Essex_Canary

Would expect Burnley to be a lot lower given that they’ve gone from being debt free and owned by fans with £40m cash to a leveraged takeover which leaves them with c.£90m debt

For me I’d also include Vrancic against Wycombe at home this season. More curled into the top corner rather than Dowell’s whipped effort and with the added complexity of the Wycombe wall jumping

Ref got it wrong then, if he’s injured because of a foul that results in a yellow card then he didn’t need to leave the pitch in the first place

If a player is booked then the player doesn’t have to leave the pitch after treatment. If he was injured (which the fact he didn’t come back on suggests) then it’s strange that Wednesday didn’t immediately replace him with a sub

Yep, three was a history to why he did it. In the end it didn’t make a difference to how the season turned out for us...fortunately

2024. Original 5 year deal was signed in 2011 with an eight year extension penned following that.

Just to clear something up. TV payments are made in two tranches each season - in August and in February so there is no outstanding revenue owed to clubs by the leagues for this season. The EFL’s £50m bailout fund to tide clubs over is actually made up of the upcoming payment for this August.

Oh the irony 25 years on. Robert Chase was hounded out of the club for putting funding towards facilities and land rather than players. Yet now a significant minority are suggesting we do exactly that. Reduce our playing budget so that we can build a stand. The board can’t win, they spend money on players and there are a vocal bunch who maintain we aren’t spending enough and trying to do things on the cheap. We push the boat out on signings and those same few moan when we have to sell and are forced to make cut backs. What this club needs for the next 2 or 3 years is a bit of stability, if we are still fortunate enough to be premier league club at that point then expansion is a discussion worth having.

He did inherit a total shambles, both on and off the pitch. A first team that had 3 number 10’s but only one full back, an ageing squad living off what they achieved 2 years previous, a bloated wage bill, a financial position which meant the club wouldn’t have been able to meet its liabilities, a training ground that once was state of the art but by that point was out of date despite 4 years of premier league money, a scouting network Thad seemed to letch from one misguided strategy to the next and a complete disconnect between the club and supporters. Sounds like an utter shambles to me

Part of the squad. By all accounts he was going to be signing in the summer anyway so this is just an extended settling in period/bit of cover if required job between now and May

I do love a good read of TWTD, even in our darkest times their delusions have made me laugh. I read recently a thread about the financial impact of their relegation to League One and it appears as though the farm hands are rather missing the plot...one even suggested that they might even reduce their debt by getting relegated. https://www.twtd.co.uk/forum/448112/why-relegation-would-be-a-financial-disaster. What has changed since we were in League One is FFP. Effectively the EFL have put into place some pretty stringent rules to limit what clubs can pay in wages and unlike getting relegated from the Premier League there is no parachute payments. Whilst FFP in the Championship is fairly flimsy at League One level it is more rigid and strictly enforced and it comes in the form of SCMP - Salary Control Management Protocol - which allows clubs to only spend 60% of their turnover on wages. For the binners this spells huge issues. Their last set of accounts showed they paid £18.5m in wages against a turnover of just £17.1m. In League One their revenue will drop by at least £6m because of the difference in TV money alone (it will probably be more due to falling attendances (fewer away fans) and lower commercial deals etc) so that means their turnover will be around £11m. If that is the case then with SCMP they will be forced to operate with a wage bill of just £6.6m - down nearly £12m from the last set of accounts...and if they don’t then they’ll be under a transfer embargo. Now player sales count towards turnover so in theory they can sell off their ‘best’ players to increase their turnover...however it’s not like they have a hugely talented squad that has simply under performed, they are where they are because their playing squad isn’t good enough for the championship. Even if one of their players is in demand every club in the league knows the issues that they are facing financially so they are hardly going to get ‘decent’ offers. They literally will have to take whatever they get offered. As we know getting rid of players on big wages can be an issue, so that juicy new contract they gave to the hapless keeper last summer (20k per week, £1m a year) will be over 15% of their total salary bill all on his own. The best they can hope is they can find someone to take him on a free and match his contract, but it’s hardly like he’s going to be in that much demand, given his wages and the season he’s having. But, I hear the dim-witted farm hands down the road say, their friendly (asset-stripping ticket tout) owner can simply pump in millions more of his money to boost the turnover figures...except old Marcus has never gifted the club anything, all the money he ‘invests’ each year to keep them afloat is actually in the form of loans...ever heard the one about it not really being debt because he owes it to himself! Now the EFL have long since cottoned on to that old ploy so loans aren’t included within turnover for SCMP calculations, meaning unless the tout actually donates the money to the club he can’t make up the shortfall himself...and given that he’s not exactly been one to dig into his own pockets (exact opposite, he’s actually robbed them blind) the notion that he will suddenly change seems rather far fetched! Now SCMP doesn’t actually cover transfer fees paid out, so in theory they could go and blow millions on new players to rebuild their already League One standard squad, however they still have to pay the wages of the players they pay fees of and keep to the salary limit...so again that seems unlikely. There are some exceptions to SCMP for young players and existing long term contracts, but seeming as though the long term contracts are most likely to be the most onerous, this is scant consolation. http://www.financialfairplay.co.uk/scmp.php To sum it all up, this idea that they can go down and bounce straight back up seems fanciful. Yes there are clubs that have done it but those were (relatively in comparison) better run clubs...and the longer they spend in League One the harder it gets as the more their turnover falls.

11/12 and annoyingly the one I got wrong was a ground I’ve been to!

Basic economic principles of supply and demand. Prices aren’t ‘high’ because if they were demand would drop given that supply (number of seats) is a constant. The club has to generate revenue anyway it can and (unlike in the Premier League) matchday income is the single biggest form of revenue that the club can generate.

The twenty is plenty arguement is a Premier League discussion only. Outside the top flight it’s all about maximising income in anyway possible so as long as demand is consistently high there will never be a case for reducing tickets to that level for games at Carrow Road. If you read any of the Swiss Ramble blog or his tweets you realise how good the club is at generating commercial revenue, for the last set of published accounts we had the second highest commercial revenue and overall income (excluding parachute payments) of all the club’s in the league.

How does it? We wanted to do a deal early in this he summer so we could bring players in with the cash raised and still managed to squeeze a record fee out of Leicester for him. The whole £40m for Grealish thing started with a throw away comment by Steve Bruce before the financial meltdown at the club happened and as far as I am aware there hasn’t actually been a single bid of more than £20m made for him, let alone £30-40m. To have got more than £60m for the Murphy’s, Pritchard and Maddison over the last 12 months is incredible business even more so when you consider this cake against a backdrop of huge financial challenges at the club.