The College Dropout

You think Kelly earns over £5m per year - £97k? I don't. I hope not tbh. Anything higher than £80-90k is crazy IMO. And will likely mean we'll not be able to sell him for a fee. I don't know about the signing-on fee going rate but that's at least a one-off payment. In any case Kelly @ 100k per week is 5.2m per year. Any more as a base salary is crazy IMO because he'll be impossible to resale. Hall's £27m fee is more than that for 1 year @ £5.6m. If Hall earns £50k @ 2.6m per year. That's £8.2m, still higher than your top end @timeEd32 and that's before any of the add-ons Chelsea apparently have. 5.2m for Kelly vs 8.2m for Hall seems about right. If Kelly is going to cost the same as wonderkid from a top club in accounting numbers..... we might as well get another wonderkid from a top club. At least 1 has resale value and won't kill the clubs wage structure. If Kelly earns £6m p/a how much should Botman get for an extension? Staveley maths might have Gordon on a 3.5 year contract, Kelly on 100k, Targett on 100k, Joelinton on 150k and a £60m bid for Olise on June 8th 2024. But I can't believe that to be true.

6m x 5 year contract - 30m. I guess Hall earns around £3m per year give or take 50%. So £9m for a year on the books. Kelly free transfer. 3.5-4.5m in wages I guess. Maybe a signing on fee too. However you shake it Hall’s book value per year would be considerably higher than his medium term squad back up in Kelly. Which for a club with our revenue - is sensible.

Expect Burn to start ahead of Kelly at LCB. Kelly will be at LB or the bench. Honest to God - if everyone was fully fit and we had a PL game tomorrow - I'm so confident Burn would start at LB. Howe adores him.

Willian replacement I assume

Is Kelly not free? And Hall £30m? Hall costs the flub about £9 per year and Hall £4m? Amortisation cost and wages. Highly paid professionals make mistakes all the time. See Boeing and err our political class.

I think that would be fine because Schar is here and looking great still. I feel like there’s always bargains to be had at CB (and massive duds).

Aye. It will require great scouting. But it’s not impossible. I love him But he’s not Harry Kane. there’s obviously a correlation between transfer fee/ wages and ability. Just not a strict one. Finding a better player than Schar for £30m is difficult but v. achievable.

I’ve suggested everything the excellent @Upthemags has and more actually. I think the club agrees with us. Which is why we’ve got Kelly at LB and not a £30m left back to compete with our other £30m left back. And at the moment we don’t seem to be looking at £55m RWs unless we can sell someone. Because spending a lot of money without several strategies to get us out of trouble - is stupid and won’t be repeated.

I couldn’t remember who it was I heard it from and it must’ve been Schweinsteiger on the Overlap. I think I’ve heard a couple other players say it happened to them too. Neville was acting like he couldn’t believe it. I’ve definitely heard it happen to other footballers. He’s either acting or totally naive cos of his career at Man U.

It's pretty common tbf.

Impossible?

£55m should get you a real player though. A serious player. At least for a CM. Only CL clubs or clubs with that ambition spend over £50m on one player. West Ham or previous Leicester or Everton’s would do 30s to high 40s. But 50m+ is big big money. It also comes with like a £7m yearly salary too in most cases. Perhaps a few of the Man U transfers aren’t on that type of money (AWB, Hojlund maybe).

I meant on paper Tonali’s ceiling is a world class player. The same is true of Isak. He had that reputation. None of the lads we have been linked too recently have the same reputation.

Dubs is surely above Ruddy. I think Dubs might be above the Greek lad too. If the greek lad is worse than Sels, he’s worse than Dubs.

Dubs is still no. 2 isn’t he?

If reports are true. I don’t think Howe fully understands FFP or at the very least is extremely loyal to his players. Which is perhaps why some feel like they can dig in their heels. It’s a dickhead thing to do but I’ve heard so many stories of clubs completely isolating players for no other reason than they want them to leave. Howe wouldn’t do that to Miggy. It’s bad. But I would get all Miggys stuff and move it to the U16s. Don’t even get to see the first team training staff or players. YOU HAVE TO GO TO SAUDI LAD! they’ll let you go wherever your agent can find you a spot in January. You don’t even have to go to Saudi personally. But you gotta sign that contract.

Rumours that our budget is small seem more and more believable as I have been suggesting. I think part of the hold up is that sales would have us looking higher up our list.

I would be mostly content. But a little underwhelmed. Been spoilt recently. They don’t seem as upsidey as Isak or Tonali. But it would suggest we are preparing properly for FFP this summer unlike the last. Which is a must and a good decision. Looking at the commercial team to unlock the £150m+ net spend in future windows again.

I do think part of our strategy is to go for players that other top clubs aren’t fully convinced by but are considering. Gordon had the biggest question marks but Isak and Bruno both strongly linked with big moves that just never quite materialised. Isak in particular was a wonder kid. I don’t think Thiaw is in that Isak or Bruno bucket. Maybe more of a Gordon - the bigger question marks. I think he looks quick and aggressive. But he doesn’t look a step up on Schar the way Botman looked a step up on Burn. Sure they’ll probably start together this season but the following season, would Thiaw be a step up on today’s Schar?

this is the perfect post. Brighton bent us over for our best youngster. I’ve got 20 minutes for some more though. Ok cool. Then our current FFP strategy is to get bent over a barrel by other clubs for our best players and youngsters. We are a distressed seller. That’s bad business. btw we bought Hall for close to £35m - Chelsra have a sell-on clause. Also I think the Luiz fee was closer to €40m. But Villa bought the 2 youngsters for a combined €12-15m or something. So they get more FFP headroom for the sale. The cost of the youngsters are spread through amortisation and low wages and they have upside that the boys increase their value. They planned that with Juve. They then bought Maatsen for the inflated fee but sold the academy players the other way. Same practice both ways with different clubs. Our sales and incoming reflect our lack of preparation / miscalculation.

The problem with the Forest deal is the GK we got is useless and will have next to no resale value. Everyone else has bought useful and/or young players they could resell for a decent fee. Thats my only problem with the Forest deal. No other shady PSR deal has been for a 29 year old 3rd choice GK for good reason. Im fine with doing loads of shady deals. They just need to make more sense.

Villa are doing a cool thing where they ‘sell’ their brightest youngsters for decent money at 18-20 with buybacks. Madrid do that too. We could do that with Miley. We should have a backlog of options like that. Which I think we are planning to do.

The Anderson deal is fugazi. Which is fine. But is our plan to keep doing fugazi deals? I don’t think it is (yet). The Minteh deal - for reasons already mentioned isn’t a great deal financially. Even Chelsea have a sell-on for Hall. City typically have sell-ons or buybacks. Funnily enough they don’t for Palmer because they thought they were ripping Chelsea off with the fee. As you say - the only way we bridge the gap is to trade. And it looks like that means trading our best players or brightest prospects (with no way to have a future stake in their value). As you say - we need a better strategy. Commercial deals, dodgy player trading etc.

Tbf nobody knew our FFP position last summer. That Milan fan on here and reports in the media were that we’ve paid top dollar leaving Milan no choice but to sell. I fully agree that midfield is awesome. But financially if we are to play FFP straight - we’ll need to sell and reinvest. If we played FFP straight we would’ve sold Gordon it seems. Or Bruno or Joelinton before the contract. Chelsea and Villa keep signing players they could resell in the short term to help navigate FFP. Their medium term FFP strategy is to keep doing these transfers. They have better academy players to do it but they are also bringing in more players for that purpose at a high clip. Inflate the selling fee but buy promising youngsters from that club to sell next season.

With the injuries we still need a CB.