by Ian Royal »
23 Aug 2010 18:04
Barry the bird boggler Ian Royal Are you deliberately not engaging your brain?
Our wage budget in the Premier League when we were relegated was about £33m
40% reduction of £33m is £19.8m. Call it a further 30% reduction for the next season, although I personally think that's very overestimated, and you still have a wage budget of almost £14m.
So yes, we could have run a tight ship and cut a lot of cloth and still have all of the parachute payment taken up by wages. Why do you think they exist!?
Personally I don't think allowing a club, that was in our position, to increase a wage bill to 33m a year was a sign of being well run, particularly as it would appear there was little in the contracts to reduce wages back to Championship levels should relegation happen.
Where do you think the 40% reduction came from? And £33m was one of the lowest wage bills in the Prem iirc. And the two years of parachute payments allowed us to gradually reduce the wage bill, rather than crash it by basically selling 10 - 12 of our best players in one go, instead of the 4 or 5 each season for a couple of years.
We haven't had any significant financial problems (for a football club), which I would say is a sign of being well run when you take a ~£12m wage budget up to £33m and back down to ~£14m in the space of 5 years. Especially when you make a loss every year for many years before that period and have your income yoyoing up and down too.
I suspect his Madj is no longer as willing to let us accrue such substantial loses now he's seen us turn a profit occasionally. I suspect he may be hoping he can get us back with minimal loses so the profit can actually be used to grow the club, rather than pay off old debts we piled up getting there.