Not Actually that Crucial a Summer as of August 2023...beginning to now think everything isnt fine!

The salaries you find online, always take them with a pinch of salt.

 

What? You don’t think we need GK, LB, CB, CM, LW and a striker named… again

 

The money in our league hasn't increased so why would our wage ceiling? Yes, we have CL income right now so we're pretty flush and can afford to push the boat out a bit, but that's still always going to have an effect on how we budget.

Do you honestly think footballers should be getting extra wage increases in line with inflation and cost of living when they already make more than most could dream of? Madness.

 

Happy to take the inflated fees when selling players but not acknowledge it when recruiting.

Still working to the same ceiling we have for past number of years. i.e. Won't spend above £10m and won't pay more than £30k a week

Did I say they deserved it?? No but its a simple fact of life, inflation exists. Lawwell wage continued to go up year on year due to it.

 

What? You don't think we need GK, LB, CB,CM,LW and a striker again named again....again

 

I always do, but it's a reference point to be looked at, I use the same source for our current team to use as a benchmark against when looking at things like that.

 

We definitely need a GK, LB, CB, CM, LW and a striker.

 

Or unless ur a member of the board.

Lawwells starting salary was reportedly £500k/year, in 2019 he pocketed £3.5m. Fat * was highest paid employee at the club.

Early 2000s our record sale for a player was Viduka at £6m and our record signing was Lennon at £6.5m.

In the 23 years since we have only matched or bettered lennons fee 4 times; jota and Ccv at £6.5m, Jullien at £7m and Edouard at £9m. So generally we are still shopping in the under £6m range. Yet we have smashed our record sales numerous times; McGeady £9m, Wanyama £11m, VVD £13m, Dembele £20m, KT £25m, Jota £27m.

Clubs who operate the business model we claim we are doing, continually reinvest the profits and progressively sign a better standard of player bcoz they are shopping in higher market this then allows them to sell him for a greater price than the 1st players and cycle repeats. Clubs like ajax and benfica do it perfectly. Wheras we have never made the jump to the next level of player.

It's probably why these clubs continue to reach later stages of European competitions while we have not won a knockout tie in europe since Lawwell took over.

 

Considering the excitement at the start of the window, it has been slowly sucked out me. Get the * chequebook out and bring in 2 or 3 players that are ready to go straight into the starting eleven. As it stands, our first eleven are weaker than last season, which is totally unacceptable given the financial position we find ourselves in.

 

Is it too early for rumblings ? Maybe some of the Jota money has went towards new steel barricades just in case we pay the car park a visit.

 

I think the inflated fees and wages are only when going to certain leagues, especially the EPL. The fact is that their worth to us in terms of contributing to prize money, CL qualification and marketing hasn't changed that much in the past 10 years; but the worth of good players to an EPL team has skyrocketed. That's just a natural consequence of the difference in revenue sources.

I think that's the whole truth for wages and much of the truth regarding transfer fees, but the one complication with the latter is that I haven't included sell-on value when talking about what players are worth to us. That's why I truly believe that we would break these ceilings for the right player. The problem is that this aspect of what a player is worth to us is the hardest of all to get right. If it is 100% clear that a player is going to be extremely good, we will be outbid. Again, it's worth emphasising that we won't only be outbid because team X has more money than us but because such players are also worth more to an EPL team than they are to us. This is why how much money we have in the bank, while relevant, is not totally deterministic of how much we can spend.

In some ways, our model is one of being paid by EPL clubs to take a risk on players they think might be good but aren't sure of . What this means is that to spend the kind of big money we all want to see us spend, we have to be pretty * sure that a player is going to be good at the same time as the clubs in the big leagues aren't sure. And we have to do it competitively against other clubs in the same boat as us trying to do the same thing, many of whom have much more experience than us of doing this. So when can we have this kind of information? Well, loans for example. After seeing them here on loan for a year, we had access to tons of information about Edouard and Jota that the likes of Brighton or Southampton didn't and we spent the money. Another is Mark Lawwell's personal contacts at Manchester City. Ultimately, the third and best way will be to trust the scouting and recruitment departments; but we've only got a reasonable track record for the last 2 years. It's quite early to go slamming our financial onions right up against the market's proverbial chin based on 2 years of getting it (mostly) right.

Where we are in our development, we don't need to be paying inflated prices quite yet. I hope in a few years, we'll be in a position to do so. Ultimately, we want to aspire to something like what Benfica do. I know they are a huge club with some amazing aspects; but I think we potentially are too.

 

You can't just ignore the leagues they're in and compare us to Ajax and Benfica though, in tv income alone they get in a season what we get over four or five, at a starting level they simply have a lot more money to play with than we do, as long as we're in scotland we're never going to be able to match them on fees and wages. The fact that Ajax can afford to take a 20m punt on a tube like Bassey shows the level we're at.

We can afford to get a couple of players above our usual range right now because we've had a few good years, but overall we don't have the steady base revenue to bridge the gap to these teams, their wage bills are probably double ours.

 

Ur right mate and I agree with most of what ur saying but I'll give the perfect example.

3 years ago we needed a striker. We had 2 options in front of us 1 was keen(Toney) , 1 wasnt so keen(Ajeti) . 1 was worth £9-10m, 1 was worth £5m. The more expensive 1 was the 1 that wanted to come.

We went cheaper option as we tend to do and instead of having a top quality striker who we would have sold on in 2 years for £30m+ (before his betting scandal) we have a useless fat lump that we can't even pay ro leave.

 

It's a very good example and I agree with you there. I think we're already at a stage where we should be spending the kind of fee we did on Edouard a bit more often when a good investment opportunity is there (as it was in your example). Bear in mind that at the time, I personally wouldn't have trusted our scouting and recruitment department to spend a £5 note wisely, so I can understand the board's reticence; but there's no excuse now. We definitely need to cut out cheapskate stuff like that and I trust that we have. Time will tell!

The best time to judge this window will be the day after it closes.

 

Our inability to blow the huns out of the water over the last ten years to a point where they can't even come close to us is frankly embarrassing. Yeah we're better than them but not by as much as we should be and it comes down to penny pinching in crucial moments.

If we do the unthinkable and don't win the league this season it will be down to this disaster of a window.

 

We've blown sevco away repeatedly since they came up and hoovered up almost every trophy available, what are you talking about? We can't stop them from spending money to be clear of the rest of the league, other than keeping on winning what do you think we can directly do to keep them down more than we are?

 

It’s not just that, even those we are being linked with seem completely underwhelming like Fraser or guys who we are relying on their club having no other offers so we can try negotiate a complex loan or risky transfer that still feels a long shot.

For me this feels like a real waste of a window, even if we don’t sell the likes of Hatate and Abada, we also have O’Riley, CCV, Johnston, and probably others that will have one eye on moving on by the end of next summers window.

There is a couple of weeks left but I fear we end up with expensive loans kicking the can down the road and we end up chasing our tail trying to do a rebuild. We seem so inadequate at getting our business done at times.

 

Spending money to keep progressing in Europe would be enough. We're spending to be marginally better than them as far as I can see.

I'd even go as far back as 08/09 when we penny pinched over signing Stephen Fletcher who would have probably scored enough to get us over the line and put them into oblivion faster but we signed Willo Flood.

 

I don’t think we will sign any of these guys we are “linked with”. Just someone throwing out names that grow legs on the good old internet. We are taking too long but surely to * they’ll bring in what we all can see we need

 

We can invest more to progress in europe and the huns will still be in reasonable touching distance of us because they're better than the rest of the league, it's two seperate issues, you saying we're not blowing the huns out of the water the last ten years simply isn't true, we've dominated them to the point they celebrate a dead rubber win at the end of the season as if it's the championship, they're becoming more and more tinpot every year.