Knew it’d likely be a struggle to win, but also Cardiff have one of the worst attacks in the league. I thought we’d at least get a draw, and was hopeing for a narrow win. Sadly we don’t win games 1-0.
That's my point, though: I don't think we have a budget allocated for this summer. I think our budget for the summer will be whatever we're able to shed, and the unwanted players aren't going to raise much (I'm dubious many of them will find permanent homes at all).
Yeah. Which is what worries me...selling Hojbjerg or Redmond in order to buy a couple cut-rate replacements is exactly the sort of thinking that got us into this mess.
I suggested this a few weeks ago. I think it is very plausible that we sell Hojbjerg to fund our summer window (provided we stay up ofc). If the option is to keep Hojbjerg and sell whatever deadwood we can and use funds from those sales or sell deadwood and Hojbjerg and let Ralph spend all the money then I can see Hassenhuttl wanting the extra cash to bring in possibly 2 or 3 more players. It is not like we are a team that is only one or 2 players away from being really good, we are utter ****e in the main and need a huge over haul of the squad and if that means selling one of the better players to hopefully improve the overall quality of the squad then I can see them taking that risk
Except for the £20m for Ings. Which is a lot of money for a club that doesn’t want to spend money, especially when he’s injured half the time. Plus we have several other additions we need to make to be competitive enough to stay in the league so that we can continue to collect the TV money. As I assume that is our primary aim. That is assuming we stay in the league this season. I wonder if the obligation to buy Ings has small print that it’s only an obligation if we stay in the PL.
I don’t think Højbjerg would fetch much more than Lemina tbh. So If we need to sell someone of worth to fund some incomings I see that as much more likely.
Perhaps, and either way I don't think either of them are going to be fetching ridiculous fees as well. There are a lot of important variables which unless you are ITK it is impossible to guess really. Most importantly who the main targets Ralph wants and how much they will cost, who would be interested in a Lemina/Hojbjerg and how much they would pay, who is interested in our fringe players and how much they would pay and what the actual budget is before sales. I can't see Hojbjerg or Lemina getting much more than £30m which, depending on Ralph's targets might not be enough to even sign 2 players, in which case it wouldn't be worth selling them. Only thing is Hojbjerg's contract and whether he will sign a new one
We put Ings on layaway, though, because we didn't have the money allotted to buy him immediately. Which is a concern, given that we'd just sold a player for £75m a few months previous.
Doing some basic maths on the transfers I think we spent all the £75m prior to signing Ings Carrillo - £20m Vestergaard - £22m Ely - £16m Gunn - £10m Armstrong - £7m £74m total. I got the fees from transfermarket so should be roughly right. £58m spent on Carrillo, Vestergaard and Ely actually made me lol when seeing it written down like that.
Vester was £22m?...so he is our most expensive signing ever, saves the embarrassment of it being Carrillo I suppose.
Again, though, we're the only team in the Premier League whose transfer budget is wholly derived from player sales (I guess you could include Spurs there, but we don't have a £600m+ stadium to pay off). Our bloated wage budget hurts there, but so too does our fixation on team profit.
Whoever our European scout is needs getting his arse booted out of the club (unless it was Les Reed!)
Oh yeah I completely agree, no other team is run like this, for it to work your recruitment needs to be exceptional. By selling Tadic and Gabbi for circa £20m we have raised the Ings money though so should be back to £0 to spend in the summer rather than -£20m
So has basically every PL club though, with our model you just can't afford to be having many failures in the recruitment department as that is how the model works. Most teams will have roughly a 50% hit record on transfers I'd say, ours has probably been that if you look at say the last 5 years, but the majority of the ones who would fall into the good half have left, meaning we are basically ****ed unless we change our model for at least one window and spend some of the TV money rather than doing whatever we are currently doing with it
It has. Being cheap is, in the current era, very expensive; if you're avoiding large transfer fees (and the fees we pay are fairly cheap compared to other established PL teams) while paying substantial wages, you can get in a lot of trouble, because there are very few teams capable of paying those wages if you want to offload them. I fully support reducing our wage bill and squad size, but part and parcel of that is that we need to leverage the financial heft that PL teams have to get better players.
