Wages

Our wage bill this year was, I believe about ?8m - ?8.5m. This works out, as a very average calculation, of around ?8k per week per player. I know for a fact that one of our strikers (yes, the one who was on loan at Barnsley) is on ?8k a week, so the average kinda ties in.

In todays Mirror, David Sullivan (Brum) states that their wage bill is ?22m and if they did not secure promotion this season they would have to drastically slash their wages, "in a division where ?5k is the average weekly wage".

So, firstly, we are paying quite a bit of the average and simply not getting value for money for what we pay. Need to also remember that Brum will be pushing up that average figure for the league as a whole quite considerably, so there must be some teams in our league who are only paying ?2k or ?3k a week.

My point is really that those teams who have a low wage bill get far more out of their players than what we have done. Our scouting system sucks, but at the same time it is the choice of our managers, both past and present (I include Worthy post May 2004), of the players that we purchase. We simply have not bought good enough players (bar the odd one or two) for anywhere near what we have paid them.

Grant got rid of people like Earnshaw and Etuhu, but we never ever replaced them. Etuhu had his critics I admit, but he's better than what we have now.

Yes, the board have made many mistakes but it is also the managers who have spent money, given out contracts for players who have simply never been up to it. Though yes, I guess its the board who appoints the manager in the first place.

Oh and another thing no one has mentioned, Grant gave Drury a 4 year contract while he was manager. 4 years!!! Yes, I know he has since suffered a terrible injury but even when we gave him his contract he had severely lost his pace and was totally out of form (and never recovered). Lets say Drury is also on the average of ?8k, that works out at ?400k a year. ?1.6m over 4 years!!! And we haven't even mentioned about a signing on fee yet!!! This was a terrible terrible piece of business (should have been 2 years at most). Who the hell authorised this?

NCFC have never (at least hardly) ever signed someone on a 4 YEAR contract. Usually 3 or 3.5 yrs. Yet another example of poor management and complete waste of money.

What we need now is to get a manager who knows the lower leagues and is used to working on a shoestring. Someone of the ilk of Mark Robins, Steve Tilson or Steve Cotterill perhaps.

Sadly its gonna be a long haul.

Posted By: Wayne Biggins, May 3, 18:49:02