Thursday, March 3

Wages of sin

Interesting piece on our accounts for the year ending May 31 2010 in today’s Digger column in the Guardian. It claims: “Davids Gold and Sullivan have been able to strip out £13m of staff costs (mostly from players). This has caused the club's wages-to-turnover ratio to fall to 70% from a completely unsustainable 79%.”

Not sure how much credit for this can go to the Gullivan brothers or indeed how much our wage bill has fallen. They got rid of Davenport and Quashie at the end of last season, along with loan signings Jiminez, Ilan and Franco. But bigger savings probably came from unloading Lucas Neill, Savio and James Collins under the Icelandic bankers. And let’s remember Sullivan and Gold gave Benni McCarthy 40k a week that January,

In the current accounting year we’ve signed players on biggish wages in Hitzlsperger, Jacobsen, O’Neil, Barrera, Ba, Bridge and Keane but only unloaded Diamanti, Daprela and Behrami.

So my guess is that there is still a lot of pruning to do, starting with 80k a week Kieron Dyer who is out of contract this summer.

1 comment:

matt said...

I doubt Jacobsen is on very high wages, or Barrera, while Behrami certainly and probably Diamanti were (although I think we made a mistake letting him go at such a loss).

Dyer, Gabbidon and Upson are out of contract this summer. However I beleive Ilunga, McCarthy and Faubert have some time to go. Was Boa Morte given more than one year, last summer?

The accounts don't look great, but they are improving, and presumably the move to the Olympic Stadium has to be factored in.

And on the plus side, all that tevez dosh ain't gonna stop Sheffield Utd from plummetting into the third division....