I might end up smashing my TV before the end of the season if I keep hearing the commentators talking about each individual player and how money their transfers have cost.
As usual these narrow minded morons don’t see the big pictures and together with other journalists and some fickle fans put unnecessary pressure on young players, after all it is not their fault that their former clubs were greedy. The home-grown rules being imposed by the FA and FIFA have created a demand for local talent which in turn has driven the prices up. Mike Ashley who was super greedy during the whole Carroll/Torres transfer saga hasn’t helped things either as everyone now uses the Carroll price-tag as a benchmark.
Speaking of Andy Carroll, there is an example of a kid being put under too much pressure for no reason at all. Yes we paid £35 million to sign him from Newcastle however there were many factors that made us spend that kind of money. As you know Torres decided to leave 48 hours before the transfer window closed and this didn’t give us enough time to find someone to replace him, signing someone from outside the EPL was almost impossible with the limited timeframe. Newcastle’s Chairman Mike Ashley smelled blood, knowing that we would be receiving a huge amount for Torres he got greedy and slapped a price tag of £35 million on the young striker. Of course we sold Torres for £50 million which left us with £15 million plus of course the salary savings.
This brings me to the whole subject of this rant/article “SALARIES“, many times these are not disclosed however I can bet my left testicle that Andy Carroll is making much less than Fernando Torres was. We are probably saving a good £40K a week and when you consider the fact that Carroll has scored 3 goals to Torres’ 1 goal I say we did extremely well. Will Andy Carroll ever score the number of goals that Torres did in his Hey-days? I don’t think so, however remember that Torres was pretty much the only one scoring goals for us then and he was after all getting excellent service by Steven Gerrard who really hasn’t played much with Andy Carroll yet.
I can rant on about Carroll for hours and hours however there are other factors to consider. I am not a football expert and never have I claimed to be, I am however a management professional and I think I know something about budgets, managing labour expenses and man-management. Like in any other business most of the time senior employees tend to make higher salaries than your younger ones. So when you have players like Poulsen, Cole and Jovanovic sitting on the bench it sure doesn’t make things very economical does it?. FSG’s ‘brave new world’ focus to buy young talent serves many purposes however I am sure that salary reduction is one of the main reasons behind it.
On closing I will leave you with a little math. LFC buys player y instead of player x. The club pays £20 million for player y however player x (who some have rated better) costs £15 million. Some would claim this is insanity however when we look at the salaries we find out that player y is making £50K a week (£2.6 million a year) while player x is making £100K (£5.2 million a year). Both of the clubs would allow LFC to pay off the transfer over 3 years, if we do the math this is what we come up with as cost per year.
Player x Player y
Transfer £5 M £6.7 M
Salary £5 M £2.6 M
—————————————-
Per Year £10 M £9.3 M
Now let us say that they both would have signed a 5 year contract, player y would cost a total of £33 million while player x would cost £40 million.
Elementary my dear Watson.
-Antoine