PineBarrens

Seeing as how Ashley's model of running a football club is so radical and visionary, makes you wonder how the likes of Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Man City, Chelsea and  Man United struggle by with their archaic method of paying good wages for top players and, you know, winning stuff. The dirty, cheating gets.

Why are we always trying to be so cheap like? Obviously we don't want to offer Man City money but ultimately if we are committed to bringing a player in we've got to satisfy everyone. Yes, £40,000 per week is a shitload of cash in the real world, but football has been disconnected from that for so long it seems daft to even bother mentioning it any more.

 

This reaction from his agent doesn't exactly sound like we're reasonably close to agreeing a deal, does it?

 

Course not, but agents can be prone to exaggerating in the media to achieve what they want.

 

No idea whether £40k a week is what he's worth, what he should be paid, too much or too little. All football wages are mental. But I wouldn't go as far as to say that means we should pay every player whatever it takes to get them.

 

Do you? Would we be having this debate if we'd offered him 50k, or 60k? Just seems like a discussion that's purely subjective.

 

Say we've offered him the same as Cabaye is on, that seems fair to me.

 

If we genuinely want a player then we have to pay what is necessary, both to satisfy his club and the player (plus his agent I guess). What that figure actually is, and what other players like Cabaye are on is totally irrelevant; each is its own case. If we want him, we'll have to pay what it takes. If it's too much for us, the transfer simply isn't happening.

 

This is apparently the player's agent, how often do you hear agents come out with reactions like this? It's not common to deride an offer like this. He claims we've known what he's on for some time. Perhaps foolishly I assume Llambias can operate Google and knows his current club is in the Champions League and has far better prospects than us. To therefore not offer somewhere near what it takes to get him is just stupid.

 

Like we did for Owen, Duff, Geremi etc etc.

 

Don't get me wrong - offering less than someone is on is stupid.  But we shouldn't pay whatever a player asks for and should be within our wage structure.

 

Ignoring the debate over whether a wage cap is a good thing or not, if our structure is that rigid then we should know within one or two phonecalls whether players are going to be attainable or not. We shouldn't even be wasting time and resources scouting them. Again, there's simply no excuse after all this time.

 

Oh, and that's an interesting set of names you mention considering one was signed by Ashley and one was supposedly offered the biggest contract in NUFC history... by Ashley.

 

Once again, if we have so much trust in our scouting team to deliver value for money, we should be willing to back his judgement.

 

Yeah, that's a fair point. If we know our wage structure it's stupid to pursue players who are well outside it.

 

That said though, it could be that Barnetta is only on £25k now and we're actually offering a decent deal. It could just be that he (or this pseudo-agent bloke) think he should be getting more.

 

That sort of thing is difficult to know until you're actually in contact I reckon.

He's on 60 grand a week according to Graeme Bailey.

 

Nobody, but that wouldn't suit the 'board can do no wrong' camp.

 

Who is in this camp?

 

More than there should be.

 

Well name them then, it should be easy for you

If you can't see for yourself, then I can't help you.

 

Nobody, but that wouldn't suit the 'board can do no wrong' camp.

 

Who is in this camp?

More than there should be.

I've posted it before, but this year's TV money would have covered the entire Championship wage bill on its own, before any other income.

 

Who have we brought in since then on huge money or who hasn't been at least offset against others leaving?

Nobody, but that wouldn't suit the 'board can do no wrong' camp.

This f***ing window man.

 

Can't wait til it's over.

 

I'm just hoping it isn't already over.

Trust me it's over (in the sense of bringing in decent players, anyway).

Obertan is worse than Alan Smith - no punchline.

Was it not Keegan who accused the board of deliberately bidding low/offering low wages for players safe in the knowledge that the bids would be knocked back?

 

I've just read this thread back and realised the last three pages are all about me! 

 

FWIW I think people ignore the bits of my posts where I think Ashley has made loads of mistakes, and the bits where I say I think he should probably spend more. Also the posts where I say not having a replacement for Enrique lined up would be massively incompetent. It's not like I even support the guy, I just think that his drive to run us in a financially sensible way is not a bad thing. It annoyed me more when we were spending millions on Boumsong and Luque.

 

The problem is you can't include some sort of barcode on every post that downloads your entire qualified opinion about Mike Ashley.

 

The thing I don't believe is that he has some sort of mind control over the media and he would bother using it to do things like make up our link to Erdinc just to keep the public sweet. That obviously hasn't worked!

 

Anyway, enough meta-debate.

Good post. I don't think he's an evil genius out to destroy the club either, more that he's a short-sighted corpulent berk who rarely seems to learn from his mistakes.

I realise this is a highly inaccurate guesstimate, but looking at the 2008 income and just thinking about our 10/11 income and expenditure, I'd have it at:

 

£47 million in TV money as per the Premier League's PDF above. Let's add another £60m in gate receipts, season tickets, merchandising/match day revenue and sponsorship (this is what we had in 2008), £35m from the Carroll sale, plus additional income from the installment payments of transfers for Bassong, Martins, Duff, Beye, Zog, Given, Milner (much of which we should still be receiving - let's say the total of those sales were £45m, spread over 5 years, we should be getting £9m for the season).

 

All of which comes to:

 

TV money £47m

Other income £60m

Player sales £44m

Total = £151m

 

Less the wages for the season (£60m), signings of Tiote (£3m) and Ben Arfa (£5m), new contracts/loan/signing on fees (£10m), running costs and other expenditure (£10m), and we have costs of nearly £88m. That leaves a rough estimate of profit for 10/11 before this summer's transfer activities as being £151m - £88m = £63m.

So, where's all this money going?

Platinum attack dogs at Mike's (aka Snake Mountain) and gold- plated masks with Keegan's and Shearer's face on them which Derek and Mike force Pardew to wear whilst being anally pierced every time he mentions the £35 million in press interviews.

So the five year model turned out to be based on Wigan Athletic? Class.

 

Following relegation, it could have been a lot, lot worse than that.

And the person most responsible for our relegation being...

Thank god they've got a bit more intelligence than the average fan.

Have you read anything by Lee Ryder?

So the five year model turned out to be based on Wigan Athletic? Class.

Pardew's main test will be in getting results from foreign players who have a totally different approach to the game to most British players and coaches. Last year's squad dictated the game we played and it didn't take a lot of coaching nous to wing the ball high to a big forward and let Nolan battle for the scraps. If Pardew can't work out how to get the best out of the new lads we might see a foreign coach come in.

'welcome to your new manager, Mr Joseph Kinerre'

It's the way managers generally work in this country, that's a fact. The club even admitted it themselves during the Keegan tribunal.

Yes, but how does that fit it with the 'can't say a bad word about rubenesque Mike' camp?

What will it take for certain posters to realise how precarious a position the football club are in - two heavy defeats to Arsenal and Sunderland? End of the transfer window with Enrique, Barton and Tiote gone with no replacements or any sign of that elusive striker? Derek Llambias bumming Lady Mae on the pitch at St James' at half-time?

There seems to be an ever dwindling band of people in denial at how shit things are at NUFC, admirably sticking to their deluded guns a la Lloyd Christmas in 'Dumb and Dumber'.

*fingers in ears* 'la,la,la,la,la,la,la,la...'

Just for those in denial about how fucked up this situation is and how much of a shitehawk our owner is, here's some comments from an Everton message board:-

'he (Ashley) is frighteningly inept. god knows how he made his money. Who knows whats going on at Newcastle and i'd have Barton in a heartbeat.'

'The nolan thing is strange..why sell your club captain and highest goalscorer especially if he keep the talented barton under control...

as for your point about throwing money away..Ashley is saving on bartons wages and knows he could of walked next season anyway for buttons ..

ashley sounds like a cunt...but hey lets hope the blue union can find someone like him eh.'

'Sound like a winner to me and i'd have said all newcastle fans and players alike would have wanted him as captain..as for set pieces hes mustard at them..if pardew cant see that then #### him...how about pardew was told not to give him the armband by his puppeteer to make barton go nuts ...'

'Sour grapes from Newcastle, leaking all kinds of stories to placate the fans, don't ya think  '

'I would say their PR activities are on hyper-drive.'

'despite all the hyperbole in those sources all that boils down to is that, essentially, he wasn't best pleased that a clown was captain and that they got beat by Leeds.'

Does Thom Yorke have a lazy eye?

Carl Serrant.

Good transfer window still?

What's Malcolm Allen up to these days?

Judge us in September, judge us in September, judge us in September, bore holes, bore holes, boar holes...

 

That came out wrong I hope...

Unfortunately not, Mike's now resorted to attacking wild pigs for lascivious thrills, the rotten get.

Judge us in September, judge us in September, judge us in September, bore holes, bore holes, boar holes...

Golfmag did warn us all, no?