st albans fox

You’re right about them having a tough season with a youngish squad. Injuries aplenty and possibly the coach with his mind elsewhere. Some of this sounds familiar. But their financial position is such that they can withstand a poor season and infact have the headroom to invest substantially and still not be at any risk whatsoever. their assets are generally young, and very saleable at a profit. Their wages not something that is of concern. they are a smaller club than us but showing that they can punch well above their weight because they are run very well with backroom staff and football executives who are sought after rather than laughed at. I know that we did this for a few seasons but it’s now clear that we decided we needed to spend big on wages to get there.

Brighton would never have got themselves into the mess we did with rodgers you think bloom is scared of de zerbi leaving? He took 23m compensation for potter and he’ll likely take another double figure sum. He’s a proven negotiator and he knows that you buy at the bottom and sell at the top (as best you can).

Man City were not a small club before the foreign ownership chelsea were not a small club before Harding backed them (and then Roman) these clubs have massive commercial incomes with a much larger fan base. When they were normal premier league clubs, they had a larger fan base too. we cannot compete commercially (that’s where the money is) with the rich six. We cannot compete with wealthy owners such as newcastle and villa have (and Everton had). You might think we are comparable in size with West Ham - I’d like to see us fill a 60k stadium each week. I was laughed at last week for suggesting we share our place in the food chain with palace and even dare I say it, forest. I think some of you need to appreciate what we are as a club. also if you remove cost controls then you just allow the Wild West out there and those who spend the most will likely achieve the best results and placings. It would not suit Lcfc. If you’re proposing that there should be salary caps and limits on overall spend then the best clubs will be those that have the best personal in the background. again we screwed. we seem to be very happy with psr when it suits us and very unhappy with it when it doesn’t. I think it’s simply a mechanism for delaying out sanction and potentially removing some of it on the basis that we fall through a legal gap in the rules.

Not sure about the highest spenders on agents fees. If that’s the case it’s a fairly recent development. I assume SW is responsible for generating budgets. I cannot believe that she generates a budget to lose £90m. Either the footballing decision makers are ignoring their budgets or incapable of meeting targets set re player sales or wages/fees paid. That would have to be with the approval of the ownership. otherwise we would have seen either SW or JR already leave after the last two years after a power struggle.

We’ll have disclosure by Friday. it’s quite rare for Israeli military to be prosecuted (as is the case in most armies) but I reckon you might see a few in this case. whether any charges are seen through would be moot though

farke and enzo or neither of them should be up for this. i like rossenior but dont understand why he's nominated ahead of others

one of those spideys should be a lot smaller than the other !

was congers involved in identifying these targets (and potentially making contact with their people) ??

one thing that might be interesting next season if we go up will be the huge spread of wages and their lack of association with the talent of the player. we wont be bringing guys in on more than 50k. ignore s/o fees which would be added if free agents. so you'll have guys on 40/50k being asked to run through walls to keep us in the PL whilst deadwood like bouba and daka could be sitting on the bench earning 80k. i dont think thats great for morale. saw that at qpr ten years ago and it didnt go well.

the way the rules are currently written - yes

we know from experience that we believe paying players exorbitant salaries is much more beneficial than giving those who are just as valuable behind the scenes a big enough wage to keep them. having said that, i'm aware that chelsea recently took someone of this ilk from brighton who went as high as they felt was reasonable but were still blown out of the water by chelsea's offer

No one can dispute what we achieved but it can be argued by our competitors that we overspent on the rules in order to do that. we knew the rules - we should have been agitating for them to be changed but I maintain that we believe that just as the rules protected the rich six from the other 14, so they also protected little old Leicester to a degree from the Aston Villa’s and any other reasonable sized PL club who had extremely wealthy owners and couldn’t invest quickly to catch us up

He’s gone on a free in July (although I am pretty sure we are trying to get him to re sign)

I don’t think these are made public there’s got to be something funny here even worse than I thought (if you were of a certain mindset then you’d be looking around for brown paper envelopes on these contract arrangements - anyone know where 30k lee has his holiday homes ?) Brighton won’t do this - they are owned by a professional poker player. I doubt he losses too many negotiating issues. He also knows when to cut and run.

Our wage approach is astonishing take Bouba and patson they would likely have been earning. 20k/week in France and Austria who on earth thought it made sense to give them 80k/week ? Surely you max at 50k and if they turn out to be mustard then you can give them a new deal 18 months later vestergaard at 80k is more understandable given his experience and that he was likely already on 50k at soton. Even then surely he would have signed at 65k. bertrand at 80k/week is often pointed at for being nuts. But he was a free and considered himself worth a £3m s/o few. So over two years that 3m is 30k/week. We’ve effectively bought him for 3m on a two year deal and paid him 50k/week. We have no idea if there was an option for us to extend his two year deal to three at 50k if he’d worked out. Our general transfer policy was ridiculous. When players are half way through their contracts you a) offer them a new deal on a reasonable increase if they have excelled b) you sell them and cut your losses if necessary you don’t have a policy which doesn’t match the commercial size of the club when there is a psr structure in place that prevents you from spending much more than you can earn. We won’t know if there was resistance in place from some board members and they were over ruled or out voted. To assume that all of them were fully on board (pardon the pun) isn’t something we can second guess.

Parachute payment is around. 70m last season broadcast revs were 115m. So that’s 45m down. perversely, matchday revs may well be unaffected because 4 additional fixtures commercial revs must take a hit - especially sponsorship. Let’s say £15m that’s a drop on last years revenues of 60m wages will be notably reduced - we can take out rodgers 10m and then estimate 30% of the 190m. That could mean our wage bill is down between 60 and 70m. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 50m lower. so we’ve lost 60m on income and saved 50m on wages. So we’re going to be losing 100m like for like. we’ve taken in player sales profits around 45m so far and spent around 6m amortised. that brings us to around 60m loss. Our three year rolling loss needs to be 83m to avoid a psr charge. We have 34m headline loss dropping out from year 3. We have no idea what our deductions are which means it’s tough to guess what we need to get in June. a rough guess would say that we need to get in 60m in profits from transfers in June for us to make a decent argument that we’ve addressed the situation. But if we get promoted then I doubt very much that we’d do this and we’d look to get an accelerated hearing and fine from the efl which the PL would take from us on their behalf. I think we’d try and get in £40m profits in June. Can’t see how we avoid selling kdh and JJ which we should hopefully be able to squeeze out, even with fairly low ball deals and another profitable sale from somewhere. how many free transfers can we manage to find this summer!

He’s pretty much all we have apart from JJ all the other ‘young’ buys we still own have proved to be duds (eg daka, Bouba )

I think that the level of wages we are paying makes annual increases less likely The year that we took in daka, soumare and vestergaard showed wages drop from 192 to 182 but other costs increase from 23 to 33 tbh, we are peeing in the wind trying to second guess how the club deal with wages etc. all we can say is that last year we saw a big rise when we’d not have expected to see much at all. Surely the majority of that is rodgers (and crew) severance EDIT: £15m of that increase is for the extra month so sort of making sense that cost of sacking rodgers would be around £12m all roads are heading back to a place where the loss should have been expected to be around £70m. If that had been the narrative, would the 90m have come as such a massive surprise ?

Aren’t they in the previous years accounts ? New entries for 22/23 would be faes and the Jan signings of VK and souttar. Fofana dropped out

They have more than a few that they bought for less than £10m which are worth £30m plus their model is way better than ours was because they are were still finding gems which cost <10m and expected low wages whilst qualifying for Europe we thought that we needed to spend £20m+ and pay 80k/week to do that !! you can only assume that their recruitment team is far more efficient than ours was. Working harder ? I believe that they use stats based models to find these guys - research into Tony Bloom and his business’ reveals more

we have to find approx £35m per year allowables to deduct to meet the 105m covid muddied the waters on previous seasons so difficult to work out what we claimed last two seasons

Winks isn’t on 80k/week BUT he would definitely have a promotion bonus in place (which could equate to that as a budgeted annual total. Eg. 50k/week + 1.5m bonus)

we lost ten places so our merit payment was going to be slashed our broadcast revenue was also depleted re no euro campaign (as was euro match day ) looks like we took a hit of almost £40m compared to previous season on those metrics we sacked Brendan and his team. Wages and other costs seem to have increased by £29m from 21/22. They were consistent in previous year so did that sacking cost way more than we thought ???? I’m struggling to work out where increases come from in the playing squad ?? so we have those losses together totalling approx £70m more than previous year. our profit on madders and wes were £75m. presumably people expected us to post losses around £60m we can see how they’ve probably undercooked that but the additional £20m beyond £70m ….. the point here is that last June we knew where we stood we knew we’d broken ffp without selling a further £50m (profit) of players before July 1st. we made a conscious decision to stick Barnes into 23/24. Can only assume we thought we’d get a fine in the PL and we were better off trying to keep more of a lid on 23/24 losses because EFL have a history of points deductions and there was no guarantee of promotion

Covid rules allowed losses to be spread over four season I believe (or rules to same effect)

The purchases are spread over 5 years whereas the profit from sales is straight onto the bottom line