As with all graphs about our club of late, it's misleading due to thinking that context is what Al Capone called his diaries At least half of the quoted figure comes from the bonus Levy got on completion of the stadium, so in reality his wage is somewhere in the Arsenal/Liverpool/Chelsea cluster
He was awarded (awarded himself) a bonus of £3m, which puts him on £45m and therefore still top of the graph.
So you remove the bonus he gave himself last year, the bonus for the completion of the stadium...and at which point do the figures look so distorted you'd think somebody had made a sequel to The Thing?
Remove whatever bonuses you want, only one of them was deserved (completion of the stadium), and removing it does nothing to the graph other than bring him slightly closer to United. Directors of other clubs also receive bonuses, although theirs tend to be for things like winning the league or CL. All I said is that Levy has done very, very well out of Spurs. Are you disputing that? Should he feel hard done by?
I don’t think this is the kind of graph that really relates to the football side of things though so not really a stick to beat him with. I can’t imagine any directors get bonuses for winning trophies, those bonuses are for players, managers and coaching staff. ENIC paid £22 mill at the outset and in 24 years, levy has turned it into a business worth billions of pounds. From a business point of view surely that’s quite remarkable considering we’ve had no financial doping from oligarch’s or Arab states and this what a directors bonus would be based on.
It is astonishingly remarkable. But it also cuts to the very core of the matter. What is Levy paid so handsomely to deliver? A successful business, or a successful football team? He most definitely hasn't delivered the latter, so based on the fact that his wage rises pretty much year on year, I have to assume it's the former. And is that so much better than an oligarch or oil money? Is it? Really? He is rewarded for using the football brand to grow a commercial/entertainment business?
There's also the minor detail the graph is patently false Based on Kieran Maguire's figures on director's salaries for the last season, which has been doing the rounds with as much context as a Quentin Tarantino script, the respective bars on the chart would read like this Man Utd £1.9m Arsenal £1.3m Liverpool £2.25m Chelsea £286k That doesn't match up to that graph at all Now I don't have the figures to hand about what Uncle Roman was paying to himself for most of that timeframe (when not having his yachts sail in circles as a tax-dodging scheme) but if Todd Bollo is paying himself less than what a few of Chelsea's players take home a week that is going to skew the figures downwards pretty quickly - and also be a good reason for HMRC to look a little closer, considering how dodgy the finances of his takeover looked as per Private Eye when he took over the club in the summer of 2022 That alone shows how things can get rapidly skewed, especially when you factor in some of the other salaries Maguire mentions Everton £3.25m Brighton £2.36m Palace £2.15m Bournemouth £2m Saudi Arabia £7k The Sheikh Mansour Team £0.00 So when do Everton, Brighton, Palace or Bournemouth feature on that graph? They don't, yet their directors are getting paid handsomely, and I legit have no idea how Palace's owners can shrug off what they're paying themselves - and that's before discussing quite how conspicuous the lowest-paid directors are, which means the HMRC are going to be pretty busy because if anyone believes the Saudis are paying their directors £7k a year they're delusional But back to Levy, there's something else the graphs don't mention in spite them being common knowledge: Levy owns 30% of the club's stock, yet has never cashed in a dividend. So how many other people on that list have a 30% stake in their clubs and, if they do, are they refusing dividends - which the Glazers certainly didn't, as I believe they were taking them every year until 2022? Or to put it another way, in taking a salary and bonuses, Levy is actually taking less money home than if he ever cashed a dividend, which takes that Narrative out back ands tells it that it won't be using lube
No one buys a football club solely to make them a successful football club anymore. They need to make a lot of money as well but I refuse to believe that Levy doesn’t want to do both. After all a successful football club makes the business even better. I would have had no issue if we’d been taken over by an oligarch like Chelsea or a state like city. He’s grown a commercial/entertainment brand to ensure the football club stays as healthy as possible. It’s all one together, we make more money from the commercial side which means we can spend more on the football side.
Accounting seems like a foreign language to most people at most times, so it's easy to take data and make it mean something that it doesn't if people want to believe it
No we don't because of the loan covenants. All we have is the ability to sleep soundly at night, safe in the knowledge that PSR can't (currently) touch us and probably never will under Levy.
What worries me more is that HBIC's numbers draw a comparison between 2022 and 2023. Draw the same comparison a year on and the numbers aren't quite as healthy, due to no CL funds (no Euro funds at all in fact). This is why we've dropped a place in the Deloitte list this year, with Arsenal leapfrogging us. Profits from selling Kane will cushion the blow (Deloitte doesn't take this into account, PSR does) but if we estimate money from the CL at around £50m, another few years without it and the Kane money will dry up. Imo this is why we are currently being very cautious with spending in this window, and is also why I've predicted that we won't see the wage ceiling rise again for a while, now that we've shaved a chunk off the top. Levy is doing what he does best - battening down the hatches in case a storm hits, not realising that by battening down too tightly, we make the storm likelier to hit, and harder than it needs to.
Agreed but the correlation between wealth and league position is absurdly high. Everyone keeps looking for reasons why we have not won trophies but it's entirely obvious that it's because we are not rich enough. Look at the sixth richest club in any league and they rarely win anything.
