Put it this way Rob which, if any of our starting eleven Saturday would you be prepared to let go for that amount of money ? Not too many I would suggest.
No, but then you're running into the economics of buying a team's first choice player, versus someone cluttering up squad space. An injury could well have led to someone like RyBen starting, for whom £4.5m would look quite good right now, based on recent opportunities.
We also don't have £100m at the end of the season, it's not like that money magically appears in our coffers at the end of the season. The £100m prize that is talked about for winning promotion actually means the TV money for the first season, plus several seasons of parachute payments which total £100m. So whilst we have a guaranteed income of £100m, it'll take 5 years before we see it all. Last season our wages + signings were stretching the limit of what our parachute payments could handle, and we made £15m or so in player sales.
Effectively, that means the parachute payments (a considerable amount of that £100m) are already earmarked for paying our squad should we go down. Everyone will have got a payrise when we achieved promotion, eroding that £100m further, and I imagine the combined wages of Brady, Mulumbu, Wisdom and Kean is pushing £90-100k p/w on top of that.
Destro on a "loan with option to buy" seems like shrewd business. I know very little about him, but at least we won't then have three seasons of contract to pay if he flops and we want rid. Still not convinced it'll come off, mind.