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The Cull of the High Earners


smetrov

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I would say fruitless rather than reckless....referring to the quality we got back for our money.

 

That's exactly right.  I wouldn't say that giving O'Neill the 6th biggest wage budget was at all reckless, OK it may have been above the ideal ratio to turnover but Randy seemed more than willing at that stage to fund it.  It's just that so much got pissed away on poor footballers and that can't be down to Randy, merely down to the manager's recruitment.  He couldn't have done much more for the club up until that point.  He's made bad decisions as well but appointing Lambert and restructuring the finances was a good one in my book, despite all the short-term pain we're suffering at the moment.

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Randy couldn't afford that wage bill however good the players were. How does a player being good make it easier to afford their wages?

 

Shit players often make the team worse, so they end up getting dropped and not used, and you have to bring in someone else and pay them to replace them.  We've had incredible difficulty shifting players so you're effectively paying two players, with the one who actually has to play in the team getting paid less.  Good players generally retain or improve their transfer value as well, shit players don't.  The money we've written off on transfer fees could probably have funded the club's wages for over half a year.  I think Randy is wealthy enough to fund a large chunk of the club as he did for the first 3 years but not rich enough to piss away £40m a year.

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We got rid of Hutton and Warnock and still ended up signing 2 unknowns for next to nothing, What more does Randy want considering we're facing relegation!? When we got rid of them I was pressing refresh every 5 seconds waiting for the players to roll in......

 

What more does this man want from Lambert, we have a team of kids and he's still not happy!? the club is on its knees because of Lerner. It's fine that he wants to cut costs but why so brutally?

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Randy couldn't afford that wage bill however good the players were. How does a player being good make it easier to afford their wages?

 

He could. A good player earns between 40-60k a week. Problem was we were giving the crap players that salary. the fact Sidwell, Beye, Cuellar, Heskey, Warnock and Luke Young were taking nearly 250k a week in salary out of the club is disheartening and if you were a neutral you can see why Randy pulled the plug on investing heavily

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OK, so if you have 10 good players at £40-60k per week you can afford them. If you have 10 crap players at £40-60k per week (not that we did), you can't.

 

This doesn't make any sense and the belief that the problem was poor quality players is hampering rational debate about the position we are in.

 

Lerner can't afford to finance a top half premier league club and that is fundamentally why we are plummeting towards the championship. (Appointing crap managers who get crap results hasn't helped but it's the money that matters most.)

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OK, so if you have 10 good players at £40-60k per week you can afford them. If you have 10 crap players at £40-60k per week (not that we did), you can't.

 

Because you end up paying wages for more players to replace the crap ones. I believe that was the point being made.

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The Club is running at a substantial loss – regardless of why, that’s a simple fact of the matter. That loss in aggregate gets bigger every year. At some point, that number gets so big, the Club fails and goes into administration.


If we get relegated, that loss on an annual basis gets substantially bigger immediately. At that point is it (when combined with other existing losses) big enough to threaten the existence of AVFC?


If so, then much as I hate the results that we are seeing on the pitch, I fully support the decision to seek a point of financial stabilty even if that means relegation – the future of the club is, in my humble opinion, more important than the performance this season.


I can also see validity in the argument that while spending large in January may have saved us this season, until the club is sustainable on an ongoing basis, we would likely have only compounded the problem.


What we need to do is get the very best out of the team that we have – to effectively outperform the sum of our individual parts… david moyes does that, Roberto Martinez, Brendan rogers did at Swansea, paul lambert did at Norwich…


What I will say about PL is that he appears to understand what he has to do, and is trying (I’m not going so far as to say, succeeding) to do so…


What I really want the Club to do is to tell the fans what the plan is, and to give us some idea whether off the pitch, we are getting close to having achieved it. I reckon the 31 May 2012 numbers are out at the end of this month, which should give us some idea.

 

What it won’t tell us is the wage number that the Club is trying to achieve and how our actual number sits relative to that. It will also be nine months out of date – nine months where there have been massive changes in the squad set up.

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you could pay 25 players 40k a week and have a wage bill of 52m a year. if our revenue is about 90m, that's about what... 65%? so assuming that to be the case, we're probably looking at spending maybe 45% of revenue on wages? 

 

that'd equate to about 40.5m, which split among a squad of 25 players averages out to £31,150 per player, per week

 

if we take it that 8 of our squad in any season are kids earning about 8k each, that increases the average among the remaining 17 players in the squad to £42k per week

 

taking a look at our first team squad list, and making some really shoddy, uninformed projections, i would put our first team at an annual wage of about £40m, with perhaps another £4m covering the reserves, academy, manager and back room staff. that's not an unmanageable figure at all, but the problem is that we're still getting absolutely **** for big earners who aren't contributing - and moreso by the fact that the owner thinks it's too much. how much more does he want to cut the wages? i think we could probably go down as far as 32m a year on the first 25 (average of 32k for the main 17 players and 8k for the younger ones) while still being competitive, if we had the opportunity of a blank canvas to start from again. the only logic i can pull from the whole scenario is that that's precisely what the owner is thinking too, and he's considering that relegation would be a means to those ends.

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i think your estimate of numbers of players in the first team squad is low. remember most of the kids signed up three year contracts in the last year or so - even if the base is as low as 10, they will have appearance fees which will bump that up very quickly - very few of our kids have not been playing....

 

thing is, if you band the players by an approximation (in a really shoddy, uniformed way), i think it looks something like this:

 

so, if we say the following are on an average of say 60k per week:

 

db9

steven ireland

gabby

shay given

stan

zoggy

 

thats 19 million

 

then you have some on say 40k per week:

 

dunne

delph

 

thats 4 million


then you have those on say 30k per week:

 

 

guzan

vlaar

benteke

holman

el ahmadi

 

thats 8 million

 

then you have the youngsters who lets say over the course of a year are on an average of 20k per week - these are all playing and have signed contracts in the last year, or have just been bought in, so i don't think its too far out, from what i understand:

 

clark

lowton

westwood

weimann

herd

bannan

bennett

bowery

baker

sylla

dawkins

gardner

albrighton

lichaj

stevens

 

makoun (top up under loan arrangement)

hutton (top up under loan arrangement)

 

thats 17.5 million

 

and then if we assume the rest are being paid nothing:

 

carruthers

williams

marshall

johnson

delfouneso

burke

 

that comes to 48.5 million.

 

the problem is that very few of the players in the top bracket are playing - only gabby, and more recently zoggy - 40% of the wages is giving us 18% of our starting XI, with a squad of 25 to cover...

 

i wonder where our actual wage bill today sits relative to the premier league as a whole. i'm sure, even with all of the cutting, its not 19th, which means that there is still more cutting to do before we can rebuild.

 

and i am also not kidding myself that the very few players this season who have enhanced their value (mostly a mr benteke) will be content to sit one day longer than the 19th may before that number becomes something untenable for us.

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theres still players like given, dunne, makoun and ireland to get off the books, plus the probably lower wage sh ite players like bennett, delph, bannan and delfouneso

 

whats is the combined annual wages of the above?

 

with the amount of money lerner has spent on players between 4 managers, you would expect us to be knocking on the top 4 door every season but we arent, and why? because the 4 managers, in lerners faith, have bought dross

 

and now, us the fans and PL have to suffer the consequences on lerner pulling the plug and not willing to waste any more, PL has already wasted money on bennett and el ahmadi

 

it seems that every one decent player bought, 2 sh ite players are also bought, a 1 in 3 ratio

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I don't actually think Lambert's been that bad in the transfer department. Lowton, Westwood and Vlaar were good signings IMO and Benteke was absolutely brilliant and I expect we'll get at least double what we paid for him even if we go down. It's just a shame he's very poor in most other departments of management.

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It'll be very hard to find a buyer for Ireland and Given, for Bent probably not so much. I'd probably keep Gabby and N'Zog if they can get back in consistent form as they'd be useful just for their experience - Gabby and N'Zog at least has shown some fight and effort. Ireland almost looked like he's getting back form and consistency but then suddenly (again) fell off for some reason and looked like he couldn't give a crap, he again put real effort against Bradford but I've lost all hope he'd come good.

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I don't actually think Lambert's been that bad in the transfer department. Lowton, Westwood and Vlaar were good signings IMO and Benteke was absolutely brilliant and I expect we'll get at least double what we paid for him even if we go down. It's just a shame he's very poor in most other departments of management.

 

Agree with this - and would add KEA (I still think he'll come good).

 

That's the benefit of a scouting network and not a "buy Britain" policy. Now if only Lambert could get the best out of them.....

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theres still players like given, dunne, makoun and ireland to get off the books

Dunne will be gone at the end of the season.

Makoun hopefully will impress at Rennes and they'll sign him permanently.

Ireland we are stuck with until next summer.

Given we are stuck with until he retires.

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With regards the wage bill, people seem to forget to include some of our 'staff':

Lambert will be on a chunk, and so will his team  - there's a fair few £m there.

Plus the youth and academy coaches. The kit-men, physios, the masseurs (although we have saved a fortune since Carew left ;) ), the groundsmen at VP and Bodymoor Heath. It wouldn't surprise me if the wage bill for the non-first team squad is £10m, or maybe more with all the add-ons.

Then there is the annual pay-off for the former manager and his staff - possibly anothe £10m a year for the past 3 seasons.

 

Add on to the £50m+ for the first team from above, my guess is at least £70m on wages and related this season alone. Finally, national insurance will take this up to at least £80m

Something had to change, and is.

 

And that's without paying the interest to Randy, or even running VP or Bodymoor.

Arghhhhh

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Can we all agree then that actually bombing out the high earners - and replacing them with players on 5k & 10k isn't the way forward 

 

 

 

I keep hearing that there's a direct correlation between wage bill and league placing.  Then I look at the people who play for us, the (reputed) wages they are on and what they deliver by way of effort and results, and I think that correlation just doesn't hold.

 

 

I think that the correlation does hold in a general sense, generally the teams paying the most, attract better players and appear higher up the league.

 

However, whilst it is true generally, for individual clubs it may not be true - For us we seem to be paying players £50k a week for a £10k a week perfromance. For example, were Warnock and Hutton worth five times what Lowton and Bennett are worth - probably not!

 

Even worse are players earning 50k plus a week and not appearing on the pitch e.g Given, Ireland, Bent etc

 

Teams like Everton are getting 50k worth of value out of Leon Osman but we are not getting any value at all from Ireland

 

These players plus Collins, Dunne, Delph, Cuellar, Makoun and perhaps Gabby are all earning top money but failing to deliver commensurate perfromances

 

Warnock, Hutton, Collins, Cuellar, Dunne, Given, Ireland, Makoun, Delph, Bent = 10 players costing us around £475k a week. We need to replace them with 10 players on £25-30k a week saving half the wage bill. The trick will be to find players like Vlaar or Benteke who were can get for that money but deliver more than that on the pitch

 

KEA and Bennett have been getting some stick but them plus Westwood and Lowton combined don't add up to Warnocks salary - we should take this into account when judging their performance and LAmberts performance

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