Snoddy - 3.5M - Norwich

Leeds had the 2nd biggest wage bill in The Championship last season!!

 

Is there a table of that somewhere?

 

If Snoddy knows what's best for him he'll stick at Leeds. He's already said he wants to be among the Scot legends at the club and to do that he has to stick with us at LEAST until we get back in the Europa League.

 

That is CLEARLY bullshit

We spend no money, we got grant holt for 400k, think on that.

 

2009-10

Oli Johnson - 75k
Grant Holt - 400k
Owain Tudur Jones - 350k
Simon Whaley - 225k
Rhoys Wiggins - 100k
Zak Whitbread - 100k

Total: £1,250,000

2010-11

Leon Barnett - 800k
Simeon Jackson - 675k
John Ruddy - 550k
Andrew Crofts - 300k
Mark Tierney - 300k
David Fox - 250k
Aaron Wilbraham - 150k
Andrew Surman - 1.5m

Total: £4,525,000

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Overall total: £5,775,000
Source: transfermarkt.de

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I worked out that over the last two seasons, Leeds have spent (at most) £1.5m on transfer fees. That means you've spent even more than the £4m more than us which I quoted. "CLEARLY bullshit"? Don't make me laugh. Think on that.

 

Your prices are all wrong, plus we never reveal, i have the accounts though and this expense isn't possible. You also don't provide any comparison data for Leeds signings.

Leeds having a go at Norwich for overspending is frankly hilarious. We have 20million in debt, we can't spend the money you think we do, we've only just got some cash.

 

The sad thing is that we sold Graham for £3.5m but you have the resolve to hold onto Snodgrass when the same amount is bid....for a player who would never be worth as much if he wasn't at a big club like Leeds.

 

The club might not disclose the transfer fees but the press generally do.

Can't be arsed doing a full write-up of the Leeds spending, but here's the link with all the data: http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/en/leeds-united/transfers/verein_399.html

The key information:

We spent £400k in 2009-10 and £800k in 2010-11 according to that source. £1.2m; I really was being generous with my previous figure. It's probably fairer to say you've not spent £4m more than us over the last two seasons, but £4.5m.

I'm not having a go at you for overspending, just saying it's hardly a surprise that you got where you did after spending that much. It's not the clubs' fault that spending has got too high - obviously they are going to do whatever they can to get a leg-up - it's the football authorities' fault for letting it run out of control. And I don't understand your comment about Leeds having a go at Norwich's expenditure being "frankly hilarious". I'll call a spade a spade when I see one. Obviously it still takes a decent manager to take a big-spending club to promotion otherwise you end up like Middlesborough, but the finance Lambert has got gave him a bloody big helping hand.

If you hadn't noticed, clubs which are in significant debt still spend huge amounts of money, it's one of the major problems with the modern game. You think Man U don't buy players for fees just because they owe hundreds of millions to creditors? There's no "we've only just got some cash" about it, I don't know whether you've been taking out loans or Delia's been putting in the funding, but it's certainly come from somewhere. I'll only believe you've spent next to nothing when you show me some figures which contest the ones I provided.

 

Yawn! We can't overspend like ManU because.... We ain't man united, we can't sell shirts in Malaysia like they can.

The figures are wrong, it's not financially possible, I can't stress it enough. Where's Russell Martin? Where's Antony mcnamee? Delia and our other backers stopped putting money a few years back.

I'm not even going to deny that we've spend less or more than Leeds, just that your figures are wrong because at the time we were debt riddled (still are potentially)

 

Global merchandising isn't the only way a club can get money into its coffers, is it?

Martin was a free transfer, as was McNamee. You'll have to prove NCFC has no backers whatsoever because you've offered no transfer figures to contest mine and the money has to have come from somewhere.

I look forward to your evidence.

Edit: not that I have to justify your club's liquidity, but apparently from 2004-2010, Delia's catering raised the club £20m. That could be one of NCFC's revenue streams; others are listed here.

 

Macnamee and Martin weren't free. We have an 18mill odd loan, no-one else will loan to us. We spent cash from tickets and tv money, that's it. It's worth pointing out we couldn't sign Craig mackail smith or Elliot Bennett in January bEcquse we couldn't afford them.

You have figures, and I'm on an iPhone and can't be arsed to find some for Leeds signings (no wonder your all so pissed off if you spent 400k in a season, bought you were the biggest club in the universe?) but the site you've used is known to be dodgy wt the very least. Some of the prices are too high and some too low.

 

Just because you are dealing with smaller numbers than the dirt, doesn't mean the concept no longer remains the same. It is quite common for businesses to be in debt, the ammount of debt proportionate to the size of the business. Sony have been in 10s of millions of pounds of debt for years. They were £60 mill in debt about 8 or 9 years ago, yet somehow, magically, they managed to fund what is most likely one of the most expensive R&D ventures in history, the Cell development.

Even my fricken dad used a similar system with his mortgage, paying off only the interest each month and waiting for some sort of bond to mature to pay it off.

 

Fair enough, the £4.5m figure increases nominally.

Probably couldn't afford them because you'd been spending all that money. As for your other revenue streams, see the link above.

Fair enough, come back with some figures any time. Till then, mine stand. And yes, to pay such high ticket prices in such numbers and watch as Ken Bates barely dips his hands into his pockets is frustrating to say the least. We've also brought in millions from Fabian Delph, add-ons and lucrative televized matches while pissing money down the drain on a failing radio station, needless court cases and a £1.5m on a lawyer who's an old mate of Bates'.

And to answer TC's point earlier about our wage spending, it only represents 50% of our turnover. UEFA recommend 70% as the general threshold and say 50-60% is the ideal target level. Probably one of (if not the) the lowest staff cost to turnover ratios in the Championship.

 

Which in itself tells you something about the size and pulling power of the club.

As for the Bates not getting his chequebook out, I'm still not convinced. I will still believe not much was spent in the summer or January because in the first instance, the aim was consolidation for a minimal cost, and in the second instance, players genuinely weren't available. I will make my judgement on the ambition shown by the pair this summer when we see if there is any spending. I'd like to see a good 2.5 - 3.5 mill spent in the summer transfer window on quality signings with a couple of astute picks of frees to bolster up the defense and midfield and give a final polish/bit of backup to the attack. I say that because we'll need one winger (Sam is a little too injury prone to provide backup alone) and one striker to replace that godawful mess Paynter. It's tragic seeing shirts around ER with "Paynter 9" on the back.

 

It is plausible that Grayson's been Wengering despite having a transfer fund to spend. However the quotes from Bates on his Yorkshire Radio edicts pretty much admitting we'll be spending bugger all and trying to Blackpool our way to success don't help with that image. Like you say, we might be surprised and spend some fees this summer as well as getting some bolstering Bosmans. You've got to hope.

 

At the same time he's also been quoted as having told Larry the funds are available should he need them. Lets face it, if we were to "Blackpool" our way up there, that pretty much means just spending within ones means with no outside investment etc, we've still got a far larger kitty to play with than Blackpool. We've all seen the figures, and that money is going somewhere and I'm not stupid enough to believe it's all going into Santa's pocket.

Also, the free transfer policy at this level isn't that bad an approach. If you think about it, the sort of players we want are the sort of players that a lot of clubs would be reluctant to let go. The sort of players who are with clubs aiming to get promotion out of the league and as such are going to be with their clubs most likely until their contracts expire, much in the same way our players generally leave Leeds. The last players to be sold were either rejects, or Fabian Delph. Delph was sold as part of the fire sale.

 

The money isn't necessarily being trousered by Bates to the extent the layman believes but some of it has certainly been completely wasted (Yorkshire Radio, court money for the 'shyster' comments, Mark Taylor's wages). Had we not wasted that £4m-ish and it had gone towards transfers, we'd have been able to spend as much as Norwich which would have got us into the playoffs at the very least.

It's been satisfactory up to this point, but now our primary season-long objective is promotion up to the Premiership, it's time for fees. The going rate for a playoff position is about £4m spending over two seasons so the £2.5-3.5m you mentioned earlier would be a reasonable sum to spend.

 

I personally expect to see vast improvements over last season and a much more serious push for automatic than we've seen in the last 2 seasons, regardless how much or little is spent. You'll have to enlighten me about the court money and Mark Taylor thing, as I am not aware of what's gone on there. As for Yorkshire Radio, can they really have spent THAT much on it? If they are piling money into it the least they can do is make the matchday programme available online and on Sky. I mean, I'm perfectly happy to use an illegal streamed feed on ustream.com, but I'd rather not.

 

The club paid £1.5m for a failed appeal against a libel case brought against Bates: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2009/dec/08/leedsunited

According to the latest set of accounts, Mark Taylor has been paid £1.5m over the last three seasons for his legal services which have amounted to nothing whatsoever. He's an old friend of Ken Bates' and a former director of Chelsea if my memory serves.

And according to the previous set of accounts, Yorkshire Radio made a £700k loss. They've since recouped £81k of that.

£3.7m down the plughole.

 

The figures for our signings certainly seem accurate. I would say we've done brilliantly considering how little we've spent.