Ric Flair

Of course, anywhere in the ball park of £10-20m there's quite possibly view points that we have complied depending on what we've valued allowable deductions at. But equally it's difficult to plan to comply right at the last minute by forecasting x amount of sales. We've seen already that part of this difficulty we've got in will be impacted by sales that never happened for players that then ran their contracts down etc.

If its less than £35m then we'd have to question why wasn't Barnes sold earlier and similarly why Maddison was sold early on the cheap if we weren't able to comply.

Some captivating replies to this who have soon flipped the narrative now that we've seemingly breached PSR too. 😂😂😂

Unless the poor decisions lead to breaches that are punishable. The decisions that were made in 2021/22 and that have likely caused it being almost impossible for us to comply with PSR in 2022/23 was not because of poor transfer incomings but because the strategy was off kilter. As I've pointed out, if we've breached PSR by more than £35m having sold both Fofana (and cleared £40m + profit and Maddison £40m - nearly all profit on the remaining book value) when we hadn't planned to sell either then there's absolutely no scenario in 2022/23 where we could have complied. Even if we'd won the league again the additional revenue would unlikely have covered it.

Whilst this is true that a few poor transfers or transfer windows hurt the rest of the PL compared to the big 6, that's more to do with their PL status rather than PSR explicitly. Take us for example, there's seemingly plenty of our fans willing to go along with the narrative that the reason we've gotten in to this mess is because we made some poor transfer decisions and because we got relegated - incorrect. As has all but been confirmed, any breach for the 3 year cycle including 2022/23 would likely have happened whether we won the league last season or got relegated. There wasn't a scenario that would see us not do so if selling Fofana and Maddison wasn't enough. The differential between finishing 1st or 18th is about £34m about what we got for Harvey Barnes and if we fall short of the limit by around that figure then the question will be asked why we didn't push for Barnes to be sold before the end of June. Although this also brings the question that if we have failed then what was the point in selling Maddison early for a lesser fee than anticipated? That's one thing I'm struggling to get my head around. Anyway, I come back to how we may have gotten in to this mess. If it were merely down to getting transfers right then how would that have made us compliant for the 3 year cycle? If Daka and Soumare were successes and key first team players it wasn't what was riding on our future compliance, I can't get my head around the clubs strategy for 2021/22. The only scenario for doing what they did was that they forecast Champions League would occur at the 3rd time of asking and then from there we'd back it up with other top 4 finishes. Baring in mind the plan was never to sell Fofana in 2022 and we barely signed anyone after we did, then we needed to raise £100m + from prize money, TV money and additional commercial revenue in 2022/23. Again, it cannot have been a genuine forecast for 2022/23 in light of all the issues that we were going to have a successful season. Rodgers even went on record saying the club were aware the season could be a struggle without a rebuild, surely they modelled for that. This is where it is a major failing on the clubs part to not sell players who's contracts were running down. If they weren't intending to sell high value assets in the summer of 2021 or 2022 then where were they intending to generate the revenue needed to comply? Likewise if they didn't build in any financial flexibility to move flops on for less than their remaining book value then this was never about transfers. It's possible to think PSR is no longer fit for purpose but that does not negate from what on earth our strategy had become.

Funny how this has been left well alone by certain posters in this thread.

This is it, nobody has been removed from their post. Simon Capper resigned to go to Newcastle but other than that there's been little change at director or board level to suggest the club think catastrophic mistakes have been made. The internal review after relegation and at that point the financial implications must have formed part of that and once again it was business as usual. Concerning more than comforting that is.

Jon Rudkin is likely to be in charge of negotiations for incomings, negotiations for outgoings and the financial obligations for wages for signings and concessions for outgoings. The finance department will work every year with the football side of the operations to set out the budget but there will be many moving parts for arriving at the bottom line, which for a football club tends to be ensuring the maximum loss isn't breached. What is interesting is what was forecast in recent years for outgoings because we've been the utter pits at moving players on. If Rudkin and Co managed to put forward the case that £100m would be generated in the year for the likes of Soyuncu, Tielemans, Praet and Maddison etc and we got nowhere near that then suddenly the budget is blown apart. The wage structure tends to be pretty fixed in any given year in whats likely to be incurred and maximum bonuses forecasted and he'd not have been solely responsible for ensuring every player was on an average of 95k a week for example, but the structure itself will have been developed over a few years with a total amount allowable and then would be down to negotiations and sign off by the footballing operations area rather than finance as long as it all came in under that. A strong negotiator or strategist would have an eye on the bigger picture which we were hurtling towards. It's hard to make a case for him being in the dark about the financial situation after the summer of 2022 and then just a few months later heading up the area that will have been trying to give Leeds £20m for Jack Harrison and in excess of £100k a week. Sometimes people get caught in the cross fire and might be the fall guy, it's pretty understandable as to why the spotlight is heavily on him.

No, prefer it when we don't play

We've got him already his name is Sammy Braybrooke

They're the sorts of signings that shouldn't command more than £30-40k a week off the bat as well if they were permanent signings.

West Brom will win the play-offs.

Ala Carlos Corberan

It's abundantly clear if we fail to get promoted this season then we will be an EFL horror story for years to come. If we do come up, I can't help but feel we'd be best pushed to sell/pay off every single player who is on a salary north of £30k a week and then make EFL type signings as if we were a plucky new Championship side ala Ipswich and then likely go straight back down but with parachute payments secured to protect our future and with points deductions likely for the foreseeable it wouldn't matter if we didn't come back up immediately.

You may well be right given our standing in the game at the time a lot of these contracts were signed but if it were the case then surely we'd have pushed harder to get more players out the door last summer. The part that doesn't surprise me is us not planning on selling Fofana (which if we didn't would have led to a monumental PSR breach) and offering Jack Harrison £100k a week and Leeds £20m for him despite all the known issues that were to come. Are you sure it's cash in the bank because that wouldn't be paid up front anyway. Most accounts aren't done on a cash basis but transactional unless a very small company.

This is a very well written article that even I font read and want to headbutt pool balls at the thought of how we've been ran. It does flag the issues we faced that whilst mistakes have been made in their bucketfuls we could still have ended up finding it hard to comply regardless of how badly we were doing on the field.

If they are all on bonuses that top them back up to their PL salaries then we are absolutely insane.

Blokes had a rough weekend.

Our squad is imbalanced. We have the best two goalkeepers, best defence and best strikers to choose from. Central midfield and out wide and the system we use is what makes our lack of options in those areas a major issue.

Took my 3 year old daughter to this, aiming to be a Dad who's club are the 1st to breach PSR for both the men and the women. She lasted until half time, her behaviour was extremely suspect and I'd ran out of crisps.

Yes they can but now teams dig in and command huge fees or did up to the point where the financial bubble may burst. The reason being because they now had far more financial clout being a PL team and the vast wealth it generated. The big 6 have been fighting for years for a bigger share of the TV revenue like for example La Liga get but that was voted down. Obviously the gap is commercially and maybe lifting PSR enables teams the feel they have the freedom to have a go but I doubt it happens with how much the powerhouses generate and then are attractive enough to find new owners should one spend an absolute fortune and it not pan out and cut their losses and walk away. Football has already ate itself, it would be a blood bath even more. Part of me shouldn't care, I certainly am no financial rule gatekeeper even though I've spent the last few days constantly arguing, I can't help it. I know you'll resonate with that 😂

Correct.

At that point we were on our way to £30m and £20m + losses for 2012/13 and then 2013/14 so we had good reason to vote for it, however I'm being facetious because the reason for the voting against isn't as relevant. If we've staunchly been against it over the years and attempted to spark challenge of it as and when in the PL then I commend us and although it possibly goes against us in the sense we proved we could achieve whilst complying, it could also be said we were in the best position to challenge it as a fortunate club compared to the unfortunate. Our owners would get blown out the water in the PL with no PSR, whilst PSR benefits the big 6 due to their vast commercial revenue compared to the rest, if it was removed it would give them and possibly one or two others (Newcastle) the muscle to well and truly blow the competition out of the water once and for all. I'm yet to read or hear a compelling alternative to PSR that would make any difference. You can't penalise the elite for the revenue they own unless you want to start doing some handicap system or draft pick muck like the Americans can't help themselves with.

And that's what I'd like our club to come out and hang their hat on if they did so. That would go along way to supporting crying wolf now, it would be admirable as bitter and twisted fans like myself find it very difficult to cut them any slack when they've provided absolutely zero dialogue on the strategy.

I will not have a bad word said about Our Keith.