As far as I can work out from purchases and sales of players, and allowing for best guess for " fee undisclosed ", we probably spent about £4.5M in the summer. Not exactly the road to ruin. What we don't know however is the salary expenditure for this season.
I think your estimate of £4.5m is low, we also spent money in Jan and on top of that we incurred the cost of removing one Management team and bringing in another. You have, however, hit the nail on the head regarding the wage bill. Excluding youngsters, who nowadays earn a fair whack, we have 25 players on lower Premiership/top Championship money and you can make your own calculation on that. I don't work in the Accounts Dept at Carrow Road so can't tell you what this years loss will be but common sense tells us that it will be substantial and unsustainable next year if we don't go up or don't want to end up in a financial hole when the parachute payments stop. In my opinion, if we don't go up, the emphasis next year will be trimming the squad and bringing through the youngsters we already have rather than buying further players.
Okay, neither of us has the full figures re sales/purchases, but say we are on the negative side by 50% of our parachute payments, we still have a very large sum to cover our salary expenditure. I believe that DM is far too astute to allow any financial danger to be allowed to darken our horizon.
I can't work out how to find it on here, but we had some pretty convincing estimates back in the summer about the likely impact. Overall, it was pretty clear that we were breaking even but the only way we could buy players was we had to sell, but that any player we replaced was going to be on lower wages than the one sold. To give you a rough idea from memory, IIRC our revenue of £95m last year is going to plummet to around £55m. We were making profits (excluding player purchases) of around £25m, which would absorb a lot of the losses. Relegation clauses and savings on bonuses made up the other c.£15m. That estimate has borne out in that we've spent roughly £18m (according to transfermarkt) on players this season following summer sales of roughly £17m. Cost of getting hold of Alex Neil, in the grand scheme of changing managers, was pretty small - supposedly part of the reason we paid over the odds for Andreu. Incidentally of the £18m we spent this season, just £4.9m was spent on players who are regularly starting. That is going to come back to bite us if we don't get promoted I feel - our transfer policy needs to improve substantially. Vadis might rescue a portion of that if he comes good, likewise Louis Thompson and Conor McGrandles, but it still does not look healthy.
