How easy is it to spend £35 million?

The first thing to say is obviously I’m not talking about blowing the aforementioned sum on yachts in Monaco, call-girls nor blowing it Mike Ashley-esque at a casino.

Given the nature of this blog I’m clearly referring to the ludicrous sum that Liverpool paid to Newcastle for massively over-hyped English football battering ram Andrew Carroll.

The question should really be: “How easy is it to spend £35 million employing expensive and often surly football players, without getting the sack when they fail to produce?”

Newcastle have clearly got previous when it comes to effectively flushing money down the toilet – see Albert Luque, and Jean-Alain Boumsong for reference. But where do you start with a treasure trove of cash if you are a football manager of a club with a massive and fervent fanbase with a penchant for attacking football? Say also that you cannot offer European football despite the draw of playing in the third biggest stadium in England, and that your owner, despite being a billionaire is unwilling to subsidise you any further following an acrimonious separation from a local hero who was the last person to achieve really get close to fulfilling the ambitions of said fanbase. Where do you start?

Well lets look at the numbers first off. Playing football in the Premier League pays well. Really well. Newcastle’s income is made up of:

TV money – makes up the biggest chunk of money. You get around £18 million from the domestic audience and £13 million from the overseas rights. You also get money from the Sky lot when they feature you on Super Sunday or whatever, with at least £6 million guaranteed even if you aren’t shown on TV 10 times a season. So all in that’s about £37 million from the last year in the Premier League

Match day revenue – Newcastle have the third biggest (and best) stadium in the country. This makes the club £21million in a year. This sounds like loads, but then Manchester United made £100 million from the same thing last year, which is mind blowing!!

Commercial – When you spend your hard earned green (even though only £5 notes are green here!) in the club shop you contribute to players wages. All those pencil cases for your kids and shirts with names on the back for 5-a-side go together to raise a further £15 million for the club. That is £66 million less than Man Yoo make and one of the reasons why Liverpool were such an attractive option for Fenway Sports to buy was because their commercial income dwarfs our own.

The figures above paint a pretty rosey picture. I reckon that to be around £73 million pounds in the coffers from last year. However now comes the bad news. Player’s wages were around £73 million at the time of relegation.

The bill was shorn to £47 million whilst in the Championship and has subsequently gone back up following promotion, for example with better contracts for Andy Carroll, paying £3.5 million for Tiote, half a million on his wages until January and £1 million since he signed on for 6 years in January. Add in paying out £6 million on Ben Arfa plus around another £3 million in wages, and £1.5 million on Dan Gosling and suddenly the money seems to be slipping through your fingers like a colander. Andy Carroll was also on about £2 million a year when he left for the bin-dippers.

Let’s add in the new boys. Yohan Cabaye is apparently on £40k/wk which is about £2 million a year. Ba is on about £50k/wk, as is Marveaux. So all in that’s around £7 million in wages in a year, plus the £4 million for Yohan’s former employers Lille.

In total then I don’t have a clue what the outgoings are, anymore than you lot do. I certainly have no idea what it costs to run a stadium, upgrade a training ground or pay all the other members of staff at SJP and Benton. I don’t know what Chris Hughton was paid when he left, or what Alan Pardew gets in his weekly payslip. Everything in this article is based on speculative conjecture from papers and 'blogs, so it might all be very wrong.

As a guess I’d say that we probably just broke even last year or squared away a little of the massive loan to Mike Ashley, plus we got the Andy Carroll money. Spending £35 million on player fees would result in a massive loss as the wages aren’t going to pay themselves so I reckon we’ll not see more than about £15-20 million spent on player fees and and the rest will be swallowed up by wages of the squad as it is now, with better contracts being dished out, and those coming in.

For what it’s worth I reckon after a lot of low balling we’ll probably see Erdnig, N’Zogbia and Neil Taylor as the last of the signings over the last two months of the transfer window. One thing is for sure – “Sign Sturridge for £12million, simple LOL” is anything but.

Is anyone able to make a better stab of interpreting the figures than me? Do you feel like I’m underselling the clubs finances, and should we be speculating to accumulate?

Thanks to Michael82 for submitting this article. In the light of Pardew revealing yesterday that all of the money will stay within the club I though that perhaps now was the time to discuss it.