Thinking About the Finances of a Rebuild

[ToDarrenIsToDo]

£100m + any money made on player sales this summer and I think Levy has played his part more than enough.

Time will tellbut with gaps in the full back areas, centre back and defensively in midfield and with a nucleus aged 27 and under consisting of Kane, Son, Lucas, Lamela, Dele, Ndombele, Gedson, Lo Celso, Davies, Aurier, Sanchez, Sessegnon, Clarke etc it's pretty clear that after this summer and with many still to his their so called age peak that only tweaks will be necessary for a season or two afterwards.

I'd prefer more than £100m+ transfer fees in to be spent, I just don't think it's realistic with our debt, the vast sums potentially knocking about etc.

What I'd like to see is a top Right Back, a top Centre Back, a top Defensive Midfielder and an able backup striker until Parrott comes through and to see the club offload Vorm and Vertonghen on free transfers, Foyth, Rose, Walker-Peters, Wanyama and Eriksen sold with Skipp, Cirkin and Parrott send out on season long loans for their development. If Aurier is content playing backup/ rotation with another right back signed that's all well and good but if not let him go as well.

If we shifted all those I've highlighted it'll probably generate £50m-£75m. With a further £100m pumped into that and with Eze rumoured to be a goer at let's say £20m, that's £130m-£155m across 4 further signings. £30m-£40m or so a pop. The question is will that be enough?

 

[spursfan77]

Seems like lots of clubs have performance related wages, not just us. This is from the Athletic:


“A number of clubs also operate a “positional bonus”, whereby a sliding scale of payments is attached to the team’s league position after every round of games. The higher up the table, the higher the bonus. And the more appearances the player makes, the more he earns.This is something Ferran Soriano successfully built upon as Barcelona’s general manager. Soriano, now the chief executive at Manchester City, introduced a scheme whereby two-thirds of the players’ salaries were fixed and the remainder was performance-related. Any player who appeared for 45 minutes or more in 60% of the matches was entitled to bonuses up to £1.1 million at the end of the season (though this was 17 years ago), whereas anybody who fell below that line got a reduced amount.
In one case the club agreed to pay the full whack to a player who had appeared in 59.6% of Barcelona’s games during a title-winning season. Yet there was no bending of the rules for the player who featured in 58% of their matches in a year when they did not win anything. That player was told Barca were sticking to their formula.”

 

[Singaspur]

The market has shifted in recent years, because high transfer fees combined with high wages, are beyond the resources of most clubs. In recent times the so called big clubs are now looking at loans leading onto potential permanent deals as opposed to just permanent deals, and this is more prevalent with the Italian and Spanish clubs, but not exclusive, and it is now evident in Premier League.

With this mind, I wonder how clubs, particularly ours are shaping their future transfer / retention strategies

This is my sense of things. I wonder if any venerable SC member has any well-informed financial insight on what is going on in the market generally?

It does seem that more players are running down their contacts and thereby grabbing a bigger slice of the pie. MU paid 80M for Maguire. Say he's paid 150,000 pm or about 8M a year on a 5 year contract i.e. 40M over the life of his contract. Total cost to MU is 120M. If Maguire just plays out his 5 year contact and doesn't sign a contract extension (or agree to a transfer before the 5 years is up) that becomes 24M pa for his services. That is a fuck of a lot of money.

If this is the trend (for whatever reason) the Club has to have a strategy to counter it. Difficult to speculate how best to do our rebuild without some understanding of this.

 

[mill]

This is my sense of things. I wonder if any venerable SC member has any well-informed financial insight on what is going on in the market generally?

It does seem that more players are running down their contacts and thereby grabbing a bigger slice of the pie. MU paid 80M for Maguire. Say he's paid 150,000 pm or about 8M a year on a 5 year contract i.e. 40M over the life of his contract. Total cost to MU is 120M. If Maguire just plays out his 5 year contact and doesn't sign a contract extension (or agree to a transfer before the 5 years is up) that becomes 24M pa for his services. That is a fuck of a lot of money.

If this is the trend (for whatever reason) the Club has to have a strategy to counter it. Difficult to speculate how best to do our rebuild without some understanding of this.

The club have barely got a transfer strategy other than let’s see what deals fall in our lap let alone a strategy to counter a changing market

 

[WiganSpur]

We got too wedded to the squad that almost “touched glory” put it in Poch‘a words. Not selling players like Dier and Rose for £100m was a huge mistake in retrospect. The fact that we haven’t been able to generate player sales for the last couple of years has been as much of a problem as the lack of focus in scouting.

Not maximising and capitalising on sales is another reason why we need a good DOF. You get a situation where say United want Dier for £50m and the DOF sources a replacement for half that cost.

The problem is I think it's just a control thing with Levy. I'm sure he even knows we need a DOF but he just can't seem to bring himself to do it. I mean, why wouldn't you just set a transfer and wage budget and let somebody more qualified get on with it? I think it's just that he wants control, and doesn't want a budget spent for the sake of it.

Again though, really I just feel as though it's a false economy, as somebody like Campos would improve us financially through generating saleable assets.

 

[WiganSpur]

Winks i'd keep, I still think he can be useful with the right blend of players around him.

Dele I feel is suffering a similar fate. I'd build the team around him this summer and give him one last season to pull his finger out. Bring in the right players around him, get some competition for his place etc.

Depending on how that pans out i'd put him in the sell or keep bracket.

Dier can go.

 

[danielneeds]

Not maximising and capitalising on sales is another reason why we need a good DOF. You get a situation where say United want Dier for £50m and the DOF sources a replacement for half that cost.

The problem is I think it's just a control thing with Levy. I'm sure he even knows we need a DOF but he just can't seem to bring himself to do it. I mean, why wouldn't you just set a transfer and wage budget and let somebody more qualified get on with it? I think it's just that he wants control, and doesn't want a budget spent for the sake of it.

Again though, really I just feel as though it's a false economy, as somebody like Campos would improve us financially through generating saleable assets.

Yeah, I feel like maybe the way he seemed to micromanage the stadium build (the architect mentioned Levy would phone him in the middle of the night to talk about tiny details) has made him obsessed by control. I actually thought the opposite might happen, that the strain of that project might see him take a step back and delegate more, but evidently not.

 

[WiganSpur]

Yeah, I feel like maybe the way he seemed to micromanage the stadium build (the architect mentioned Levy would phone him in the middle of the night to talk about tiny details) has made him obsessed by control. I actually thought the opposite might happen, that the strain of that project might see him take a step back and delegate more, but evidently not.

To be fair I don't have a problem with the stadium stuff. That's the sort of stuff he's good at and should be doing.

Investing in infrastructure, commercial deals etc should all be down to him. The football stuff, well, football people should be doing it. All Levy should do is set a budget in accordance with financial results every season. I don't think it even matters that a budget is conservative. A good DOF can work on a limited budget, it's the autonomy that is the crucial thing.

 

[danielneeds]

To be fair I don't have a problem with the stadium stuff. That's the sort of stuff he's good at and should be doing.

Investing in infrastructure, commercial deals etc should all be down to him. The football stuff, well, football people should be doing it. All Levy should do is set a budget in accordance with financial results every season. I don't think it even matters that a budget is conservative. A good DOF can work on a limited budget, it's the autonomy that is the crucial thing.

I disagree, he shouldn’t be doing all the non-football stuff either. A well-run club should have people with autonomy all focussed on each aspect. I think the stories about his control of the stadium project are symptomatic of the way he’s doing things all around the club. I just get the feeling there are too many “yes men” around him and nobody is telling his the hard truths about where we’ve gone wrong since 2017.

 

[Hakkz]

Not maximising and capitalising on sales is another reason why we need a good DOF. You get a situation where say United want Dier for £50m and the DOF sources a replacement for half that cost.

The problem is I think it's just a control thing with Levy. I'm sure he even knows we need a DOF but he just can't seem to bring himself to do it. I mean, why wouldn't you just set a transfer and wage budget and let somebody more qualified get on with it? I think it's just that he wants control, and doesn't want a budget spent for the sake of it.

Again though, really I just feel as though it's a false economy, as somebody like Campos would improve us financially through generating saleable assets.

Campos made so much money for Monaco by signing prospects that were later sold on.

 

[hellava_tough]

I'd like to see a separate pot of cash spent by a Head of Youth Scouting, or DoF, which the manager has no say over (although you'd like to think they'd discuss potential signings).

That way, if we had a summer like '18 where Poch didn't want any of Levy's plan B signings, at least we'd have someone in the club doing a little forward planning.

Btw, the more I think about that summer, the more it winds me up. Levy is certainly to blame, but Poch needs to take a long hard look at himself if he thought that there were absolutely no available players in Europe, who could have added ANYTHING to the squad.

Absolute joke!

 

[hellava_tough]

In terms of rebuild, might not be quite as expensive as we fear (£150m) if Jose can get his scouting network together. He's an experienced manager with a clear idea on how he wants to play, so hopefully he can do it.