Drive to revamp Headingley left Yorkshire to stump up millions

The historic old ground, scene of some of English cricket's most memorable matches, was run down and in danger of losing its Test match status when the club successfully argued the commercial benefits to the local economy of retaining big England fixtures justified support from the public purse.

Leeds Council was first to back the club with a 9m loan, in 2005, needed to buy the ground from owner Paul Caddick.

Leeds Metropolitan University then stumped up 14m towards a new 21m pavilion which is due to open shortly.

Yorkshire's contribution was technically 7m, based on the club occupying around one-third of the building, but 4m of that came from the publicly-funded regeneration agency Yorkshire Forward.

The 4m is a grant but the outstanding 3m for the pavilion, plus the 9m to the council, will have to be paid by the club.

It made a record surplus of 700,000 last year – based on record income of 8.4m – but a lack of England international cricket in the next two means Yorkshire have no chance of making payments due this year and next.

Much of the club's debt links back to the buy-out of Headingley. As well as the 9m, over the last 18 months the club has paid a further 4.6m to Mr Caddick to buy out his remaining options on the ground, utilising help from its bank and the England and

Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – both of whom will also need repaying.

The 9m is due to be paid back by 2020. Yorkshire had repaid 1.1m when it asked to reschedule the loan last year which resulted in the council returning the 1.1m on the understanding the full 9m, including interest, would still be repaid over the same period.

The council last night confirmed that just over 8.5m remains outstanding. With deferment agreed for the next two years, capital repayments alone over the last eight years will be in excess of 1m a year.

But there are also interest payments, which the club is paying in 2010 and 2011, and which currently amount to 382,800 a year.

Yorkshire's 3m contribution towards the new Carnegie Pavilion was due to be split between 1.5m spread over 20 years rental payments and 1.5m paid in four equal lump sums over four years.

After being 75,000 short of the full 375,000 last year, the club now wants to pay nothing for the next two years and then spread the remaining 1.2m over six years, at 200,000 a year, up to 2018.

A Leeds Met spokesman said: "All parties involved in the construction of the Carnegie Pavilion are bound by contractual agreements and we do anticipate that YCCC will honour this. We have a long running and fruitful working relationship with YCCC and of course want this to continue and for them to prosper, but we are also firm in the view that we do need to receive the payment due to us as part of the contract, as any partner would be."

Yorkshire's chief executive Stewart Regan also acknowledged debts of 4m to the club's bank and a further 5m to club chairman Colin Graves, who has provided a personal guarantee for the outstanding payments.

The club has been hit by a series of untimely setbacks, including the economic downturn which led to far fewer debentures for new reserved seating being sold than the 1m worth the club is aiming for.

Advanced sales for this year's Australia versus Pakistan Test, being played at the neutral venue of Headingley because of the terrorist threat in Pakistan, are also significantly less than expected.

The collapse of a firm which ran Headingley's hospitality services last year has also deprived Yorkshire of an annual upfront payment of just over 300,000 although bringing the business back in-house will pay dividends later.

And perhaps most importantly, England play only a single one-day international at Headingley this year and next before hosting Tests and one-day internationals every year up until 2019 under an agreement with the ECB.

Mr Regan acknowledged Yorkshire were "trying to negotiate through a difficult period" while Mr Graves was more robust and insisted there was no long-term problem, saying: "All the partners are helping us through a cash flow situation we have got for the next 18 months. Nobody is panicking at all.

"The investment is for the good of Headingley and for Yorkshire people. If we hadn't done it, Yorkshire would have lost its Test match status and the economy of Leeds would have suffered."

But Yorkshire will certainly be hoping for and perhaps needing an economic upturn and very healthy returns from future England matches to cope with a heavy burden of debt from 2012 onwards.