I have taken this post 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.
Who was the poster? Are they known to be reliable? How big would bonuses have to be to be "out of control"?
Never heard of Guided Missile. Are you familiar? His post is ended with a rather moronic statement, so that doesn't get him off to a good start in my book.
IIRC he's an arrogant business type (fertilizer company or something, i suppose the jokes write themselves) who liked to name drop a bit and probably mixes in the hospitality circles tbh. He was very active and skeptical around the time of the Wilde coup IIRC. I wouldn't class him as a wum at all or particularly as an outright fantasist. No idea of the veracity of his inside info. edit: real name John Misselbrook, if that means anything to anyone.
This was posted elsewhere and as I said it fits the facts more than other theories. Have heard the bit about Nicola alienating sponsors before and the idea that our commercial side has been neglected was mentioned when he left. He probably needed to delegate more...he said he liked having people he could trust and leave them to do their job, but he actually micromanaged. Nothing in this that I couldn't believe.
It was Pesticides, rather than fertiliser. https://www.duedil.com/company/04046444/agform-limited He's a chemist apparently. And he looks a bit like a poor man's brendan fraser http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/s/southampton/3407225.stm
I don't think the wages or financial situation was out-of-hand. I think that they very likely would have gotten out-of-hand had we tried to challenge for Europe. Just look at the budgets of those clubs. Whether you like the with selling or not, I think we would all agree that we are getting extremely high figures for those players. And yet Liverpool is spending like it's nothing, and they are probably doubling their wages. And buying up others besides. We only have to look at Portsmouth to see what happens when you try to spend like a big club without the fanbase, sponsorship, cash reserves, etc. to back it up. Cortese's plan was risky. We were going to spend big and win first. Then having won, the money would start flowing in. The finances we had in place were quite likely sustainable. The club we had in place probably wasn't. Lallana, etc. weren't going to stay on those wages. NC promised them we'd be like Liverpool, Chelsea, Man U. and not just in club stature but probably in wages. So if it looks like that promise won't be kept, it makes perfect sense not to rely on a promise of Liverpool when you can just go to the real deal.
The era of greedy, spoilt, ungrateful, spoilt and self-obsessed children who can kick a ball around for a living. The above may be exaggerated, but isn't this how they behaved? Not one showed that they actually cared about the club. It is possible there is something terribly wrong at the club now, but could also be construed as there was something terribly wrong at the club before...the 'one for one and all for one' attitude got us promoted and gave us great performances, but also introduced a canker into the club. They've gone and we're left with the club. I intend to provide support and patience until proved unequivocally otherwise.
Okay, he seems to have some credibility. What doesn't add up for me is how the "player budget" was so out of control that we needed to bring in hundreds of millions of pounds to settle it.
Could be that a lot of pay was made up of bonuses and that wasn't going to happen again (pure speculation). Remember how Cole nearly crashed his car because of Arsenal's 'derisory' pay rise? Footballers are that out of touch. Our next financial statement could be interesting.
Same response as what I put in the transfer thread, but here goes: This does kind of fit? I'm sure I read somewhere the players, in particular Lallana received a bonus of £500,000 when we got promoted from the championship. Ok, not necessarily 'a lot' of money in football terms, but if you take into account Lallana's salary at the time (£25,000?) and the fact that he was already at the club with personal ambitions of playing in the Prem, imagine the bonuses in place once we started signing players like Lovren, Wanyama etc. all on substantially bigger wages than Lallana's £25,000 a week in the championship. Added to the fact we signed them from champions league clubs, they would and could have commanded massive bonuses for achieiving top 4 finishes, trophies etc. You could probably added in bonuses to people like Jay Rod's contracts for international recognition, goal targets etc. (Cortese last pre season, telling Jay Rod he would be our top scorer, and play for England). You can imagine how the negotiations went. 'Jay if you sign for us, you will be top scorer in two seasons and play for england, hell were even give you £XXX amount of money for doing so we are that confident'. 'Lovren, if you sign for us and help us get into the champions league, you can have £XXX amount'
If it's true, at least you can be pleased that it was nipped in the bud and not left to a complete meltdown which we had to suffer.
The hundreds millions of pounds weren't needed to cover a debt. Consider that money generated as a nice bonus. The budget would have been out-of-control due to wages (or in my belief, an expected escalation in wages). So the need was simply to get the wages off the books, not generate 100m in capital. We had a bunch of Ferraris, which is nice. But we couldn't afford the gas, maintenance and garage fees for that fleet of Ferraris. So we sold them, and now we're going to buy some more practical economy cars, whose upkeep is much cheaper.
Well then I guess Jay's and Morgan's wages and bonuses aren't out of control. Which is odd, considering Morgan is our longest-serving first team player.
