timeEd32

Tonali is 17.3, Isak 16.3 (6 year deal when it was allowed for FFP), Botman and Gordon 11, and Tino 9. £64.83m/yr with all the proper decimals. Tielemans and Kamara 8, Diaby 16, Moreno 5 (cheap but also only a 3.5 year deal), Torres 11, and Carlos 11.8 (4 year deal). £59.77m/yr with all the actual numbers. It's a fairly random set of players, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's quite pointless to talk about finances in terms of only transfer fees. The fact their wage bill is ~£25m more than ours is quite significant. And, if anything, it's probably preferable to be paying higher fees + lower wages because you can finesse the amortisation with contract extensions. Once you commit to paying someone £7.8m/yr then that's that, especially if they are unlikely to carry a lot of resale value. To even more neatly illustrate the point just take Gordon + Tino and Kamara + Diaby. With transfer fees only we spent £72m and they spent £47.5. But when you add wages and amoritisation it becomes £20.14m/yr for us and £24.06 for them. What looks like £25m more in all of the headlines is actually £4m less per year. Even if you want to remove all the funky accounting and amortisation from the equation, the actual five year outlay on those players is £120.3 for Villa and £100.7m for Newcastle.

Correct, based on the average outcome of many similar occurrences.

This is why I'm on a crusade to get people to stop talking about just transfer fees. "A lot of their investment is in wages rather than astronomical fees" makes it sound like one is preferable to the other when it all gets added up together. When you factor in wages and amortisation, those six players are only £5m less per year than these five: Isak, Tonali, Botman, Gordon, and Livramento. Free transfers certainly aren't free when you're paying a player almost £8m per season. No doubt they did very well with Kamara, but I'm not sure I'd want to still be paying Tielemans £150k/wk a couple years from now.

The wage bill seems high relative to revenue, which is what jumps out to me. Though it's not quite as high as it seems at a glance if Lenglet and Zaniolo are being subsidized (plus it's only one year anyway).

Watching us play them in the mid-00's on a questionable 640x480 grainy stream was nearly impossible. It's easier in 55" HD but not by much.

It definitely impacts both the current three year period and the next couple years that it would remain part of the relevant accounts.

Do Villa have a lot of room once Grealish falls off the books? I don't know much about their situation other than their wages are ~£25m higher than ours on similar revenue.

I think about Pedro often. Obviously glad we got Isak instead, but I wish we went back for him. We could really use someone like him right now.

That's what our current manager did last season. He had the highest wages in the league and top 2 transfer spend.

Have to believe that was a Joelinton make-up booking. There's no other explanation for it.

ESPN's weekly VAR review leads with the Jota decision: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/39204359/the-var-review-jota-penalty-overturned Basically argues both sides and then uses it to discuss the current state of VAR, which is fair enough IMO. I wasn't really mad at the referees yesterday - it's the fact that I don't really know what is and isn't a penalty anymore, I don't understand when VAR intervenes and when it doesn't, and as a spectator you don't get anything approaching an explanation of why something was upheld or overturned. How anyone in charge thinks the current implementation of video review is the right way to go about it is beyond me.

One thing to note on the away form that does not excuse it, but I think is important context: we've played 8 league games this season at a rest disadvantage and 6 of those were away. Overall in the first half of the season we played league games with a net of negative 17 full rest days, which breaks down as -3 at home and -14 away. On top of the injuries we've been pretty unfortunate with how the fixtures have played out.

Amen. I know this is not new information, but I feel like people have lost some perspective on where we sit largely due to how quickly we closed the gap in the table last season and our very rich owners. Our wages are the 9th highest in the Premier League, behind the six you'd expect plus Villa and West Ham. We are as close to Everton in 10th as we are to West Ham. Our wages are about £50m higher than Sheffield United's (19th), which is roughly the same gap from us to Liverpool. Chelsea's are another £16m higher from there and then Arsenal takes it another £16m higher. The Manchester clubs are another £35m+ above them. Our last officially reported revenue was less than the wages paid by the Manchester clubs. Even with the increases over the last couple years Manchester United's and Manchester City's wages are still closer to our revenue than our wages. The gap is astronomical. There are ~42 players in the Premier League on higher wages than Bruno, our highest paid player. There are another ~23 before our next highest paid (Isak) That means you can create almost six starting XI's of the highest paid players and we'd only have one player included. We have gotten 450 or less league minutes from Tonali, Targett (despite Burn being injured), Willock, Murphy, and Anderson. Just those players account for 21% of our wages and as everyone knows that is far from the end of our injury problems. All of the above is not to absolve Eddie of any blame. He's made some mistakes and I think he'd be the first to recognize that. But so much of the angst in this thread and elsewhere seems driven by ballooning expectations. We overachieved last season based on our revenue, wages, talent, and depth, plus a very good injury record. We are now (currently) underachieving in the midst of a horrific injury record and compounding fatigue problems (and we were still moments from the CL knockout round and a second straight LC semifinal). It's frustrating and the derby is huge, but some patience is in order.

One day we will win at Anfield again and it will be glorious.

0.79 but yeah.

They all think the world is against them too.

How?!

Correct. We are many miles off them financially and it’s going to take years to close that gap.

For sure.

Every time Nunez doesn’t score I get more annoyed about the home game.

Isak’s legs seem just as gone as Gordon, which is concerning considering he hasn’t played nearly as much.

GTFI

He needs a month off. Run into the ground.

I’d be very confident in us scoring with a fit Barnes / Willock and/or fresh legged Gordon and Almiron.

Feel like Beglin has been kind of fair to us considering he played for them. But yeah, they are not a fan of our “party” in the technical area.