Ric Flair

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.

Here's another one who doesn't get it. The reason very few clubs will ever break through is because of the vast gap in commercial revenue from the elite and everyone else in the PL. As I've repeatedly said, remove PSR and the elite will blow EVERYONE out the water by a scale larger than they already do. It will inflate transfer fees and wages even more so and leave the rest even more vulnerable to players being taken from them, the last 10 years has been a marked shift in PL teams being better equipped to refuse or at least get massive fees for players in this scenario. Prior to that they were powerless and the fees modest. I stand by what I've said, if the club have spoken out about PSR in the past then that's admirable and should give our stance we are taking now more weight, if they haven't then it hubris.

Bang on. There's no perfect solution that I've come up with or read/heard anyone else come up with. Carte blanche would just give the juggernaut clubs even more licence to spiral the farcical wages and transfer fees that awash the Premier League. The fact is, the wealth within the Premier League has allowed far more clubs access to better players from around the world than they'd ordinarily have gotten when the status quo was in existence 10-20 years ago, certainly not en masse like happens now. As a result over time, the entitlement that the average PL clubs have on being able to shoulder barge their way in to the big 6 is ferocious. The irony is, it's only in the last 10+ years that average PL teams have had the security to be able to prevent big clubs taking their players for modest fees. They are far more resilient to keeping players or demanding huge fees and we have benefitted more than most in that regard and was a large reason for our environment in which to progress. This footballing eco system doesn't significantly improve without controls like PSR, not unless there's a handicap system to narrow the gap between the have's and have not's. The elephant in the room is the commercial revenue that is far bigger than the revenue that comes from actual football. Is it unfair the biggest clubs pull in what they do? Everyone's skirting around it.

He'd signed a new 4 year deal so this cannot be entirely correct. Perhaps the conflict happened when he did end up signing the contract and was a ticking time bomb, wouldn't surprise me if he wanted his own man as he'd started making lots of changes as soon as we resumed back from pre-season.

I'd like our club to lay claims of where they've challenged the fairness of PSR previously, because if they haven't then it weakens this stance to nothing but a wet fart. The club were very resound in explaining to our fans the thought process behind trading a high value asset every season in order to progress and comply and at no point did they use that opportunity to question the financial limitations. We had an opportunity to be the shining light in succeeding and striving to comply whilst exposing the difficulty in making significant inroads in to the gap between the commercial revenue of the elite and the single outlier in PL history over several years but we didn't (publicly anyway). This is where the club has done themselves no favours with the fanbase, too closed off, too private. They could have mobilised something for others to get behind, especially at the time when the greedy 6 were trying to launch a break away. It's hubris, we've lost the plot and now crying wolf.

He'd already signed a new contract after we won the league. Why on earth would we be offering him another one when we were hurtling towards the drop? He was sacked for that reason.