Turnover of £152.6m. Wages of £113.3m + other expenses of £33.2m. £6.3m in taxes. Those items alone exceed our revenues. Take player sales out of the equation, and we were cashflow negative last year. It'll be worse this year.
It's mostly because our revenues tanked. Our wage bill last year actually decreased slightly. But yeah, if we're going to finish 17th every year, our wage bill is uncomfortably high. We need to finish higher up the table, yeah. That's pretty much the only way we can significantly increase revenues without sales. Can we dump just the detritus and get better? Possibly, as they're obviously not doing anything for us, though I wouldn't really count on it being much. I'm not sure that we can swap Carillo/Hoedt/Boufal for even one meaningful transfer. Most clubs would; the biggest threat to our financial position is either remaining where we are, or getting relegated. We won't, though; I think it's well-established that Gao does not wish to finance the club. I'd expect us to try to dump as many of the non-entities as possible (which is perfectly fine), but I wouldn't expect any great summer investment in the squad unless we're selling important players.
As a percentage of turnover, we're third at 74% (among those who have published their books) behind Leicester (75%) and Everton (77%). Among those still in the PL, no one's close. This is -- easily -- the highest our wage-to-turnover ratio has been since the Championship.
Okay cheers, do you know if the £33m in other expenses is about average for similar for other sized clubs? Definitely need a bit of a cull this Summer, might be easier said than done though. Be interesting to Wolves in a year or so too, or even Fulham (gulp).
I’m pleased I managed to get the basic questions I thought were important out in a way that you understood. All your answers are bang on what I was saying We are in a financial hole because we have bought players for substantial fees and with high salaries and they have failed. The question now is how quickly we can get out of that hole and what happens football wise while we are doing that I wonder how Ralph sees this as he can’t have come in expecting expensive signings Hopefully Real Madrid will hurry up and buy Mane and VVD and the sell in clauses are generous
Higher than Leicester's £22.9m; Swiss Ramble doesn't keep a table on that, so I'd have to go through all of his posts to find others. Now, some of that might be transfer-related (bonuses, etc) but it would be eyebrow-raising if our transfer dealings in 2017-18 resulted in far higher agent fees/incoming bonuses than Leicester's £79m spent. However, we also had no exceptional payments last year (which I presume means there was no payout for Pellgrino? Might explain that odd hire if he came on very cheap terms). That won't be the case in 2018-19: we paid Mark Hughes £6m to go away.
A drop in the ocean if he hadn't managed to keep us up though.... (and Ralph wouldn't have been our Manager now)
Mark Hughes record shows that he wasn't a great or even good Saints Manager but he has at the very least contributed something positive to our history. He is nowhere near the top of the list of people culpable for our current financial predicament either.
I don’t think Hughes was such a poor manager, given the squad he had to work with. Very few managers would have got the improvement out of us that Ralph has.
I couldn't see this posted here but I saw this being discussed on Saintsweb https://www.saintsweb.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?5-The-Saints Full list of our players and their wages. It just boggles the mind the money we are paying out - just doesn't seem sustainable. And the sheer waste on players who do nothing or aren't even at the club! What I was struck by most of all was reading from the bottom upwards you quickly run out of players who are delivering on their wage bill. The top end of our earners iare not showing much in terms of results. https://www.spotrac.com/epl/southampton-f.c/payroll/
About 30m more than Watford, Bournemouth and Newcastle. On par with Leicester according to the link posted above.
We have to be careful what we wish for as fans. I remember when fans were moaning about not paying players enough money to keep them or sign them. Now we’re paying too much to move them on when they don’t work. Recruitment and running a business is difficult.
