1) I don't think we can afford to spend 30mill a season (net) on transfers, the last club to do that year in and year out in the EPL, who weren't mega rich was Liverpool - they would have had to go into administration if they weren't bailed out.
2) If we could, we certainly wouldn't have needed to raise ticket prices - for an under performing club who are already the most expensive sport venue in the world to raise ticket prices to do so whilst not financially needed to and having a surplus of +Xmill pounds a season would be nuts. As proven by fans and media reaction this summer.
3) We can probably dip into a one off fund, as explained by swiss ramble (http://swissramble.blogspot.com/2011...er-budget.html), but that fund would include first years worth of wages, fees, legal etc, so we can either add several 0-10mill squad like players, or one or two 30mill *stars* depending on how many we sell.
4) Which means because we've been living within our means, we've been extremely restricted in what we could do in any transfer market and I doubt any manager would have had the latitude to do spend a whole lot more than we had, regardless of whether he valued certain signings more than AW did.Furthermore, if you look under the bonnet, there are some underlying issues that suggest that the financial picture is not quite so wonderful as it has been painted. In fact, if you exclude the £11 million property profit and the £38 million made from player sales, then the remaining football profit in 2009/10 would only be £7 million. That’s still very respectable, especially as it is net of £14 million interest payments, but the interims really bring the ongoing challenges to the fore.
For the first six months of 2010/11, the club actually made a loss of £6 million, largely because property profits fell to £3 million, while the profit on player sales sharply declined to £4 million, mainly from the sale of Eduardo to Shakhtar Donetsk. In fact, the pure football business produced a loss of £13 million.
To be fair, part of that is due to timing differences with two less home games than the previous season and TV merit payments, but it does suggest that the business model is not quite as robust as previously thought. There has been an undue reliance on player sales with an average £25 million a year being generated from this activity since 2006. Good business, but it makes it hard to build a winning team.
There's this repetitive fallibly going around, probably born out the believe that we're a "big club" and made year over year profits (actually, most of it was from one time development sales) - that we can spend money, maybe not Chelsea or United money, but liverpool or Tottenham money on new signings every year and be ok... I honestly don't think we can, and when average managers can become world beaters by cherry picking stars, when statistically, we've had a smaller (playing) squad than our rivals, when we've the average cost to quality ratio has risen whilst our spending power has stayed the same, I believe this to be our biggest disadvantage over the last few years. The ONLY things we can hope for is for the FFP to be successful and other clubs to be forced to cut spending, or failing that, a sugar daddy to step up to enable our club to continuously operate at a loss.
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