Exactly this. Or sit on your arse and not play for another year, picking up 20k and then have to go down to about 7k because you've not played in an age. Swings and roundabouts Billy old boy....
Well he will get one at the end of his contract. If he is on loan in the meantime that doesn't affect his chances of getting a club at the end, in fact it might improve them because the club who has him on loan may want to keep him.
You are certainly right about his contract..........How long has he got on his contract left...2 years? Would it not be better for him to put himself in the shop window by playing regularly and making a go of it to possibly enhance his career? By doing that surely he will be prolonging the time he can be on the higher wages over the longer term.....rather than high wages over the short. Surely it cannot be his ability that is causing him not get a permanent club can it?
Unless we refuse him the chance by not taking less than 100%. Then he just looks stupid and greedy which isn't a great look for prospective employers.
Why would we do that? As I've said, if it comes to the end of the loan window and no-one is offering 100%, we will accept less, because it's not worth paying Sharp more than we have to just to make him rot in the reserves or look greedy to other clubs (as if they would care anyway).
Because of the principle. Look, we're forever bemoaning the cancer of player power in the sport. This is an instance where (if these presumptions are correct, and let's not forget, all of this discussion is based upon presumption), a player is absolutely cutting his nose off to spite his face. If he's going to be an idiot about it and quibble over a move because he'll lose a couple of grand off his over-inflated salary, let him sit and ponder what he's doing for a while.
Something about this whole thing just doesn't make sense to me. Why is it better for Southampton FC to have someone on their books who doesn't play any kind of competitive football and who is paid £20,000 per week, rather than letting him go to another club and cut the outgoings to £5,000 per week? And on the other side of the argument, here is a player in the middle years of his career, who needs more than anything the chance to play proper games of football, who could do that by accepting a cut in pay (which might not amount to a huge loss after tax adjustments and so on), which could be further enhanced by scoring loads of goals and getting win bonuses. Both sides need to sit down and make some sort of compromise here, it's in everyone's interest to do so.
Because there's still time for someone to take him and pay 100% of his wages. It'd be like accepting a lowball transfer offer in early July, there's no point when it doesn't reach your valuation and there's plenty of the window left.
I know, but every week that goes by with Saints paying 100% of his wages is a loss to us. And every week that goes by with Billy playing no football is a loss to his future earning capacity. A compromise would mean that both sides salvage something.
You have to ask yourself why clubs didn't sign him permanently. Saints would have had to accept a bid which couldn't have been that much, probably around £1.5-2m. So they must have been put off by Billy's wages. They would have offered him decent Championship wages, and he must have demanded more. The only way you can question Saints' behaviour over this is on loan deals. Saints obviously don't want to loan Billy out and still pay his wages, so it is all about compromising. The championship clubs and Billy/agents are to blame more so than Saints over his failed move this window IMO. If he wanted a move badly enough, he could have taken a pay cut and play regularly.
It sets a precedent. We should not have to pay a players wage to play for another team, a principle I agree with. Either they pay his full wages and he gets to go on loan or he takes a slight pay cut and goes and plays regularly. Just like in the transfer market we do business on our terms. He will earn more in the long run if he takes a pay cut now, goes and plays regularly and puts on a good show. When his contract expires after 2 years of rotting in the reserves he won't get the same offer.
Why should he lose that money? He signed a contract, and that's legally binding. He will have planned his life and budgeted accordingly to that contract, why should we expect him to accept less money? Would you voluntarily take a 25% paycut in your job if you could keep earning the same amount? Of course not. This isn't a matter of "doing business on our terms", we are legally obligated to pay him the value of his contract. If another team is willing to pay any proportion of that, then we are monetarily better off. It's likely, due to competition for his signature, that someone will offer us 100%. That works out for us and for him. But if they offer less, we either accept it and save some money, or we keep him and save no money. It seems a pretty simple equation to me.
But we are paying him that money! It just means he has to sacrifice his career if he's going to be stubborn about earning that precise wage. I earn nothing in the same area code as much as Billy Sharp, but given the choice of long-term furthering my career or damaging it, yes, I'd take a 25% pay cut. You're making out that we're refusing to pay him his (inflated) salary. Nobody is doing that.
Very true. At the moment, Billy has a good reputation as a proven Championship scorer, and a very good, hardworking striker. If he doesn't play regularly for a year or two, his reputation as a player, not as a person because I know everyone will still like Billy, will be damaged and he won't reach the heights he wants to. After all, Billy is 27 now, supposedly in his peak.
There's not much point going back and forth, because inherently we disagree, and that's fine. I just don't see the club as being terribly evil here, but I do think Billy is being incredibly short-termist (there's very little you can manage on 1m a year that you can't on £750k a year) in terms of his immediate earnings and future career.
I genuinely felt bad for Billy when he was sent out on loan, liked him and everyone warmed to him. I felt it was another of those harsh decisions that Cortese makes. But they're always the correct ones and now I can see that he just wouldn't fit into our style of play. A year has passed and I'm losing sympathy because there is no reason why he can't find another club and play regularly- except most NPC teams won't pay him the same wage. He's quite at liberty to stick out his contract and we are obliged to pay him. But nobody is owed first team football. How much respect do we have for Forecast for sitting on his contract?
