'Sheffield United's spending gamble shows why parachute payments must stop'

[Bell4]

I'm not really arsed what he says but it is beyond belief the way the club has been run since we got relegated.

This

The soundbites coming out of BL are embarrassing- I agree with his points - fully

Mismanagement and abdication

We are a fking disgrace at the top

 

[Champagneblade]

The man’s a stain. There’s a particular breed of pompous sports writer that need gone - Henry Winter another example. Haven’t paid for a match day ticket for 20 years, and nothing to contribute but smarmy little op eds which highlight out of touch they are.

Henry Winter has always appeared to be very positive about United. In fact he appeared in court in our favour as part of the Tevez claim.

You're obviously entitled to like/dislike bay journos, just a tad surprised he's your pick given his support of us in the past.

What irks you about him, as a matter of interest?

Incidentally I would back myself in a debate with Rod Liddell on the topic of 'Sheffield United - the spending club'. I have a lifetime worth of evidence to the contrary!

 

[Champagneblade]

This

The soundbites coming out of BL are embarrassing- I agree with his points - fully

Mismanagement and abdication

We are a fking disgrace at the top

Isn't the problem simply a lack of cash?

I can't think of too much waste or ridiculously lavish expenditure since relegation.

Isn't the difference between being "a well run club, operating within their means" and the current brickbats thrown at us, simply this - we couldn't sell Sander Berge when we wanted to and for what we wanted to.

If we'd sold Sander for 25m upon relegation, we would have been probably running a surplus that year. Isn't it a 40m expected loss in year one? So we offed Rammers for 30m of that (eventually, probably). We'd have also saved another say 1.6m on wages?

It's, as Wilder once said, fine margins.

The reality is that we've not been able to offload some of those earners like Berge whilst others like Brewster have never been fit enough to be even saleable.

So it just comes down to whether the Prince has deep enough pockets and you'd conclude that beyond this season he doesn't.

He's still trying to avoid undoing the club's season by not selling off players at knock down fees to the detriment of the team but here is where we find ourselves.

Stoke had similar issues when they came down but they have a large benefactor. Unfortunately, not so us.

 

[HVR]

Think one needs to consider the reasons why the PL clubs voted to pay out parachute payments to relegated clubs.

The answer is to improve the competitiveness in the PL and that’s one of the reasons it’s so successful.
Even the small clubs in the PL are wealthy with some top talent, so every game is a spectacle.
Every promoted club is encouraged to compete due to FFP.
Take FFP away and then we’ll be like other leagues where the bottom 2 or 3 are whipping boys losing 6-0 every week.
Also without FFP you’ll find that every single season the 3 promoted clubs have zero chance and are relegated in their 1st season because they’ll need to implement massive relegation clauses, so they’ll struggle to attract decent talent.

Now…all promoted clubs can afford to gamble and sign players on high salaries because even if that club is relegated they can still afford to pay most of their agreed salary.

There’s little chance of bankruptcy and no relegated club has come close to this.
That’s what FFP or Profit and Sustainability is far….the answer is to make FFP stricter (accounts reviewed every year) with stiffer penalties.

The real issue is those clubs who haven’t been in the PL for a few years being unable to compete financially with the relegated clubs
so it’s these clubs that need protecting like Sheff Wed and Derby who are breaking the rules, gambling risking going bankrupt.

It's this 100% and I can't believe a journalist can't see this either.
Although the 'prize (TV) money' is weighted to the top teams, the PL is unique in world football because it negotiates as a league not individual clubs.
Which as you say, makes every game saleable - and unbelievably - because of the wealth gap to the Championship - even the 'relegation battle'. Dramatic music and excited hosts can genuinely big up Southampton v Bournemouth (can they fight to stay in the PL) like no other league could even get close (Cremonese v Hellas Verona anyone?).
The parachute payments are a vital part of the PL in making it the most watched league anywhere.

 

[jono_t2000]

Think one needs to consider the reasons why the PL clubs voted to pay out parachute payments to relegated clubs.

The answer is to improve the competitiveness in the PL and that’s one of the reasons it’s so successful.
Even the small clubs in the PL are wealthy with some top talent, so every game is a spectacle.
Every promoted club is encouraged to compete due to FFP.
Take FFP away and then we’ll be like other leagues where the bottom 2 or 3 are whipping boys losing 6-0 every week.
Also without FFP you’ll find that every single season the 3 promoted clubs have zero chance and are relegated in their 1st season because they’ll need to implement massive relegation clauses, so they’ll struggle to attract decent talent.

Now…all promoted clubs can afford to gamble and sign players on high salaries because even if that club is relegated they can still afford to pay most of their agreed salary.

There’s little chance of bankruptcy and no relegated club has come close to this.
That’s what FFP or Profit and Sustainability is far….the answer is to make FFP stricter (accounts reviewed every year) with stiffer penalties.

The real issue is those clubs who haven’t been in the PL for a few years being unable to compete financially with the relegated clubs
so it’s these clubs that need protecting like Sheff Wed and Derby who are breaking the rules, gambling risking going bankrupt.

Exactly, i think it was Darren Smith on Twitter who said premier league about to become a closed shop.

Without parachute payment those teams going up are certain to get relegated because they won't want to spend without backstop of receiving parachute payments if relegated.

Probably what premier league wants to be honest... stops team's like Everton risking relegation.

 

[Rodley]

Henry Winter has always appeared to be very positive about United. In fact he appeared in court in our favour as part of the Tevez claim.

You're obviously entitled to like/dislike bay journos, just a tad surprised he's your pick given his support of us in the past.

What irks you about him, as a matter of interest?

Incidentally I would back myself in a debate with Rod Liddell on the topic of 'Sheffield United - the spending club'. I have a lifetime worth of evidence to the contrary!

Agree, Winter loves a trip to BDTBL - always extremely complimentary!!

 

[lazyfecklessblade]

Henry Winter has always appeared to be very positive about United. In fact he appeared in court in our favour as part of the Tevez claim.

You're obviously entitled to like/dislike bay journos, just a tad surprised he's your pick given his support of us in the past.

What irks you about him, as a matter of interest?

Incidentally I would back myself in a debate with Rod Liddell on the topic of 'Sheffield United - the spending club'. I have a lifetime worth of evidence to the contrary!

With Winter it’s more tone. Some of his stuff smacks of a guy who’s not been in the terraces for decades telling us what to think. Maybe I’m just a bit chippy!

 

[PaulHalfway]

"They have enjoyed an average attendance of 28,669 this season and have also coined an extra £2 million from their cup run. Added to that, they received almost £16 million at the start of the season — the third and final leg of their parachute payments which accrued from being relegated in 2020-21."

Don't we receive our final parachute payment next season?

Yes we get it for 3 years, 35 million this season and 15 million roughly next season then it’s all finished assuming we stay in the EFL

 

[Canterbury Blade]

Rod Liddle looks like a bin bag full of rice pudding wearing a floral shirt and bootcut jeans.

Still at least if he’s picking on us he’s giving asylum seekers a break, or indeed his wife who he beat the shit out of while she was pregnant.

Is that why he picked Millwall to support?

 

[PaulHalfway]

I would advocate the opposite view and not just because I am a United fan.

He may have a point in some cases about parachute payments but we are not that example.

1. Got relegated.
2. Sold Ramsdale for up to 30m. Failed to sell anyone else probably because we were so bad. Clearly we were hawking Berge around but failed to get a bidder that didn't want us to give him away. Released higher earners like Jags.
3. Sent around 14 senior players out the door in some way, shape or form and welcomed 9 players, 6 on loan, one free and Davies for a nominal fee plus youth in Starbuck. Big spenders, eh?
4. Following summer, sent 9 players out the door from the senior set up including higher earners like Didzy and Burke, in favour of blooding younger ‘home grown’ players like Ndiaye and Jebbison and brought in just 5, 4 on loan of which one got terminated. The only spending 'blemish' is the slight gamble which has paid off, on Ahmedhodžić for around 4m. Millwall laid out 2m on Flemming. Which is more lavish? 4m by a team getting almost 29k gates or 2m by a team getting less than half that?
5. Not a single player came in during January.
6. In the meantime we’ve used the money to honour the contracts of the players who still remain with the club whilst actively looking to cut the overall playing staff and essentially signing just the one player for a non-nominal fee.

It seems Rod had the article in mind and just decided to pick on us. There are plenty of other clubs no doubt, who came down and hoovered up much talent upon relegation like a Newcastle or West Ham but I’d say United are probably one of the worst examples to support the ‘teams abusing parachute payments’ narrative.

The only reason we haven’t probably cut our cloth more is due to lack of interest. Yes we could have offloaded Berge for 10m perhaps or Ndiaye for 15m but I wouldn’t consider not selling players for half their market value to be somehow lavish. In Ndiaye’s case he’s a player we’ve at least to a degree developed from lower down. Plus of course, Hecky giving more debuts to young players than any prior manager doesn’t exactly fit the narrative of a club who is relying on splashing the cash.

The parachute payments have allowed us to keep up with obligations we had to take on in the Premier League. The big disparity between the top and second tier is the main issue here, not clubs needing support to make the transition from top to second top tier.

What is his actual proposal? You sign a player on a 3 year deal in the PL. You go down as three teams inevitably will. You lose the PL TV money. How does numb nuts aim to pay the remaining 2 years of the player’s contract if you don’t get any takers?

If you don’t invest in the PL, relegation is a given, you then get called the worst team ever to grace the PL and the media absolutely destroy you
it’s definitely a catch 22 getting promotion to the PL and trying to survive against a top 10 who will never be relegated due the the size of club and annual massive investment in their squads

 

[Dkc]

I disagree that the Premier League has been good for English football. It came into existence due to the greed of the clubs that were in England's top division. Before it was founded the revenues were split more evenly across the divisions. Today, only five or six clubs have any chance of being champions of England due to the vast financial gap between them and the rest.

And don't get me started about the obsession with 'Premier League records' which devalues the achievements of all players and clubs who were playing before the PL's formation.

Structurally, there was no change when Division One became the Premiership in 1992 so there is absolutely no reason to ignore all achievements before its formation. You may as well talk about 'Post Taylor-report records' or 'Post Clough-era records'.

People also forget that the Premier League has only existed since 2001. Before that it was called 'The Premiership'. It consisted of 22 clubs until 1995-96 when it was reduced to 20 clubs (not the first time the number of teams in the top flight has changed). So there's no definitive start-date for the 'Premier League and 'records' can be skewed to fit the start of the Premiership, the start of the Premier League or the reduction in teams from 22 to 20, which all took place in different years.

 

[Sheffsteel]

I disagree that the Premier League has been good for English football. It came into existence due to the greed of the clubs that were in England's top division. Before it was founded the revenues were split more evenly across the divisions. Today, only five or six clubs have any chance of being champions of England due to the vast financial gap between them and the rest.

You hear it quite a lot from the old uns,
"the Premier League have ruined the game", "Football was much better in my day"
"Football is no longer a working mans sport", "Players get paid for too much and aren't worth it", "prices are too high".

However the reality suggests the polar opposite.
The PL is by far the richest, most cosmopolitan, most successful league in world football.
Even the poorest/ smallest PL clubs can afford to buy decent talent from around the world.
Every single game in the Premier League is a relative spectacle, full stadium, good atmosphere and talented players from around the world on show.
Agree football to a degree is no longer a working mans sport, that's because it now belongs to everyone, it's become fashionable for the middle classes to support a team. Also agree players are paid too much because that's because the income is so high, so the rewards are also high.

I suppose it depends what you mean by "good for English football".
It's currently never been as popular at home, several PL clubs have long season ticket waiting lists, attendances have never been so high.
It's also never been as popular around the world, it's the number 1 league in so many countries.
Tim Vickery lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is the South American football expert for Talksport.
He was saying the other month, that people in the UK probably don't realise how huge the PL is in Brazil, far more popular than the Brazilian league which he said is slowly dying. He said that you see so many kids wearing Liverpool, Man Utd and Arsenal shirts and very few kids wearing Brazil club football shirts.

Even the Italian and Spanish leagues know they can no longer compete commercially against the English league.
Hence why the likes of Real Barca, Milan and Juventus are desperate to form a break away Euro league to try and raises additional revenue to compete.

If people don't think bringing in extra money is good for the game
You could use the same principle to ask the question "has professionalism been good for English football"

My view is that football didn't change when the Premier League started with it's biased strong promoting and marketing
Football actually changed when it turned professional. At the time Sheffield FC were against the idea of playing for money, they probably thought it would ruin the game.
So they decided to stay amateur, wonder if they ever regret it.

 

[Houston_Blade]

Isn't the problem simply a lack of cash?

I can't think of too much waste or ridiculously lavish expenditure since relegation.

Isn't the difference between being "a well run club, operating within their means" and the current brickbats thrown at us, simply this - we couldn't sell Sander Berge when we wanted to and for what we wanted to.

If we'd sold Sander for 25m upon relegation, we would have been probably running a surplus that year. Isn't it a 40m expected loss in year one? So we offed Rammers for 30m of that (eventually, probably). We'd have also saved another say 1.6m on wages?

It's, as Wilder once said, fine margins.

The reality is that we've not been able to offload some of those earners like Berge whilst others like Brewster have never been fit enough to be even saleable.

So it just comes down to whether the Prince has deep enough pockets and you'd conclude that beyond this season he doesn't.

He's still trying to avoid undoing the club's season by not selling off players at knock down fees to the detriment of the team but here is where we find ourselves.

Stoke had similar issues when they came down but they have a large benefactor. Unfortunately, not so us.

Agreed, it was always going to bite this season if we didn't offload players. You can get away with one season of not having a fire sale, after that the big earners and those who can attract decent fees need to go.

That's just how it works. PL give you money to spend on the way up, then gradually take it away on the way back down. If you screw up the first year back in the Championship then the 2nd season is the time to cut your cloth. If you still haven't cut your cloth at the start of the 3rd season then financial meltdown is a certainty without wealthy backers.

It still amazes me how surprised people get at this, this is how the whole parachute payment model is supposed to work.

 

[Sheffsteel]

It still amazes me how surprised people get at this, this is how the whole parachute payment model is supposed to work.

very much agree.

If we fail to gain promotion this season then next year, the financial reality must result in us
losing many of our best players and replacing them with cheaper lower quality players (that's why promotion this season is so massively important).

I'll make a prediction.
If and when this happens, many of our fans will be complaining how we lack ambition and are a poorly run club.
They'll probably argue we should be trying to keep N'Diaye and Berge, "pay them whatever they want", without realising that without the Sky millions we can't even try to compete. Some will even say that due to our lack of ambition, no longer buying top rated players handing out big contracts, then they'll stop going.

It would be quite funny, if in a few years, ours fans become like the fans of Sheff Wed and Derby
where we complain about the relegated PL clubs with parachute payments and some of our fans ask for parachute payments to end.
The fans of those 2 club have used the warped logic, "as parachute payments mean we can't financially compete then we may as well, effectively cheat to reach the PL"

 

[fifty shades of blade]

Rod Liddle...the thinking man's Himmler

 

[ChipButtyBlade]

Rod Lidl

 

[ISZA ⚔️]

Creates article on financial troubles of professional sport. Uses wrong club entirely as example.

 

[Balham Blade]

What Rod Liddle is missing is that almost every Championship club loses an obscene amount of money. We're slightly different in that we can cover the majority of our cost base with the parachute payments, just as well because our owner has stopped funding the other losses.

Borrowing this from the exceptional Swiss Ramble (soon to be, sadly, paywalled):

Stoke's figures are skewed by the waiving of a £120m loan from their owners. Take that out and they're at -£18.2m, slotting nicely in between Reading and Middlesbrough. I also note that Millwall lost an unsustainable £12.6m last season. Norwich and Bournemouth's profits came through player sales (both c£60m in the reported season); Derby's was through the inflated sale of the stadium - note that their figures are from 2018!

All those losses have to be funded somehow, either by borrowing or by injections of share capital. Both of those generally come from the owners as commercial financing options generally aren't available (there are insufficient assets to secure against).

 

[Westran]

The whole article seems to be hinged on this question:

"How will they pay their creditors or players then, when a new season beckons with no subsidy coming from the top tier?".

It's an easy question to answer though, sell our assets. I'd expect more of a newspaper of the Times' calibre, but he obviously has an axe to grind.

 

[HVR]

You hear it quite a lot from the old uns,
"the Premier League have ruined the game", "Football was much better in my day"
"Football is no longer a working mans sport", "Players get paid for too much and aren't worth it", "prices are too high".

However the reality suggests the polar opposite.
The PL is by far the richest, most cosmopolitan, most successful league in world football.
Even the poorest/ smallest PL clubs can afford to buy decent talent from around the world.
Every single game in the Premier League is a relative spectacle, full stadium, good atmosphere and talented players from around the world on show.
Agree football to a degree is no longer a working mans sport, that's because it now belongs to everyone, it's become fashionable for the middle classes to support a team. Also agree players are paid too much because that's because the income is so high, so the rewards are also high.

I suppose it depends what you mean by "good for English football".
It's currently never been as popular at home, several PL clubs have long season ticket waiting lists, attendances have never been so high.
It's also never been as popular around the world, it's the number 1 league in so many countries.
Tim Vickery lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is the South American football expert for Talksport.
He was saying the other month, that people in the UK probably don't realise how huge the PL is in Brazil, far more popular than the Brazilian league which he said is slowly dying. He said that you see so many kids wearing Liverpool, Man Utd and Arsenal shirts and very few kids wearing Brazil club football shirts.

Even the Italian and Spanish leagues know they can no longer compete commercially against the English league.
Hence why the likes of Real Barca, Milan and Juventus are desperate to form a break away Euro league to try and raises additional revenue to compete.

If people don't think bringing in extra money is good for the game
You could use the same principle to ask the question "has professionalism been good for English football"

My view is that football didn't change when the Premier League started with it's biased strong promoting and marketing
Football actually changed when it turned professional. At the time Sheffield FC were against the idea of playing for money, they probably thought it would ruin the game.
So they decided to stay amateur, wonder if they ever regret it.

Absolutely. The PL is in a way a 'closed shop' - there's only going to be 5 teams in the whole of England likely to be Champions. However, due to Champions League and Europa spots, you have the excitement and tension for the top 10 clubs - who can get a European spot? But then, also, you have the pressure and tension for the bottom 9 clubs - who will get relegated and miss out on the riches? Every game is watchable.
And that also seeps into the Championship. The top 10 teams are covered almost like a Cup tournament - the Battle for promotion to the PL. Can anyone really say that a 2nd Division is more closely monitored / televised / talked about anywhere in the world?
Even, to stretch a point, the English 3rd Division (League One), with the Owls, Ipswich, Derby, Barnsley etc. all trying to get back in the Championship and then pushing for the PL probably has more TV Global coverage than the lower teams in say, the Dutch 1st Division League.
People want to bring it all down for parity but let's not forget the Golden Goose story, if you pick away to make things more equal, you are in danger of unraveling the entire beauty of English dominance in world club football.
If there's no wealth between the PL and the Championship, no parachute payments why would anybody be interested in promotion / relegation ( from a TV hype point of view). It would just be, who is the English Champions.

 

[ormester]

Have we really spent though seriously

 

[John Street West Terrace]

You get slated by Simon Jordan for having no ambition if you are like Norwich and don't spend

And get slated for 'gambling' if you do.

Can't win.

 

[robbiez666]

I disagree that the Premier League has been good for English football. It came into existence due to the greed of the clubs that were in England's top division. Before it was founded the revenues were split more evenly across the divisions. Today, only five or six clubs have any chance of being champions of England due to the vast financial gap between them and the rest.

I think football as a whole is worse off now than it was before the Premiership/PL. Sure, we've become the biggest league in the world and the Championship has moved higher than most first divisions, but it feels less and less like a fun sport every year. It's great to get the best players in the world playing here, but it's lost something with the huge fees, wages, TV deals, sponsorships etc.

It's the same game as before but it just doesn't seem like the same atmosphere at games. People being priced out of going. Lots of tourists and a whole generation basically barred from going to support their local club if that club is one of the top 5 or 6.

It's lost a great deal of excitement along with it. The Leicester success is a huge anomaly. There's so much money at the top now that clubs basically stick up there and are only joined if teams have billionaire chequebooks.

The talent on show is much better, as is the management, but it's lost its sparkle for me.

 

[Stu_Blade]

If you don’t invest in the PL, relegation is a given, you then get called the worst team ever to grace the PL and the media absolutely destroy you
it’s definitely a catch 22 getting promotion to the PL and trying to survive against a top 10 who will never be relegated due the the size of club and annual massive investment in their squads

This season in particular is a particularly random one. You have 12th to the relegation zone seperated by 3 points and 12th-20th by 4 points! With a gap of 11 points to 11th place. Alot can change in most sports but this year 3 from 8 are in the mix of going down and when you have Brighton with a game in hand and level on points with Liverpool it definitely mixes stuff up.

 

[GymClassHero]

What an absolute clown.

Not sure why he's decided to take his mrs not giving him any action out on us