100% correct. The club budget on an 18th place finish for the coming season (ie relegation). That means there's definitive rewards of around £65m and that's what the budgets will be set against. Last time in the top flight we were paying something like 60% of all our turnover on wages, and given promotion bonuses, the ridiculously large squad and increased salaries across the board it doesn't leave much to play with! The club were unfortunately rather reliant on the RvW move to Sporting to happen. It didn't and it's left us short of dosh for fees. And Lafferty's injury isn't helping either as nobody will buy him, not to mention pay his not-unsubstantial wages while he's injured. Tricky situation but it doesn't help that so many of our fans demand big-money moves because they assume we are 'loaded' thanks to being back in the top flight. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are the poorest club in the division with regards the ability to pay transfer fees. Well, apart from maybe Everton!
I thought the Mbokani rumour must hold water given his twitter and all the multiple links over time. So frustrating as I think he could really do a job. On the work permit, for those without a medically-problematic obsession with detail, stop reading. Otherwise: To get a work permit my understanding is you need to be "an international player of the highest calibre". This means: A player must have played for his country in at least 75% of its competitive A team matches of which he was available for selection, during the two years preceding the date of the application The player’s country must be at or above 70th place in the official FIFA world rankings when averaged over the two years preceding the date of the application Congo is ranked 59th (so that's ok), but Mbokani missed the entirety of Congo's 2014 ACN qualifying campaign. So even though he played all games in their ACN matches earlier this year, he misses out on getting over the 75% hurdle because of the injury. I think you can make out a special case (i.e. that he would have played if he hadn't been injured) but that's obviously much harder to solidly demonstrate... Which would explain our troubles here. If it's rejected we can appeal and give other evidence, but they tend to favour younger players on appeal apparently. BTW he needs a work permit because Ukraine is out of the EU so freedom of movement does not apply.
Indeed, or at least the Mirror believes us to be the paupers of the division At £23m, Norwich owners Delia Smith and husband Michael Wynn Jones find themselves bottom of the Premier League table in a list of the division's richest owners. (Mirror) Bah!
I bet their share in Norwich City is worth a hell of a lot more than that now. Must be their most valuable asset by a country mile, although obviously difficult to precisely work out and varies hugely depending on what division we are in...
I guess we have to hope that pretty much the same squad as last time we went down can do a whole lot better under Alex Neil then. It's a shame that we don't have the cash, but what can you do if you can't shift your high wage earners. Supers, what's your thoughts on RVW? I heard the move fell through to Porto because he didn't want to take any kind of pay cut? Is that true? Is he just gonna sit here and run his contract down and play for the under 21's etc?
As we're never privy to these discussions we may never know 100% but that's what Sporting intimated when the deal broke down. To be fair, I wouldn't take a pay cut in his position either. Why should he? Money is important. Always makes me laugh when people say 'he should want first team football - just take anything you're offered'. Yeah, as if they would do that!! Bollocks! I think Norwich will just have to bite the bullet eventually and pay a % of his wages to make up any shortfall, wherever he goes.
Chicken and egg, though. By letting players leave, the club knows how much in terms of wages have been freed up to offer potential new signings?
Essentially we need to sell before we can buy, depending on price of course - we could buy someone cheap I'm sure! But if we want a player who is valued at £7m for example it probably wouldn't be possible to sign him until a player or two are moved on.
So, unless we can offload Turner, RvW, Lafferty etc, we're facing a season with ostensibly the same nucleus of the team that got us relegated under Hootun (Brady and Mulumbu - when fit, excepted) Less prudence, more ambition S'il vous plaît
You of all people should know how businesses have to be run and budgets have to be set and unfortunately NCFC is a business. We already have more than the 25 man squad allowed and buying a new striker and a new CB means than 2 more have to go. If we could sell RVW, Turner, Hooper and Lafferty it would free up enough in the wage budget to cover these new acquisitions and if we could get, say, £12m in total for the 4 of them then added to the,say, £8m we already have left in the transfer budget we have £20m to pay for the new acquisitions although my calculations are probably optimistic. The point is that we cannot buy until we sell because if it all went wrong we would really be in the financial mire.
Coventry, Portsmouth, Leeds etc etc all had less prudence but plenty of ambition - is that what you really want?
Whilst I can see money is perhaps tighter than we'd like: -Mbokani: Regardless of whether we'd agreed a fee or not, we surely could have done due-dilligence and seen that a work permit would be a sticking point. Surely the first criteria in signing a player, before ability, age, cost, etc, is whether they can actually play in the UK? -If money is so tight that realistically we've only been able to add Mulumbu and Brady to the first team, (Dorrans was here, Wisdom isn't ours, Kean is irrelevant), why was Brady considered a priority worth paying so much for? Marcos Alonso for a couple of million seems a much safer bet if money is so tight we now can't afford players where we really need them. -We've been touting RvW for two years now, if Sporting are the only club interested in all that time, why didn't we suck it up and pay a bit of his wages? £4-5m in the kitty and £20k p/w off the wage bill would have been very handy.
Nothing at all to do with a 'lack of ambition'. If we can't afford to pay more, we can't afford it! Simple as that. I get the feeling some fans would quite like the club to buy players just for the sake of having a transfer to talk about - regardless of if they are needed/better than what we already have. Do these people lead such uneventful lives that a new signing is all they have to look forward to? Yes the side is similar in personnel to that which was relegated, but very different in almost every other way. Anyway, wasn't the general consensus that that side should not have been relegated? I'm sure last season everyone felt we had a PL-quality team, yet the second we go up its not good enough? People can moan that others are signing bigger and better players but there's not a lot we can do about that. We can only spend what we have and without a big-money backer we are entirely reliant on PL cash and player sales. And quite why anybody would want to be back in the Championship I will never know.
