The Long Awaited Accounts....

[brian green]

All off these frighteningly excessive numbers are what drive so many of us to demand that our own produced young players must be given full and proper opportunities to develop.  The simple choice is between economic ruin and player in house development.  It should be a no brainer.

If the counter to that is that our young players are not good enough the answer is not to throw money at old journeyman players, it is to make your youth system better.

[DB]

It's journeyman players on Prem wages too.

[lovejoy]

So I pulled myself together and ask, with all the dignity I could must, "Is this any way to run a fucking football club?"

We should be massively thankful to our new owners for bailing us out but they can't be expected to keep doing this forever.

Grealish is going in the summer - its the right thing to do for all parties.

[Chico Hamilton III]

We should be massively thankful to our new owners for bailing us out but they can't be expected to keep doing this forever.

I'm sure they didn't take us on out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it because they, maybe misguidedly, smelt money or prestige. And they should be massively thankful that they chose a football club that can pull in 35,000 loyal fans every week.

[pauliewalnuts]

Even when we had our first benevolent billionaire owner, we had one who did not seem to understand the importance of employing the right people to look after your investment.

Look at how many players from that era we managed to actually sell - hardly any. The number who would just sit out their contracts and leave for nothing, having hoovered up shit loads of money, is staggering.

Someone like Habib Beye, whose presence at the club was pointless. 40k a week for two or three years (cant be arsed to google how long) is a fucking ton of money.

Then think back to how many underused players we acquired in that period.

Lerner rolled up with his dad's best mate and someone whose main qualification seemed to be that he worked for him already and was English, and trusted them to look after his football club.

Nice enough people, but totally inadequate when it came to running a modern football club.

[cdbearsfan]

So I pulled myself together and ask, with all the dignity I could must, "Is this any way to run a fucking football club?"

We should be massively thankful to our new owners for bailing us out but they can't be expected to keep doing this forever.

Grealish is going in the summer - its the right thing to do for all parties.

It's the wrong thing to do for us. We need him to help us get promoted. That'll make a far greater contribution to our finances than his sale would.

As for him, he's signed a new contract so he's here unless someone meets his release clause, which I guess they won't given his injury record.

[danno]

The thing I can't wrap my head around, is buying championship players as opposed to premier league ones and the wage bill going up!

I do shudder at the amount of player turnover we've had in the last ten years. Too often with no resale value.

[gpbarr]

The thing I can't wrap my head around, is buying championship players as opposed to premier league ones and the wage bill going up!

I do shudder at the amount of player turnover we've had in the last ten years. Too often with no resale value.

It’s what happens when you keep changing managers. They want their own players, they change the style, etc.

The damning thing is this is all so predictable. Brian has got it spot on - we need to offload the journeymen, stop throwing money after anyone in the hope of promotion, and rebuild the academy and youth system - will improve our finances and in the long run, improve the clubs fortunes on the pitch.

Of course, the long run doesn’t really exist in the game anymore. So I’m not hopeful and see further trouble ahead

[Meanwood Villa]

The players that the Club sign for the foreseeable future, won't be joining for ridiculous wages.

They'll be joining for the Glory of playing for Aston Villa.

I'm looking forward to it all.

That's a very romantic view but it's also a load of bollocks. As if any player gives a crap about the glory of playing for Aston Villa, they're not fans.

Generally speaking the more you spend on wages the higher you finish in the league. Just because we've wasted a load of cash on useless players doesn't mean that by spending less we'll end up with better players. It doesn't work that way.

[Ad@m]

The thing I can't wrap my head around, is buying championship players as opposed to premier league ones and the wage bill going up!

I believe it's called shit or bust.  RDM and then Bruce were quite clearly told by Xia that they had to get promoted ASAP so they went around the Championship buying every else's best players, mid-contract and just chucked money at them to make it work.

As we found out, it went to shit and we were very nearly bust!

The real frightener for me is the fact that the above strategy has resulted in Scott Hogan being paid £40k per week (if those numbers are to be believed) whilst Tyrone Mings, whose contract was negotiated by Bournemouth, is on £15k.

That shows the art of the possible and I'm getting closer to the realisation that you literally have to get rid of pretty much everyone and start from scratch on the playing side in order to fix the problem.  As it stands, anyone new coming in just uses the already inflated salaries we currently pay as the benchmark and the cycle continues ad infinitum.

[KRS]

I’m a little confused with the FFP rules. Are they only applicable to EFL teams or are PL teams also subject to the same restrictions?

[SoccerHQ]

It's journeyman players on Prem wages too.

Shows how many money has flooded down to this level now from premier league when what we did not just in summer 2016 but window 2017 has pretty much knackered us.

In 2017 one we signed mostly championship players but lansbury and Hourihane were captains at their clubs so inevitably highest earners and so coming here would be double your money no problem (particularly as both were out of contract in six months so strong bargaining positions).

We have too many mediocre players in 30-40k range. Richards, Lansbury, Hourihane, Taylor, Jedinak, Whelan, Adomah, Kodjia and ones still contracted to us like Hogan and McCormack.

Not easy but we simply need shot of majority of then and then go for younger players from yes maybe leagues below who won't be demanding that sort of money.

Then maybe we have a chance of building something sustainable long term. If we want to get big name or two in then loans continue to make sense I think (as long as we don't pay all their wages like se seemingly did with Bolasie).

[eamonn]

How was broadcasting down £8m when we were on Sky more than any other Championship team last season?

[paul_e]

It's journeyman players on Prem wages too.

Shows how many money has flooded down to this level now from premier league when what we did not just in summer 2016 but window 2017 has pretty much knackered us.

In 2017 one we signed mostly championship players but lansbury and Hourihane were captains at their clubs so inevitably highest earners and so coming here would be double your money no problem (particularly as both were out of contract in six months so strong bargaining positions).

We have too many mediocre players in 30-40k range. Richards, Lansbury, Hourihane, Taylor, Jedinak, Whelan, Adomah, Kodjia and ones still contracted to us like Hogan and McCormack.

Not easy but we simply need shot of majority of then and then go for younger players from yes maybe leagues below who won't be demanding that sort of money.

Then maybe we have a chance of building something sustainable long term. If we want to get big name or two in then loans continue to make sense I think (as long as we don't pay all their wages like se seemingly did with Bolasie).

The biggest problem in all this is that we have a lot of players who were worth (that's subjective I know) big wages when they signed but because of their age were only going to get worse so they might be of only half the value at the end of their contract but we've still got to pay in full but get very little benefit in return.

If we aim to sign players in their early 20s most of the time they'll be on comparatively lower wages that, within a year or so, will be less than their value (McGinn is a great example here), that's a much healthier position to be in because if you don't want to give them a pay rise you can sell them (usually at a profit) and you'll get plenty of offers because their paid less than their worth. If you're paying more than anyone else will offer then a lot of players will see out the contract (or negotiate a pay off).

I agree with Brian that we need to focus on improving the academy production line and bringing players through but you still do need to make signings, the key thing is that we should be very wary of signing people the wrong side of 25 and the ones we do sign should be used to fill gaps as first team players, not as backup. This is where the words and actions of Bruce were are odds with each other, he spoke, in his first summer, about making a smaller squad but then he added 4-5 more players to the squad without moving anyone on. With the set of 19-22 year olds we have in the U23s we should be looking at a first team squad of about 18-20. That would mean that the like of O'Hare, Doyle-Hayes, Clarke, Clark, Davis, RHM, Ramsey, Sarkic, Revan, etc are going to be needed on the bench fairly regularly but that's ok, if we don't trust them to even come on for 10-20 minutes here and there then we should be looking to move them on but the issue we've had for years seems to have been that if we don't think a player can be a regular starter then we sign someone to sit on bench instead of them. In the premier league you can get away with that more but in the championship you just can't have players like Thor and Lansbury earning a fortune to watch the games.

[ChicagoLion]

Every club has the same idea regarding developing youth, unfortunately it is a lot easier said than done.