 a week, makes them officially the Premiership's worst-run club, with financial experts queuing up to dispute Prof John McKenzie's claims that the club are not staring at administration.

Arguing that the figures actually showed a significant improvement, McKenzie came up with the kind of analogy that Leeds's fans might have found amusing if the club's plight were not so serious. It may come to be seen as his Cantona moment.

"Two years ago we were struggling to swim against the current," he said. "Now we are treading water. In a year's time I hope to have one foot on the sand, which is where we want to be as quickly as possible. And following that I would hope to be on the sand running with a beautiful blonde."

In the short term, avoiding relegation will be the club's sole ambition. The financially stricken club are to receive a £4.4 million injection from the Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton, a member of the Leeds board, and another individual who is hiding his identity behind the name ARM Holdings Group Ltd.

With the former Chelsea chief executive Trevor Birch arriving as chief executive next week, the club are preparing to embark on an urgent effort to restructure their £70 million debt by the spring.

Their place in the Premiership at that time - they are currently second from bottom - will prove crucial in any attempt to find fresh cash. In their financial statement yesterday, the club admitted talks with new financiers would have to take into account "the consequences of the football team failing to maintain Premier League status". A drop out of the Premiership is estimated to lead to an immediate fall in revenues of £20 million, a sum the club could ill afford given their turnover was already down 21 per cent to £64 million in the year to June.

Their loss of £49.5 million - compared with £34 million last year - was £25.4 million before taking into account losses on players who were transferred for less than their valuations. The internationals Robbie Fowler, Lee Bowyer, Olivier Dacourt and Robbie Keane were all sold for considerably lower than the valuations.

The results, the first full-year figures since Peter Ridsdale left in April, revealed the club had been forced to spend £5.7 million on "first-team management" - largely in compensation to the former managers David O'Leary and Terry Venables. The bill for compensation - which reached £7.2 million when other employees are included - along with wages to players means that 88 per cent of the club's turnover is spent on paying staff.

McKenzie, the Leeds chairman who will become non-executive once Birch arrives, admitted the salary bill was "far too high" and he stressed he had already taken £20 million of costs out of the business.

McKenzie could not resist aiming a sly swipe at his predecessor Ridsdale, whose obsession with building a Champions League team, no matter what the financial risk, was the cause of Leeds's downfall.

"Leeds lived the dream - and I inherited the nightmare," said McKenzie.

Joe McLean, a partner in the recovery and reorganisation unit at Grant Thornton, said: "The dire financial situation in which the club currently lies has taken some years to develop as a result of poor on- and off-the-field decisions.

"It is simply naive to think that this can be redressed, in the absence of some Russian billionaire, without a restructuring period which will take some years to complete."

There was speculation in the city that if the club's financial position worsened and they were pushed into administration, they might be rescued by the entrepreneur Peter Wilkinson.

Wilkinson founded Sports Internet with Chris Akers, who was the original boss of Caspian, the Stock Market-listed company which became Leeds United.

The club have two main sources of debt they need to refinance: £59.2 million of loan notes held by Prudential of the UK and two US investors, Teachers and Metropolitan Life, which are linked to payments received from gate receipts in the future, and a £21.2 million complex leasing scheme used to buy and sell players. The shares rose 25 per cent to 3.25p.

Meanwhile, Tottenham's next manager is likely to find his hands tied in the transfer market unless the team captures some silverware this season.

That was the stark warning from chairman Daniel Levy yesterday as he announced that Tottenham Hotspur plc made a £7.1 million loss before tax in the year to June 30th.

That performance compared with a £900,000 pre-tax profit in 2002, and the figures do not even take into account the purchase of Helder Postiga, Bobby Zamora and Frederic Kanoute during the close season for a total of £11.75 million.

Spurs are searching for a successor to Glenn Hoddle who was sacked last month and, unless fortunes improve under caretaker David Pleat, whoever comes in might find there are limited resources with which to strengthen the squad.