The question is has Chester's agent leaked the story or have the club, as the answer to that could be very revealing. Don't we get this every season at every club that a player wants to get a little bit more than the club want to offer and that the club want to try to offer as little as they think they get away with.
Bruce said we couldn't offer him the same deal we he was on if we stayed in the Championship, but if we were promoted, then continuing to pay him what he was already getting was not a problem. Which was a bizarre thing to come out with, I'm sure he'd have accepted less.
I also don't think SB will decide on actual amounts but he might decide on "pecking order" within the squad. If what you have posted is factual it would seem to indicate that what Chester wants is much in excess of what McShane is on.
Not at all. I brought this McShane thing up as a comparison to try to demonstrate that Chester is not being greedy at all. He's one of our lowest paid players and we should have given him a pay rise a year ago. McShane on the other hand has been on circa £20k for the last four years despite having nowhere near the impact that Chester has. If Chester was to say "I want what Macca's getting." I don't see how we could argue with that. Why should McShane get more just because of the stupid contracts thrown around under the previous regime? There is no reason for anyone to suggest that Chester has made that request. I think it's more likely he's been told he can get more elsewhere and his agent is trying to use that to get more money from us because he wants to stay, but he's not going to sacrifice a large difference in wages to do so.
That answer is simple. They came in to save the club, not to allow it to keep paying out stupid money for longer. There's a contractual obligation to be met, but all new deals have to fall in line with the business model of the club. Unless we know that McShane is definitely being offered equal terms to what he was on there's no good reason to justify what he has been earning being used as a guide for other players' wages. As Chester has been one of the lowest paid players and most were signed under the Allams he definitely deserves a payrise to take him up to the top end, but what if the club have set a maximum wage of £15k for any non-proven PL player and Chester is asking for £20k? (I'd offer him £250k bonus for making personal performance targets to get round the issue myself but an agent might not go for that) I don't think there's a big issue though. Having come through the Man U setup there's bound to be an appreciation for Bruce that goes beyond just what he's done alongside him. You've got Dudgeon, Brady, Evans, and Stewart (maybe not for long) all here that he's grown up with. Then you've got the likes of Danny Simpson and Bardsley being linked who will have been a few years above him at their academy and have been used by the coaches as role models for working hard being able to get you into PL clubs. There's a lot of reason for him to stay and a lot of people to look up to, and being in the PL now it's a new challenge for him so he doesn't need to move on. It's not like Pulis at Stoke where the club has gone as far as it can without a major change so he's moving on to find some new challenge, or for a player like Beckham at Man U where there wasn't a lot left to achieve with them so he went to Real to test himself abroad.
