Club for sale etc.

Not at all please dont make an assumption, inflation is a current fact of life. That’s my point.
If one’s income isn’t inflationary too then we have a problem, so does business as a whole. Maybe City should add 15% to season ticket prices to cover inflationary pressures. Proportionally the playing budget should remain the same therefore?

 

Think mine went up that this year already

 

There appears to be a discrepancy in the finances that doesn’t allow us to have 55% of the total income for the playing budget. You were suggesting that non football expenses had gone up due to cost of living etc., so how come the playing budget has not gone up, and in real terms gone down due to inflation. We have had a very good increase in income to our commercial activity, so an increase in ST is not required in my view. What I want to know is why our playing budget is 35%. Please don’t tell me that that is sufficient. As we need to compete with the top clubs for the best players. We needed a quality striker, midfielder, and CB’s. None of these arrived.

 

The club spend a lot of money on the academy now than they did in the Lawn Rhodes days as they used to ignore it. It’s starting to reap dividends now as young players starting to come through and the kids had a very good youth cup win at Tranmere last night. This could explain any discrepancy rather than conspiracy theories.

 

I really wouldn't mind a ST price rise if we were competently run and I knew it was going to good use

 

yes that could be explanation. It would be nice to be treated like an adult and that we had a full explanation rather than the silent treatment. Plus I would like to know how much that is costing, plus I also want to know how many of our players we can keep. It appears to me that the majority are sold elsewhere which does go back in the budget I presume, but who knows.

 

hasn’t happened this year

 

Great post.

I’m not really sure what Park means when he says our budget is competitive, it sounds like he’s speaking with Rhodes or Sparks moving his lips for him. It’s a meaningless comment when we don’t know other team’s budgets. Sparks has made a rod for the clubs back disclosing the playing budget as now we can see just how low it is in comparison with turnover, which is neglectful when you consider it’s the key part of the business. I can name 7 clubs that I can comfortably expect to have a higher budget than £2.8 million, which is shocking in League 2. Hell we should have one of the biggest budgets in League 1 let alone 2. Sustainability will kill this club by a thousand cuts and some are blind to it. A club that stagnates is actually in reverse.

 

Longer player contracts probably help keep the wage bill down. We've moved from 1-2 year contracts as standard to 2-3 year contracts so that long term commitment should help bring yearly costs down because we're probably structuring deals to pay more over a longer period. Also, helps with amortising transfer fees which we've paid for a few of the ones on longer deals eg Young, Odusina, Wilson.

 

I reckon we're saving vast sums of money by not having to pay goal bonuses to most of our attackers or clean sheet bonuses to any of our defenders. I also reckon that midfielders mustn't get those sort of incentives which is why we haven't bothered to sign many because they cost too much.

 

It's a brilliant plan if the players being signed on those long deals improve us as a team, but when half of them end up being loaned out and the other half are little more than squad fillers, it's not so great.

 

Fundamentally that’s answering a different question, but I agree for sure. What we are suggesting is the allocation of funds has changed, however as has been said multiple times it’s either increases on the playing side of the budget or stagnation or reduction of other costs. If income from ALL sources has increased by 10% that does not automatically mean the playing budget would increase by the same amount. We know there is no additional funding from the owner , and the remit is “ self sustainability” , as a result until we know the precise departmental spend ,it impossible to know how funding has been allocated within the model. My concern is twofold, reductions in sponsorship and a drop off of attendances will have a greater impact moreso than inflationary pressures, which is inevitable if the footballing side remains in the doldrums.

Hope that makes sense?

 

It's another sign of the muddled football thinking at our club. We're signing players for the long term and then panicking as soon as they have a few poor games and just bin them off without giving them time to develop. Sparks doesn't seem to be able to decide whether to try to get to the Champ in (say) 5 years or to just focus on getting out of L2 and as a result we're doing really badly in progressing to achieve either.

 

And income from selling off, to prem clubs, the youngsters we hardly know of, let alone see!

 

Not defending anyone here but it doesn’t make Park wrong. Nobody speaks for the owner, especially anyone on this forum. ( I hope)

 

Do you think we loan them out for free? I don’t believe any club does anymore.

 

Think it depends if we are paying the players wages or if the new team are

 

The loaning team “ normally “ pay all or a proportion of wages. Unless it’s young kids being sent out for development , I can see fees involved.

 

I can see us paying part of the wages and not getting a fee as the players we are loaning out are on more with us than the borrowing club would pay

 

Having a massive squad doesn't help. Maybe some are on peanuts, but there's all sorts of additional costs other than wages that go towards having employees at the club.