SCIAGYorkshireRoyal99Hound
Also tbf Bournemouth, Wolves, Leicester, Villa, Fulham and prob a few others have all managed to get promoted with gross financial mismanagement
We just bought shite players rather than good ones
Ultimately that as well that didn't help us.
What baffles me more is, how we were "gunning" for promotion and only had 1 season where we finished in the top half, the last one before our points deduction. I don't know why someone didn't realise after our back-to-back 20th placed finish, that it wasn't going to materialise. (We may have been too deep in the mire by then to feasibly get out of the mess).
The Dais didn’t throw silly money at us for very long.
When they took over we had just finished third. We then lost the playoff final on penalties. Promotion was a realistic aim. They spent a lot to shore us up. Signed replacements for Al Habsi, Kermorgant, and Williams, an upgrade on Gunter, and for some reason two new wingers.
The next year we only had one major signing, Baldock. McNulty for £1m was hardly breaking the bank.
The year after that we were under our first embargo but still signed Puscas and Joao. And since then the only fee we’ve paid was to make Ejaria’s loan permanent.
In their first year, all that spending “made sense” because we’d just come so close to getting promoted. After that, with hindsight Puscas and Baldock were bad signings, and we should have sold Moore when we had the chance, but we didn’t sign five players every summer for big fees. That first summer was a huge weight around us when nobody seemed to know what they were doing.
Blimey, when you put it like that… in the last five years we have only signed five players for fees. Admittedly for something like £16m…
It's not just the fees we were signing players for though, it was the wages as well. I believe in 2018 around 12 of our players were earning over £1m a year on wages, which is roughly around £20k per week, unsustainable.
We also paid a small fee for Araruna, but peanuts in comparison to the £16m spent on other players in fairness, but it was the massive wage bill that also needs to be taken into account season after season, when that was likely to be around £20m before the Dai's took over to nearly £40m post-takeover, that's another £15-20m a season extra spent on wages as well, which is really what wracked our losses up so much.
On the surface, it looked like promotion could be achievable, but anyone who understood the players we had would have known we were unlikely to replicate that the following season without major investment. You have also missed a lot of other signings, Aluko who was a record fee (before Puscas), Meyler, Edwards, Bodvarsson, Bacuna etc who will have cost us a fair few million and with some/most on some pretty good wages, we have spent a hell of a lot of money that the club didn't have.