Missing (but not in action)

[Concrete John]

I agree that I never saw quite the player in Warnock others did before his form started suffering.  Decent enough LB, but nothing to write home about.

As for Beye/Salifou, the simple truth is every team will have players that don't get in or near the first 11.  I guess the key is how much these players are paid.  Comparatively speaking, we got that right in Salifou and wrong in Beye.  But with Beye we have to remember even an average PL player is on £20k a week or more, so I don;t so much see it as £6m wasted, although can understand why some would, as much as it's £2-3m overspent on a squad player that didn;t make the grade.

[pauliewalnuts]

I agree that I never saw quite the player in Warnock others did before his form started suffering.  Decent enough LB, but nothing to write home about.

I actually think it's harsh to point at Warnock as an example of a bad signing by MON, even given the way it has turned out. He was more than decent for us for a fair while, but he's clearly got something else going on which is making him unsettled.

As for Beye/Salifou, the simple truth is every team will have players that don't get in or near the first 11.  I guess the key is how much these players are paid.  Comparatively speaking, we got that right in Salifou and wrong in Beye.  But with Beye we have to remember even an average PL player is on £20k a week or more, so I don;t so much see it as £6m wasted, although can understand why some would, as much as it's £2-3m overspent on a squad player that didn;t make the grade.

I don't really see how we got it right with Salifou, despite his relatively low wages. It's only 2m pounds, but it is still two million pounds. The fact we have renewed his contract a couple of times is puzzling.

[Concrete John]

I'm not saying that Warnock is a bad player/signing, just that I never thought he was a good as some did when he first joined. 

As for Salifou, I suppose it's not so much a case be getting it right as not getting it too far wrong by paying him astronomical wages.  If you accept you'll have a player or two who won't get in the first team, but do a job for the reserves as that is used to bring through the kids who WILL get into the first team, then how much would you realistically think they should be paid?

[pauliewalnuts]

I'm not saying that Warnock is a bad player/signing, just that I never thought he was a good as some did when he first joined. 

I didn't say you did, I was referring to the Warnock signing as discussed in general.

As for Salifou, I suppose it's not so much a case be getting it right as not getting it too far wrong by paying him astronomical wages.  If you accept you'll have a player or two who won't get in the first team, but do a job for the reserves as that is used to bring through the kids who WILL get into the first team, then how much would you realistically think they should be paid?

That assumes that you accept we need to sign a player specifically to help bring through kids in the reserves, which I don't think we do, seems a bit arse about face to me - a bit like retrofitting a plausible reason to have spent that money on him.

It's not about Salifou per se, for me, it is about the casualness of throwing salary money around.

That 10k a week might one day be the difference between being able or unable to keep a player we really want to hang on to, for example.

[Concrete John]

I agree we payed too much to a lot of squad players that simply weren't good enough.  However, I don't think we payed too much to Salifou, if viewed comparatively to who and what he was. 

The issue with these wages isn't so much whether we can afford them or not, but the impediment they create in offloading the players that aren't making the impact we thought.  Were he not on £40k a week, Beye would have moved on by now to someone who would happily pay him the £20k he should be on.  Same thing with Harewood - served his purpose for a season but we couldn't shift him out and recoup/save on the outlay.

[pauliewalnuts]

I agree we payed too much to a lot of squad players that simply weren't good enough.  However, I don't think we payed too much to Salifou, if viewed comparatively to who and what he was. 

The issue with these wages isn't so much whether we can afford them or not, but the impediment they create in offloading the players that aren't making the impact we thought.  Were he not on £40k a week, Beye would have moved on by now to someone who would happily pay him the £20k he should be on.  Same thing with Harewood - served his purpose for a season but we couldn't shift him out and recoup/save on the outlay.

The problem is, we knew this when we signed these players, yet we still went ahead and did it.

It shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone that Beye wouldn't get anything like that money for that long anywhere else. It's not like this is a new, unique situation we've stumbled into.

[Concrete John]

I think a bit of rationality has come into some levels of football since we started spending big, mainly due to the world wide recession.  That has been changed a bit for the worse again by the Man City takeover and them pushing the boundaries at the top end of the game money wise.

For instance, anyone know how much Beye was on at Newcastle?  So did we pay the going rate or drastically increase his salary? 

I agree as a player he shouldn't have been bought, but how far above his 'worth' at the time £40k a week was is a different matter.

[KevinGage]

Salifou's deal isn't as wacky as a few make out.

He's on close to buttons in the mental world of football wages, and is a regular in the reserve side.

It would be great if every single player in that reserve side was a realistic candidate for the first team, but not many reserve outfits operate that way. Team dynamic comes into it too, I guess. Even for the second string, it would be important to have a mix of players; some promising youngsters, senior pro's who are just missing out on the first XI and a few players punching above their weight and happy just to be there. Salifou definitely comes into the latter category.

If you have too many of the first two you have players who are either too green or too disappointed/ disinterested in the side.

Agree on Beye and Warnock, but not many had Warnock down as a bad bit of business this time last year.

Disagree entirely.

What would Salifou's experience in the Swiss second division bring to the squad beyond having another academy kid there?

It's "only" about 600k a year in salary, you're right, comparatively it isn't much, but that sort of freeness with money is what leads to our current wages - turnover imbalance.

It's that team dynamic thing again.

Too many promising youngsters from the academy and we could get rolled. The priority for any reserve side is to provide a base and bridge the gap to the first team, I accept that. Results very much come second.  But it could still be damaging if they consistently lost -which could also happen if the side was packed with players like Sidwell, players who thought they should be in the first team and were just going through the motions.

Salifou won the lottery when we signed him from the Swiss second division, yet he didn't play as if he took his good luck for granted.  He never embarrassed himself in the few Europa League games where he got a run-out, and at the time when he signed various contract extensions it was probably expected that we'd face a fair amount of games, between the LC, Europa League and so on (the logic of treating European competition as one step up from the Reserve League is lost on me though, I must admit).