by Victor Meldrew »
08 Jan 2009 15:40
Vision Victor Meldrew On the question of Birmingham, Bouazza and Sinclair are only loan signings and they will get good money for Jerome to help fund the purchase of Boyd.
The people who run Birmingham strike me as shrewd and it looks as though they are investing the SKY TV money knowing that if the fail this year there is still more parachute money next year as well.
For whatever reason we have decided not to invest the SKY money in the squad.
To suggest that Birminham are heading for administration striks me as a bit premature and probably wide of the mark.
BTW wouldn't mind Jerome for us.
I'd like Jerome too but its not gonna happen.
They have a large squad most of whom they are still paying prem wages for yet they still supplement their squad with Premiership loans. Phillips and Carsley certainly don't come cheap. Their attendances are not following their spending pattern either..
They are the last club (in my memory) that bounced straight back up automatically so i guess they feel this is the way to go about it but their outlay is way above that of Charlton and Watford who like most clubs find themselves in bother if they haven't reduced the wage bill to manageable levels following relegation. Like us they cashed in on a couple of players like Kapo and Muamba but they spent pretty heavily to stay up in the last transfer window and that didn't help them.
I think they're precisely the sort of club that will find themselves in bother if they don't go straight back up. Whether its quite administration or not i don't know but the second set of parachute payments isn't easing the problems at Charlton or Watford.
Having read your post I decided to have a look at Birminham's squad details and in fact ,unless you think we have a large squad,their "large squad" is slightly LESS than ours.
You and I don't know whether Birmingham are still paying Premiership wages nor do we know if Reading are still paying Premiership wages so it's wrong to make such assumptions.
Dare I say also that they MAY have more valuable assets to sell if need be whereas we,apart from Doyle,have nobody worth much more than £1million-I am thinking of Ridgewell,Larssen ,Jeromeand McFadden in particular-and they must feel that the gamble is worth taking.
You use Charlton and Watford as instances of how it can all go wrong although now the parachute payments are even higher so from our club's point of view (and that's the only one I really care about) I would have thought that new capital from the sale of Kitson,Shorey and Sonko at about £10 million plus the parachute payment plus the supposedly unused portion of SKY money from last season presumably means that if we want to take a bit of a gamble we can afford to do so.
We didn't gamble to stay up (or rather, took an outrageous gamble on a player who had never played in England to take the place of our most expensive player who also had never played in England) so I wonder if we will gamble to go up.
Whether we do or not I find it sanctimonious that Birmingham should be derided for taking such a gamble.