Writer: Jod
I’m sure everyone has seen the news we made a world record profit.
Since the same people who moan about not buying players with no names also specialise in accountancy with no numbers I’m sure there will be plenty of vague complaints. I thought I’d just see what a profit like that actually means in football terms.
In a normal business £113m is a lot of profit. Even in football, you could build a team in the Championship with that kind of cash. Unfortunately, we are operating at a much higher level.
In order to progress we need players who are better than those we already have, otherwise we are just maintaining our current level at best or even going backwards. There aren’t many of those about so if you want the finished product it’s going to cost.
Probably you are talking about £75-£100m as a transfer fee and 250k a week (£12.5m a year) minimum in wages. So our record profit equates to one player and change.
Which tells me we won’t be changing our business model of developing our own players. It backs up something Deloitte said a few years ago when analysing football finance. It doesn’t matter how much money flows in, they said, all that happens is transfer fees and wages go up and the clubs end up no better off.