Don't know if you've seen but Ronald is now living in our neck of the woods too. Taken Osvaldo's place for the time being.
Breaking News Liverpool have put in a £16m bid for Southampton's £92m transfer fund. Southampton's Les Read has described the deal as 'the best the club could get after the £92m made it clear to us that it did not see its future here at St Mary's'
Lifted this from saints web I just had a text from a football agent with strong ties to Southampton FC, who told me that the player budget at Saints was out of control. He suggested that the board was hamstrung by the commitments Cortese had made to both the players and Pochettino et al, which would have ensured that any future success on the field would have swallowed up income off of it and led to an unsustainable situation going forward, given our restricted income, with regard to sponsorship and crowds. Cortese had taken his focus off of the commercial income growth. In fact it was shrinking, due to the fact he was an unpleasant guy to deal with. Sony swore never to sponsor a box again, after the way they were treated last season. So, my take is that to prevent all and more of the riches earned in the Premiership disappearing via players, their contracts, bonuses and constant demands, leading to an unsustainable future, it made sense to clear the decks and adjust the player budget to a level that a club our size, with 30,000 crowds and a tiny commercial income, compared with virtually any other club in the Premiership, could afford. Cutting our cloth in an area in which the majority of the overheads are spent. The area of greedy, spoilt, ungrateful, spoilt and self-obsessed children who can kick a ball around for a living. Better to start with new contracts than have to pay for the mistakes of the past.
I never know whether to take guided missile seriously but this would be the only benign explanation for the manner in which we've rolled over to have our belly tickled and seem set to sell every first team squad member we had. It fits with my earlier conclusion that all the upheaval was to do with promises made to players who expected the gravy train to keep accelerating. I didn't anticipate that the existing contracts were unsustainable and that we would need to get rid of them. The schedule for replacing the players has been appalling though.
We were just testing the water. Seeing what the reaction would be, we knew damn well we wouldn't get him for 3.5. A bit like a house you don't go in and offer the asking price.
that said, GM's next post was to suggest that rather than sell the club for 150m the owner is likely to sell the best players for 100m each season. That's where i wonder about his credibility. We've sold a lot of talent that has been with us for 5-8 years of first team football. That won't replenish every year, nor will the top four's appetite for mid table footballers.
Your TV income will have increased by £25m+ last season though and you were only trading at a £6.6m loss in the last set of accounts for the previous year. So whilst your budgets probably had increased beyond what was maybe sensible the vast TV income increase would have surely balanced the books on it's own?
This does fit with the rumour about Cortese's excessive bonus promises (used to bump up a limited wage system).
I call bullshit. If the finances were that bad, it would be in the clubs best interest to have leaked the information long ago to justify the sales. They haven't. This is the first any of us have heard of it.
How much do you think these supposed bonuses would amount to exactly? Because we've raked in how much? Upwards of £100m?
Nah they only get cleaned before players moved in. I have about 5 Saints players living right near me.
Yeah, the only thing they "leaked" as a shot at Cortese was the £27m transfer debt which isn't a problem anyway
All I can say about that Guided Missile post is that the Sony thing is spot on. They wanted to become a club partner and were in the process of doing so but NC's behaviour ****ed them off. Same goes for Mercedes Southampton. They signed as car partner, but when they didn't want to sponsor the shirts, Nicola took all SFC business to Mercedes Bournemouth. As far as I was told, both of these companies complained to KL via the PR firm, apparently.
