The blame game and the wage bill

I was really surprised by the fact revealed (well, revealed to me anyway; some of you may have known this alredy) in the new accounts that we still have a very, very high wage bill for players. Player wages in 2005-6 "were only marginally lower than during our year in the Premier League" (accounts p4, Doncaster's Report).

What seems to have happened is this, and I think it represents incompetent management by Board and manager.

First, we agree structured wage contracts with our promotion-winning/Premiership squad. In other words, we agree that if we go down, they get less money. This is what the Pink Un reported on 19 May 2005:

"Wages at the club are governed by a divisional pay structure meaning that every single player and member of the senior management and coaching staff will all suffer pay cuts as a result of relegation. It is understood that reductions in salaries will vary from around 20pc to 50pc, reflecting the kind of rises that were paid out upon Norwich's promotion last year. Mr Doncaster said Norwich was the only club playing in the top-flight which had such a policy in place and would not be saddled with the kind of crippling wages that have in the past led to financial problems at other clubs."

So the idea is that we know that high wages are a problem, we don't want to be saddled with high wages, so we've got a structure in place that means that on relegation we won't be stuck with a load of high wages. High wages are a Bad Thing.

Of course, players aren't too happy with the contractual pay cut when they could get more elsewhere. So we pretty quickly lose an awful lot of players, mostly rather good players.

So far, fair enough to be honest. It's sensible not to be stuck with high wage earners; cut your coat according to your cloth etc. If it means that some of them want to leave, fair enough again, and you then have to choose which ones you want to throw some more cash at to keep, and which ones you don't mind seeing leave.

But what I thought this meant was that the club knew that high wages were a Bad Thing. So when we signed a load of new players who were OBVIOUSLY not as good as the ones we were losing (no-names like Hughes, Colin, Ebooboo, Bobinson etc) I assumed that they were NOT on high wages. Why should they be, after all? They weren't particularly good players. They didn't have huge reputations. And we were a club that knew that high wages are a Bad Thing. So although obviously we were going to break the bank for real quality like Deano (the new contract) and Super Robbie Earnshaw, equally obviously (I thought) we would be paying low wages to the journeymen squad players.

But now it turns out that was wrong. We were paying almost as high wages to the new squad of no-names as we had been to the ones who had left; the ones who were too expensive to hang onto.

So what it boils down to is this. We let a load of known, good players go in order to save high wages. Then we get in a load of new players who aren't as good, and pay them almost as much, thus losing the talent and saving almost nothing!

This seems a bit dim to me. Surely the choices are (a) pay the high wages in order to hang onto known talent; or (b) shed the known talent in order to pay low wages. What you DON'T do is (c), which is shed the known talent because it's too expensive, and then spend almost as much on a load of unknowns.

This is both Worthy's fault (his desperately poor talent spotting after we went down) and the Board's (for keeping faith in Worthy too long).

Posted By: Old Git, Dec 11, 11:45:46