by Elm Park Kid »
18 Apr 2021 19:11
I was listening the Price of Football podcast today with Kieran Maguire, who is considered pretty much the authority in football finance. Was interested to hear him say that even if an owner was able to 'dump' £150m into a Championship club, he didn't think it was enough to guarantee promotion.
This is the context that I think a lot of fans just aren't grasping at the moment. The kind of money we're spending, although crazy at face value, is actually pretty normal for a promotion chasing team. And, yes, a lot of it is 'wasted' on players that don't turn out as well as you hope. It's like the concept of 'hedging your bets' on the stock market - you buy a basket of shares with an understanding that some of them are going to lose you money, but an expectation that overall you will make profit. This is how you have to see spending in football - you can't cherry pick and say "Well, if only we bought the 'good' players or avoided the expensive wage flops' then we wouldn't need to spend so much. That sort of thing is just built into the game.