Finnegan

Probably more simple than that, don't have the 7th highest wage bill in the division in the first place when you've got a commercial footprint closer to Boston United than Manchester United.

True that, so far in 25/26 Harvey has a goal or assist every 0.43 90mins. In 21/22 he had a goal or assist every 0.69 90mins. You're right, miles different.

Been told the next person to make the same ****ing joke is getting a ban from Transfer Talk.

I get a bit of acid reflux every time I see him celebrating in a Newcastle shirt.

My source is the usual people on foxestalk claiming to know family of his. So basically completely made up. But I want to believe it. 😔

There were definitely things in there that I either didn't know or straight up hadn't considered. I've heard the numbers about our ratio of wage bill to income but I had no idea we were literally the worst ever at one point. I also didn't know that bit about the structuring of our contracts being so skewed to basic wage vs bonuses compared to other clubs which does go a long way to explain why, as the like of @Stadt have pointed out before, we struggle to move players on more than other clubs. It's all pretty damming of either Rudkin or whoever else has been in charge of negotiating player contracts here for the longest time. It smacks of naivety and inexperience which tracks, given JR was never particularly qualified for the post. Also goes a way to explaining why the players don't actually hate the man and he seems to be well spoken of inside the club hahaha.

He didn't even want to leave

We became a Big Six club in terms of performance and achievement and forgot we weren't one on the ledger.

If we get out of this mess and then let Rudkin go back to the negotiating table again we're doomed.

Selling players for significant profit always helps and obviously selling Youri instead of him going free would have brought in money. But the biggest stealth damage is done by the wage bill. The wave of transfers from Praet, Perez, JJ, Tielemans, Castagne, Daka, Soumaré, Vestergaard, Bertrand through to Faes and Kristiansen - even really continuing it with Winks and Coady - just insane. We signed so many players on wages way, way beyond what we could afford, made a massive senior squad with far too many players on wages way beyond what our income could sustain. Selling the odd player for a big splash is like throwing a bucket full of water out of a boat with hundreds of holes. It slows down the sinking but you still end up drowning if the boat is that leaky. We won't be out of the woods until our wage bill makes sense against our income and we keep giving increasingly large chunks of our income to Macquarie in order to try and bail out more water from the boat in the short term. It's why we keep spiralling. It's why I'm quietly glad we haven't signed anyone new this season. If we survive in mid table this year without buying anyone and start fresh next season without Daka, Soumaré and Co on the books it'll be a big help.

An option is just a contractual pre-agreed fee with one club. Think of it as a temporary minimum fee release clause that only applies to one club and only until a fixed date, likely to be a few weeks after the window opens in the summer. Nothing to stop him turning us down and equally nothing to stop any other club making a bid which his parent club can accept.

The TLDR summary of this is ultimately what plenty have already said and know: it all largely comes back to our horrendous mismanagement of the wage bill. He said the year Rodgers took us down we had the largest discrepancy between our income and our wage bill (£116 spent on wages for every £100 earned) in the history of the Premier League. For context, think he said UEFA recommend no more than 70 for every 100? He also says that you can be almost certain by analysing our wage bill and the contracts that he's seen as an insider that the contracts we hand out to players are skewed hugely towards paying an up front, guaranteed salary whilst the vast, vast majority of other clubs give a reasonably small basic pay that's supplemented by huge bonuses. So a player at Leicester will have a massive basic wage with a small bonus for performance if we stay up, whilst a player at say Bournemouth will be on a much lower basic wage but with much larger incentive bonuses for staying in the league or scoring goals, keeping clean sheets etc. All of which explains why we're stuck in this constant cycle of PSR struggles because we're still in this 4 or 5 year contract cycle after we let Rodgers massively over spend on rubbish and let Rudkin negotiate all their contracts. It also explains why we can never get rid of players whilst other clubs find it easier to sell, because ours are happily sitting here for years on massive basic pay even if they don't play. And why we've got a squad of players that look like they don't give a shit if we win or lose. He also amusingly points out that in the first 4 years we were back in the Premier League (the two before and after we won it) we made profit which he says is almost unprecedented. There's two ways you can look at that that's interesting, it's the time Vichai was running the club not his son. It's also the time when the vast majority of the players contracted would have been signed before Rudkin was the DOF.

You could make that statement about every player we've been linked to for the last three years and pass as ITK Not so much a dig at you as just I found the statement funny in the context of our situation.

I know and that's who I was responding to when you chimed in

Your bias is showing. His problems here started when his line manager at the time publicly threw him under the bus claiming that his commute to work was too long regardless of the fact he was arriving at the work place on time and staying until the end of the work day. And this was largely a distraction to cover for that line manager's incompetence, by the way. His productivity was actually better than coworkers who were being favoured ahead of him because he didn't fit the manager's view of what someone in his role should look like. Even when his line manager left and was replaced, his performances were better than the same co-worker who was once again preferred to him, seemingly largely because of his personality. As a result he's been increasingly isolated from the rest of his team and assigned other duties which are beneath his job description. If we attempted to then pay him at the level of those new duties he'd go to an employment tribunal and absolutely annihilate us, rightly so. I get it, you don't like him, fair enough. Frankly I've lost patience with him, too. But if we were to pay him at the level of the U21s we'd be entirely in the wrong.

Except that's not it, is it. It's "we're choosing to send you to work with the apprentices for reasons that are entirely subjective and because you're working with them, we're going to pay you their rates regardless of what it says on your contract."

I'd ****ing love to see the look on your face when your boss tries this on you.

First time you've broken the news on a signing for years and it would be this, you pervert.

The country he had nearly 50 caps for and has openly spoken about managing in the past? Pretty sure he would.

Unironically probably the biggest boost to the club's social media following since we won the league.

I also don't think he'd come back to work with Rudkin as DOF.

We genuinely don't really know what anyone at the club does and I'm not being funny. The corporate structure and the responsibilities of staff at our club do not seem consistent with well run, modern clubs. We (fans) throw blame all over the place but we don't actually know where it truly belongs. Especially with our dubious relationship with agents and agencies muddying the water.