You don't have a £50m wage bill paying players £15k a week, most of our first team squad will have been on £25-50k a week.
If we were spending £1m per week on wages with 10 on an average of £45k per week then if the squad was 25 that would mean the remaining 15 were on an average of £37k. There must be something wrong there - I suppose it was that we had more than 25 included in the wages. Are the management, training, analysis and medical staff included in the £50m wage bill? I suppose Bruce and Phelan are the only people on reasonable wages out of that lot.
That makes it incredibly difficult to judge what the wage structure is without using rumours a great deal. Even when people talk about an individual player's wages they lump all sorts of potential bonuses in. In 2013-2014 the club had the following employees: players and coaches 137 (!?), administration 23, and sales and marketing 25 Their wages were £38.5m and employer's NICs (which usually gets added to the wages bill but isn't part of the wages paid) was nearly £5m.
Last year the accounts were submitted on 14 October so we may have some interesting information next month!
Just watched the highlights on YouTube and if they're an accurate representation of the game, I'd say we were very fortunate to get the win. Mind, I'm glad we did.
At Brighton there were a lot of cries of "forward" and "attack" when we were leisurely passing it around the defence and midfield when we were 1-0 down. I thought they were reasonable shouts. Not if we didn't have the ball though!
A very interesting game last night. We have seen this all too often in the past with the Tigers being on the wrong end of that scoreline after missing so many chances. We rode our luck - dug in and scored the goal that mattered. Job done. Round 4 of the coc here we come.
A couple of comical moments last night. After the linesman failed to give an offside decision in the first half a bloke in the crowd shouted to Steve Bruce and commented that the Swansea player had been yards off, Bruce looked disgusted and (playfully) squirted he contents of his water bottle at the lino next time he came near. Later on Garry Monk was complaining about the ball boys being slow to return the ball, he'd obviously forgotten the great Swansea versus Chelsea Legue Cup match a couple of years back in which the ball boy was hanging onto the ball and a Chelsea player gave him a kick. Oh the irony.
