It isn't though. There is no point in letting Sanchez go for £8m and then signing someone no better for £15m when if we sold him for £13m we could afford £20m on replacing him. It seems to me that we are looking to spend the maximum possible which means maximising income.
I don’t think that’s the issue though, in terms of spending more if we sell for more. We have plenty of money and a large FFP window. What’s stopping us is the size of the squad in certain areas. Not money. We know the players we want and what we value them at will presumably have been factored in during the scouting process. I don’t believe it’s a case of Target A if we sell for X and Target B if we sell for Y because there’s limits on the kind of players we can sign anyway with no Europe.
We are not limited by FFP but we are limited by a covenant on the stadium loans so I think balancing the books is necessary
Is that confirmed or just an assumption? I can’t remember Ali Gold or the like saying it and it sounds like the kind of thing they would have picked up on if it was significantly impacting transfer business.
Just a theory used by the UKIPpers, since they got bored crowing about a golf course that cost us about as much as a month of Sonny's wages
Levy said it to THST when the stadium was refinanced. It was a covenant on EBITDA which is quite normal as the bondholders want to make sure that interest is covered by cash profit. The details were not revealed but EBITDA is affected by transfer profit and salaries. Given the Winks and Kane fees are pure profit I imagine next season is the pinch point.
The whole covenant on loans thing is something I've only hear you and others mention very, very recently. Didn't exist until it magically needed to. I'm not sure how that structure works but if for argument's sake we are restricted to a net spend of £100-150m per window for the duration of the loan (20 years iirc), that is insanity as crazy football inflation means that in a few years from now, £100m will be the going rate for a kid who played once for England U21s.
It is in the THST minutes. It won't limit spend in itself but will stop us running at an overall loss
Thanks. But even given that the Kulu and Porro deals count in this window, all incomings are amortised anyway, so we should have a lot of headroom still. At least to the point where quibbling over small numbers and holding up progress on the pitch shouldn’t be what we need to do. All I’m saying is that I don’t doubt the truth of what you say but if it was causing that much of a problem, someone would have picked up on it in the mediasphere by now. We wrote off Doherty’s contract in January and there wasn’t a peep on this. Not a dig at you, just surprised if this is what’s causing holdups at this point.
Tanganga's buy obligation is reportedly in the region of £5m and is triggered if he plays a set number of games and Augsburg stay up. Not either/or as was first assumed. Shame that, when he broke through I hoped even if it didn't work out for him, we'd at the very least make a solid £20m on an academy product.
I think they paid a similar amount in an initial loan fee too. So if triggered it’ll be about £10m total.
Writing off contracts might still be the right thing to do in some circumstances but the covenant will be a hard limit so will impose some limitations. If we are near the limit on the covenant then every penny counts. If not then I agree with you. But our net spend is already the highest ever so it's not exactly a very restrictive thing in the big picture
I've no idea. He's played RW most for Forest, but he's been used in a lot of roles. LW, ST, SS, AM and even central midfield. I don't think any of our attacking players have cemented their places this season. I'd expect him to start on the bench and come on for Kulusevski at first, though.
My immediate thought is we might need a sell-on in that, as there would be a good chance that (presuming they meet the requirements) Augsburg would flip him next summer for a tidy profit to a side in the middle tier of the Bundesliga (i.e. A German Team, Eintracht, Hoffenheim, Wolfsburg)
