Quote:
Originally Posted by Christian Benteke
I see what you're saying, fair enough they've spent 27.5m, but they've also had a turnover of over 300m and it's gone straight into the owners' pocket and paid off some interest on the debt. They've been announcing deals galore all summer with tomato juice, tyre and other pointless companies, sold the naming rights to Carrington for 150m, they're constantly told the money is there, unlimited budget and yet it's never spent. They could spend 150m net every year and still fall in line with FFP and they're resorting to the nonsense you saw last night  . |
They do make a tonne of money, but don't forget their wages to turnover is still something like 50%. They still have 350mil+ debt and a year or two ago spent 50 mil just on net interest on those debts. They get what they want most windows and just seem to throw their toys out of the pram when they don't get it. I reckon the money was there but Moyes is just confused on what to do with it. There were some pundits saying they should have announced a marquee signing on the day Moyes was announced, but he would have still needed weeks at least, even with SAF's help, to know what he was working with to begin with. After that though it was a bit of a shambles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Christian Benteke
What is the financial situation like at Newcastle? I swear he has actually spent money in the past? Why tighten the purse strings now? The best thing to do would be to spend to keep them in the PL for the next few seasons because of the TV money surely?
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The financial situation is great from a business perspective, I think we've actually made an operating profit in the last two years. But Ashley has never really invested, other than interest fee loans to pay off our debt which went up to about 150m but is steadily going down. He came in and spent a bit of money initially but in the last 3-4 seasons I think we're one of three clubs to make a profit on transfers, selling our top performers, Milner, Given, Nzog, Bassong, Oba, Carroll and made about 80 mil on transfers. The Carroll sale made us break even by 1/2 mil with his transfer, but now we make a profit even without player sales.
We only needed a bit of quality investment last summer and we would have been right up there behind Everton and ready to take them on during a period of change (now for instance) Ashley skimped out though, sold our reliable squad players and trusted youngsters with no experience because we don't loan them and develop them properly, so we got buggered, lost Ba and had to make up for the lack of summer signings in Jan. Now we're being told this summer's work was done in Jan, it's a ****ing joke honestly. We're told its for FFP but there are so many ways around it and every club is doing it that we seem to be the only club focusing on stability, when we still need improvement on the pitch. That's why it's crazy you have Cardiff and Southampton spending 30 odd mil and we're sitting there with no outlay at all when 10 mil would probably have shored us up.
In reality we shouldn't need investment to stay up-the squad was small and then decimated by injuries (as usual) and we could barely field a competitive side. We're angry because we needed possibly one or two signings to get back to "best of the rest" really, but now we can't be sure. Pardew is already under massive pressure and the only replacement would be Poyet or Kinnear, Poyet is alright but Kinnear is insane and no matter how good our players if the manager loses them/happens to be kinnear then we'll implode again.