Transfer Rumours To sack or not to sack?

[PowerSpurs]

Our inability or perhaps lack of willingness to sell players has been crippling.

I've no idea how Arsenal can sell Alex Iwobi for £34m, Chelsea can sell Mason Mount for £60m, West Ham can sell Scamacca for £25m yet we can't shift a single unwanted player for more than a loan with an option to buy for a fiver. Heck, United have even found a taker for Antony and he is so bad he has his own meme page.

I should add that there is more to it than incompetence. I'll post the link to a fascinating analysis I read a while back.

Basically the long and short of it is it isn't always beneficial to just sell a player to the highest bidder unless that bidder offers more than whatever the remaining contract value is.

This is a really important point that I've only recently begun to understand as I've delved down the Daniel rabbit hole of our finances.

So take Ndombele for example. Signed for circa £65m on a 6-year contract with wages of circa £10m per year.

This means for example in year 3 of his contract, it was worth 65 - (11.5x3) = £30.5m.

So to show a profit for PSR, we'd need someone to bid higher than that amount. That was never going to happen.

Even at the end of year 5, we'd need an offer higher than £11.5m to come in, in order to show a profit.

In the event that those don't come in, it becomes better to send him out on loan and at least save on a chunk of his wages, rather than sell him for less than the value of his amortized contract, which shows up on the books as a loss.

I've done a terrible job at explaining that but take a look here for more:

https://www.reddit.com/r/coys/comments/1eg55yt/understanding_transfer_policy_through_the_lens_of/

That's a very good explanation of transfer financing but he hasn't spotted that the stadium loan covenants is both more restrictive than PSR and has a bigger penalty for breach. I think the losses over each of the last few years tell us pretty exactly what that limit is. The PSR limit is about £50m per season higher.

 

[PowerSpurs]

The main problem with the club is that it is run appallingly. It doesn't matter so much how big your transfer kitty is, it's how hard you work and smartly you use it to progress the squad for the coach.

We spend our money like a drunk buying presents on Christmas Eve, after the pubs shut. That comes from the owners' representative on the board. He could stop it anytime he wants...but it just keeps rolling along.

No other club does this...and our shocking level of success (or more correctly, lack of it) shows why. Levy's never escaped his inner barrow boy, unfortunately he never will and we suffer the fallout.

ENOUGH OF THIS ****!

Almost every other club does the same on transfers. Do the same list for Man Utd and Chelsea or for Liverpool or Arsenal starting 5 year's earlier and you will get the same outcome.

 

[Citizen Kane.]

That's a very good explanation of transfer financing but he hasn't spotted that the stadium loan covenants is both more restrictive than PSR and has a bigger penalty for breach. I think the losses over each of the last few years tell us pretty exactly what that limit is. The PSR limit is about £50m per season higher.

Yes, his fundamental mistake is that he basis his calculations solely on PSR restrictions, not the covenants which are independent of those.

But it is a superb analysis.

 

["Thanks for that Brian"]

Almost every other club does the same on transfers. Do the same list for Man Utd and Chelsea or for Liverpool or Arsenal starting 5 year's earlier and you will get the same outcome.

No other club of any stature buys as many players at the death of transfer windows. None.

We're obsessed by doing it. When I was young (angry) and poor, I used to wait until the end of the day's trading at Surrey Street Market to buy 'bargain' food when the traders were getting rid of it...because I had to.


Despite being in theTop 10 richest clubs in the world, we're doing it again this window, just as we did it in the last...looking for cheap deals...not playersvthat the coach/club needs. it's a ****ing nonsense and needs to stop.

 

[humanbeingincroydon]

No other club of any stature buys as many players at the death of transfer windows. None.

We're obsessed by doing it. When I was young (angry) and poor, I used to wait until the end of the day's trading at Surrey Street Market to buy 'bargain' food when the traders were getting rid of it...because I had to.


Despite being in theTop 10 richest clubs in the world, we're doing it again this window, just as we did it in the last...looking for cheap deals...not playersvthat the coach/club needs. it's a ****ing nonsense and needs to stop.

Would you like me to list the number of players Liverpool or Arsenal have bought in the last days of the January transfer window to underline how wide of the mark your argument is?

 

[PowerSpurs]

No other club of any stature buys as many players at the death of transfer windows. None.

We're obsessed by doing it. When I was young (angry) and poor, I used to wait until the end of the day's trading at Surrey Street Market to buy 'bargain' food when the traders were getting rid of it...because I had to.


Despite being in theTop 10 richest clubs in the world, we're doing it again this window, just as we did it in the last...looking for cheap deals...not playersvthat the coach/club needs. it's a ****ing nonsense and needs to stop.

Despite being in the top 10 richest clubs we have a covenant limiting our spending which according to my calculations means we can basically afford to spend nothing in this window. That's the explanation of what we are doing, not incompetence.

 

[humanbeingincroydon]

Those suffering from Levy Derangement Syndrome found the quickest way to lose the argument: replying to social media posts about the club commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in the most boneheaded manner

 

[PowerSpurs]

Part of the reason I am an outlier on many discussions is that I don't expect the club to have an edge in a number of areas where others seem to take it for granted that we will. The principle ones that come up are transfer performance, manager selection and distribution of goals scored. I expect us to be exactly average at all of them because I can't see any way of generating a long term edge.

 

[Roo]

Would you like me to list the number of players Liverpool or Arsenal have bought in the last days of the January transfer window to underline how wide of the mark your argument is?

I think a better comparison is Bournemouth, who, like us, have been hit by injuries but have brought in 5 players already, IIRC.

 

[PowerSpurs]

I think a better comparison is Bournemouth, who, like us, have been hit by injuries but have brought in 5 players already, IIRC.

BBC website lists two Bournemouth transfers out of 15 PL ones in total.

 

[Roo]

BBC website lists two Bournemouth transfers out of 15 PL ones in total.

I could be wrong, I just thought I’d read that somewhere.
But still, even if it’s 2 already, they’ve addressed the issues long before the end of the window, knowing the injury problems they had.

 

[Dier Hard]

I could be wrong, I just thought I’d read that somewhere.
But still, even if it’s 2 already, they’ve addressed the issues long before the end of the window, knowing the injury problems they had.

I think what makes it damning on our account, regardless of work done or not by other clubs is that Postecoglou, whether you like him or not, has been pretty much as close to begging for new signings as you could get since before the window opened. Yet with less than a week to go he’s not gotten anything, well anything significant anyway.

By waiting this long too, our results have further suffered and any selling club will have seen our desperation grow, likely making any targets even tougher to get.

A lot of clubs raise the price when Man Utd go in for them, I think we’re gonna have a similar effect for the remainder of this window now, to the point I’m genuinely now of the belief we won’t bring anyone in.

 

[remembercolinlee]

I actually think that record on signings might well be average for the league or even slightly above. As I mentioned the other day, you have to invest well over twice the selling club's valuation of the player to get a transfer done.* Imagine how successful you would be buying anything else with that handicap.

*The selling club has the option to keep the player and up his salary and contract length so that his fully paid up contract is just below their valuation. So you would expect them to want a transfer fee in excess of his current contract value. But you also need to give the player a better contract to move to you.

But the simple fact is that EVERYONE thought spending £60m on Richarlison was insane.
Many of us thought buying Sessengon for £35m was mad.
We clearly did not show due diligence when spending the money on Ndombele when you consider that he was thought to have a real problem with his commitments to being a professional footballer. I could go on.
None of this is anything to do with how much money we have to spend. It is about the way we have wasted so much of it in the past 5 or 6 years

 

[PowerSpurs]

But the simple fact is that EVERYONE thought spending £60m on Richarlison was insane.
Many of us thought buying Sessengon for £35m was mad.
We clearly did not show due diligence when spending the money on Ndombele when you consider that he was thought to have a real problem with his commitments to being a professional footballer. I could go on.
None of this is anything to do with how much money we have to spend. It is about the way we have wasted so much of it in the past 5 or 6 years

Ask any fan about their club's signings and you will get a similar list. Wasting money seems to be an unavoidable feature of transfer business. There are also some examples where everyone on here was demanding we sign someone who we decided to overlook and the guy was hardly heard of again.

 

[Dier Hard]

None of this is anything to do with how much money we have to spend. It is about the way we have wasted so much of it in the past 5 or 6 years

Nail on head.

We probably had a higher transfer success rate in say the last 10 years at WHL than we have done in the 5/6 years at THS.

It felt like we had more logic in signings back at WHL too, even with ones that may have ended up flopping. So many of the signings at THS have had fans scratching heads before a ball was kicked.

 

[PowerSpurs]

I could be wrong, I just thought I’d read that somewhere.
But still, even if it’s 2 already, they’ve addressed the issues long before the end of the window, knowing the injury problems they had.

They've bought an 18 and a 19 year old for about £8m in total. That would have caused a riot on here if we had done it.

 

[Roo]

They've bought an 18 and a 19 year old for about £8m in total. That would have caused a riot on here if we had done it.

we bought an inexperienced youngster from the Czech Republic league, and we were all bloody delighted, even if it was argued that it wasn’t a priority position.
We were also excited by the arrivals of Bergvall and Gray in the past.
Ages doesn’t matter, it’s the quality we need, and the depth.

 

[Spurlock]

Not gonna back him, not gonna sack him, Levy must want to crack him

 

[SarrMan]

we bought an inexperienced youngster from the Czech Republic league, and we were all bloody delighted, even if it was argued that it wasn’t a priority position.
We were also excited by the arrivals of Bergvall and Gray in the past.
Ages doesn’t matter, it’s the quality we need, and the depth.

I don’t think age necessarily matters but price definitely does.

Using the current flavours of the month forest and Bournemouth, Huijsen and Zabarnyi cost about £35 mill in total and Murillo and milenkovic cost about £25 in total.

If we’re going into a season with a starting centre back pairing on those prices then we’re already on the back foot as the social media meltdown would have been off the chart with the ‘levy being tight’, ‘shopping at the bargain basement’ again.

We don’t necessarily need to spend more, we need to spend better but that won’t satisfy a lot of the baying levy out groups.

 

[Dier Hard]

Not gonna back him, not gonna sack him, Levy must want to crack him

It’s like a social experiment in it.

Probably find out there’s some documentary being made on this all that’ll come out in about 3-4 years.