New Owners - Redwood Watch

[Snowflake Royal]

On the other hand, how much longer would Dai have limped on if we'd been able to make a few more million in player sales.

Break the rules and cheat, and you're going to get punished and face consequences that mke life hard. And the FL have very few levers to pull when all this happens. It's points deductions and spending restrictions... that's it.

[WestYorksRoyal]

The example I remember at the time was not being able to offer a new contract to Richards and losing him for free; that's £5m transfer revenue lost at least.

But it was around the time Dai was blocking sensible sales for Moore, Loader and Swift. Perhaps the result would have just been we'd have been locked into a higher wage contract with him?

[Snowflake Royal]

The example I remember at the time was not being able to offer a new contract to Richards and losing him for free; that's £5m transfer revenue lost at least.

But it was around the time Dai was blocking sensible sales for Moore, Loader and Swift. Perhaps the result would have just been we'd have been locked into a higher wage contract with him?

The issue with Richards wasn't so much that we couldn’t offer him a contract, but that he went from being no better than Blackett or Obita (?) so there was no reason to offer him a multi-year deal, to looking like he could be a PL player within 6 months, by which time he had no reason to sign a contract, because he could just sign a pre-deal with a European side.

[West F]

A player who is entering the last year to eighteen months of his contract is owned by his agent not any club. The agent will start pimping him out to the highest bidder as they make large amounts of money from not only a percentage of their wage, but also in a more lucrative signing on bonus. It often turns out that many of the ‘free transfer’ moves that particularly younger players make, often turn out to be detrimental to their careers in the long term. More and more players will be encouraged to run down their contracts by their agents in the future, simply because it is in the agents interest to move their players around as much as possible unless they have achieved their pay ceiling with one particular club.
Omar Richards is a player who warmed the bench at Bayern, then moved into the Marinakis multiverse and disappeared. Poof!

[Whore Jackie]

Very happy with the academy situation, but noted we lost a lot of players throughout the latter Dai years. Apparently we have the lowest Category One expenditure, but the eighth best productivity (not specified what that meant specifically though).

That is interesting. Would love to know what that lowest expenditure figure actually is. And who has the highest expenditure.

Think this is complete list of Category One Academies:

Arsenal, Aston Villa, Birmingham, Blackburn, Brighton, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Derby, Everton, Fulham, Ipswich, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham Forest, Reading, Southampton, Stoke, Sunderland, Tottenham, West Brom, West Ham, Wolves

So 8/28. Kudos to Gilksey and co.

[Clyde1998]

Very happy with the academy situation, but noted we lost a lot of players throughout the latter Dai years. Apparently we have the lowest Category One expenditure, but the eighth best productivity (not specified what that meant specifically though).

That is interesting. Would love to know what that lowest expenditure figure actually is. And who has the highest expenditure.

Think this is complete list of Category One Academies:

Arsenal, Aston Villa, Birmingham, Blackburn, Brighton, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Derby, Everton, Fulham, Ipswich, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham Forest, Reading, Southampton, Stoke, Sunderland, Tottenham, West Brom, West Ham, Wolves

So 8/28. Kudos to Gilksey and co.

Burnley are also in that list - twenty-nine clubs this season.

I've contacted the club about the calculation about the productivity figures, so hopefully I'll hear something this week. Academy funding is very opaque, but (based on a quick Google search) it seems there's a minimum expenditure of roughly £2.5m per season for Category One.

As a guide based on media reports (year of report noted in brackets), per season, each club seems to spend:
£11m - Liverpool (2025)
£5m - Crystal Palace (2023); Middlesbrough (2024)
£4m - Leeds (2020)
£3m - Blackburn (2025)

Different clubs may include different things as academy costs - such as whether to include player wages within that.