Playing budgets next season?

[Jabba the gut]

No but I have a really good knowledge of players for this level, and Exeter have quite a few that are really good at this level.

Considering the location, without a good budget Exeter wouldn’t be able to compete for these players.

Which players?

 

[Jabba the gut]

Pretty much how it went for us - spent big trying to return to the Championship and never quite made it, so the investment was diverted instead to the academy and we started struggling each year before eventually dropping down.

I'm surprised you did that. I thought I remembered when you had your serious financial troubles reading your chairman at the time saying that reaching the Championship was the worst thing to ever happen to the club in financial terms - presumably due to the money required to stay there. Then again I might be confusing you with Southend!

On the subject of your Championship seasons, it always amuses me that in the season the Greens constantly hark back to as the mythical time they nearly achieved their "true potential" and reached the Premier League, they actually finished behind you in mid-table.

 

[LeonTheGreen]

Plymouth are very far from minted.

Of course we aren’t minted. But in comparison to most in this league we will have a bigger budget.

Then there’s Salford

 

[Son of Cod]

I heard on Talk Sport this week that Grimsby had the second worst budge this season...Is this true?

I'd heard we were 17th in this budget table that has become a thing all of a sudden. While I reckon this might surprise people, I actually think we're probably one of the more sustainable clubs in the division right now. Fenty has hinted there might be a bit more money next season, but I'd be surprised if we have a top half budget looking at who has come up/down into the division.

We've released a decent portion of our wage budget in Collins, Welsh and Woolford. How that gets re-invested is pretty much gonna make or break our season. We can't afford to have such replaceable players/passengers as top earners again.

 

[Moomin]

i don't understand why these players would be so valuable.

Prior to Motherwell Bowman spent almost his entire career at Conference level or below, with brief stints in L2, and his scoring record is mediocre to say the least.

Aaron Martin has played remarkably few games in his career - virtually his only full season was with Coventry a couple of years ago after which he was released. He also suffered a serious injury while at Oxford and was again released.

In his last two seasons at Notts County, Forte made fewer than twenty starts and scored 15 goals (i.e. he was a sub more often than not).

Williams spent the recent past on loan at fellow fan-owned cash-strapped Wycombe, and is a very inexperienced 22 year-old - in fact prior to signing for us the only six league appearances in his entire career were made at Wycombe, so I doubt he attracts a big wage.

Lee Martin obviously had a better career once upon a time, but he spent the last two years at Gillingham, suffered a serious injury and was eventually released. He's also 32. He's originally from Torquay, so he might have been easier to persuade to move to Devon than is usually the case.

Nicky Law has had a lot of accolades in his career, but in the lower divisions mostly a while back. He's 31 now and was released by Bradford. People get excited about his Rangers career but that was the new, refounded Rangers in the bottom Scottish divisions, not the old, liquidated Rangers in the SPL. He's also from Devon (P**m**th) so again, he mght not have required the same financial incentive to move to the back of beyond.

I'm not an expert on these things, but none of these sound like particularly expensive signings that demonstrate a large budget. On the contrary most of them seem pretty identical to the sort of players we've always signed in the fan-owned/Tisdale era. Players who have some talent in there somewhere, but who for whatever reason lost their way - either because of injury, bad luck, circumstance, age or being a bad apple when they were young (Harley) - and who we hope to get back on track or unlock their potential.

Don't forget that even in the season we signed Stockley for a record fee the club exploded the usual myths flying around exeweb by revealing our budget was only 13th. I remember the shocked tweets.

I'd be astonished if our budget was as high as eighth, but I suppose anything's possible.

You may be right, but as Conker says if you look at our squad as a whole, you can pinpoint a number of players who’d be on decent money. Moxey, Boateng, Holmes, Brown, Taylor, Law, both Martins, Forte etc. Okay not mega bucks but a number of these players have played at Championship level in their careers plus asking them to relocate to Devon is a big ask (Moxey aside). I’m not saying we’re paying them mega bucks, we obviously can’t, but I suspect Taylor will be able to target good players this summer. Whether we get them is another matter.

Oh, just to be mildly pedantic, Lee Martin was born in Taunton but you can tell from his accent he grew up around London. Indeed he was in Wimbledon’s academy before Man U picked him up. So I don’t think he has much affinity with the south west...

 

[Conker]

You may be right, but as Conker says if you look at our squad as a whole, you can pinpoint a number of players who’d be on decent money. Moxey, Boateng, Holmes, Brown, Taylor, Law, both Martins, Forte etc. Okay not mega bucks but a number of these players have played at Championship level in their careers plus asking them to relocate to Devon is a big ask (Moxey aside). I’m not saying we’re paying them mega bucks, we obviously can’t, but I suspect Taylor will be able to target good players this summer. Whether we get them is another matter.

Oh, just to be mildly pedantic, Lee Martin was born in Taunton but you can tell from his accent he grew up around London. Indeed he was in Wimbledon’s academy before Man U picked him up. So I don’t think he has much affinity with the south west...

To put in perspective Tomlinson was about to sign for you instead of a L1 team until we came in for him, think it was Tomlinson anyway.

Exeter can clearly pay well for the spine of their team; I imagine despite it being relatively competitive it’s pretty similar to quite a few clubs in the league.

 

[dedwardp]

I'm surprised you did that. I thought I remembered when you had your serious financial troubles reading your chairman at the time saying that reaching the Championship was the worst thing to ever happen to the club in financial terms - presumably due to the money required to stay there. Then again I might be confusing you with Southend!

On the subject of your Championship seasons, it always amuses me that in the season the Greens constantly hark back to as the mythical time they nearly achieved their "true potential" and reached the Premier League, they actually finished behind you in mid-table.

I think that must have been Southend, as we never had any financial problems.

To be fair, at half-time during the penultimate game of the season away at Stoke I think we were 1-0 up and may have actually been in a play-off position. We went on to lose both that game and the final game and dropped down to 10th, but we were far closer to the top six than the final standings show.

Surreal times!

 

[salfordian]

Ours will be big for the league, no use denying it

But we're going to need to step it up as to be honest we still have some players that didn't shine much in the last league so we'll be spending money but not all out mad. We won't be going all out but 3/4 high profile signings and some solid L2 players on what will be slightly inflated wages compared to what the rest of you pay.

Hopefully we'll do it sensible as agents will be looking to exploit us and I don't blame them.

 

[valefan16]

One thing often missed regarding budgets is location. A player on £2000 a week at Vale, Crewe or Bradford for example is better off than a player at Colchester or Orient on £2000 a week.

 

[Laker]

One thing often missed regarding budgets is location. A player on £2000 a week at Vale, Crewe or Bradford for example is better off than a player at Colchester or Orient on £2000 a week.

Well financially better off yes, but their health might take a pasting from the northern smog mightn’t it?

 

[Jabba the gut]

You may be right, but as Conker says if you look at our squad as a whole, you can pinpoint a number of players who’d be on decent money. Moxey, Boateng, Holmes, Brown, Taylor, Law, both Martins, Forte etc. Okay not mega bucks but a number of these players have played at Championship level in their careers plus asking them to relocate to Devon is a big ask (Moxey aside). I’m not saying we’re paying them mega bucks, we obviously can’t, but I suspect Taylor will be able to target good players this summer. Whether we get them is another matter.

Oh, just to be mildly pedantic, Lee Martin was born in Taunton but you can tell from his accent he grew up around London. Indeed he was in Wimbledon’s academy before Man U picked him up. So I don’t think he has much affinity with the south west...

We clearly aren't back to the days when Tisdale was working with peanuts in L2 and tiny peanuts in L1, but I still don't see anything in that list that indicates we have a better budget than most. I doubt there'd be a battle between L2 contenders to sign say, Moxey, Holmes, or either Martins if they suddenly became available, given their ages and/or injury records. Even Brown's value might be undermined by his injury record.

Boateng might fetch decent money now, but the operative word is "now" - the situation was different when we signed him. An inexperienced young player, with a good first loan spell at another club but a poor second one, again marred by injury. Taylor has just explicitly said that one of the reasons Boateng and Pym are leaving is that they felt undervalued for a long time, which doesn't suggest they were particularly handsomely paid.

 

[Jabba the gut]

One thing often missed regarding budgets is location. A player on £2000 a week at Vale, Crewe or Bradford for example is better off than a player at Colchester or Orient on £2000 a week.

That's not the only way in which the value of the football pound varies with location. It also depends on how close or accessible a club is to the centres of the football industry - the NW, Midlands, London/SE, with secondary centres in the NE etc.

Just like in any industry, attracting workers to the main centres of its activity is easier and consequently cheaper - you'd have to pay a feck of a lot more to convince the best supermodels, lawyers or bankers to base themseves in Sunderland rather than central London.

Similarly its easier to attract a footballer to Stevenage - with its easy access to London & the masses of potential alternative future employers in close proximity - than to Devon, as difficult as it might be for some of our fans to accept. In fact part of the Exeter Chiefs stellar rise can be attributed to location - the South-West is a centre of the rugby union industry & so an attractive option for top players in a way say, Yorkshire is not. Once professionalism became a reality it was only a matter of time before Exeter made some sort of impression. That's unlikely to ever be the case with football, sadly.

 

[Luke Imp]

Ours will be big for the league, no use denying it

But we're going to need to step it up as to be honest we still have some players that didn't shine much in the last league so we'll be spending money but not all out mad. We won't be going all out but 3/4 high profile signings and some solid L2 players on what will be slightly inflated wages compared to what the rest of you pay.

Hopefully we'll do it sensible as agents will be looking to exploit us and I don't blame them.

I'm not sure whether it will be. There's a wage cap you've got to get your head around first, which is 55% of turnover. Will be an awful lot of jigging about until you know where you are and what you've got to play with.

 

[dedwardp]

I'm not sure whether it will be. There's a wage cap you've got to get your head around first, which is 55% of turnover. Will be an awful lot of jigging about until you know where you are and what you've got to play with.

Interesting Twitter thread from Andy Holt this morning on this subject:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1127514647840591874

"SCMP is a bigger load of bollocks. It says you can only spend a proportion of your clubs gross profit on your playing budget (55% or 60%) depending on league off memory.

The format of @EFL box ticking is a ball ache and takes our accounts ages to fill in.

At the bottom of the document there’s a tick box that basically says that provided an owner is prepared to cover the excess that can ignore the rule and do what they like.

SCMP is pointless.

It’s a rule I can just ignore."

 

[Indian Dan]

#bollockstothefairytale#

 

[Luke Imp]

Interesting Twitter thread from Andy Holt this morning on this subject:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1127514647840591874

"SCMP is a bigger load of bollocks. It says you can only spend a proportion of your clubs gross profit on your playing budget (55% or 60%) depending on league off memory.

The format of @EFL box ticking is a ball ache and takes our accounts ages to fill in.

At the bottom of the document there’s a tick box that basically says that provided an owner is prepared to cover the excess that can ignore the rule and do what they like.

SCMP is pointless.

It’s a rule I can just ignore."

Yep, as long as it goes in via shareholding rather than loans I think. That was brought in to stop owners saddling clubs with their loans (although they seem to put other debt on them instead!).

Lim and the 6 will need to decide how much to put in, or at least how much they think they'll need.

 

[Jabba the gut]

Interesting Twitter thread from Andy Holt this morning on this subject:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1127514647840591874

"SCMP is a bigger load of bollocks. It says you can only spend a proportion of your clubs gross profit on your playing budget (55% or 60%) depending on league off memory.

The format of @EFL box ticking is a ball ache and takes our accounts ages to fill in.

At the bottom of the document there’s a tick box that basically says that provided an owner is prepared to cover the excess that can ignore the rule and do what they like.

SCMP is pointless.

It’s a rule I can just ignore."

Holt is a Don. I'm a massive advocate of fan ownership but if Holt owned ECFC it would soften the blow.

 

[E10rifle]

Then again I might be confusing you with Southend!

Easy mistake to make. An simple way to tell the difference is that if you have a Southend fan and a Colchester fan, the Shrimper will be the one with syphilis and the U’s supporter will be the one that isn’t there because they don’t travel outside of Essex.

 

[Jabba the gut]

Yep, as long as it goes in via shareholding rather than loans I think. That was brought in to stop owners saddling clubs with their loans (although they seem to put other debt on them instead!).

Lim and the 6 will need to decide how much to put in, or at least how much they think they'll need.

It can be "donations" as well I believe. Basically the whole thing is a farce designed to make It look as though action was being taken after relatively big clubs started suffering insolvency events.

 

[redjed]

We were told last season we had a top 5 budget, but according to Wellens we had a budget between 1.25 to 1.5 million, i can imagine we will have the same this year.
i think attendance wise we were in the top 5 or 6 in the division, but according to power he says he had to lend the club a million or so to keep us ticking over.!
Hopefully, Power allows Wellens to get into the transfer market early, and not wait until the last couple of weeks before the season starts, Power hates paying for players that are on holiday, then its always a mad dash to get hold of any decent players that haven't been picked up and so we end up with young professionals, on loan from championship or the prem clubs.
Wellens has stated that there will be an all out push for promotion, but I will not be holding my breath! Don't get me wrong I think Wellens has the making off being a decent manager, as since hes been here he has made the football much more entertaining, but, lets see how his recruitment goes then we will see.

 

[Jabba the gut]

To put in perspective Tomlinson was about to sign for you instead of a L1 team until we came in for him, think it was Tomlinson anyway.

Exeter can clearly pay well for the spine of their team; I imagine despite it being relatively competitive it’s pretty similar to quite a few clubs in the league.

It was Tomlinson, but that doesn't prove that overall we had a big budget. As I said before, the season we made our record signing in Stockley and paid him a relatively big wage our budget was eventually revealed to be 13th in the list.

 

[Jabba the gut]

Another excellent thread from the Accrington Chairman about the danger to us all. Someone should get this guy to chair a Commission on the future of English football outside the Premier League.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1127805907189080069

 

[Conker]

Gunna be some rate bants on here when Mansfield sign Danny Hylton.

 

[Indian Dan]

Scummer

 

[Son of Cod]

Gunna be some rate bants on here when Mansfield sign Danny Hylton.

Especially when you bring Bogle in on loan in Jan too and go unbeaten all season but draw 29 of them and go out in the playoffs to Stevenage on pens.

 

[Conker]

Especially when you bring Bogle in on loan in Jan too and go unbeaten all season but draw 29 of them and go out in the playoffs to Stevenage on pens.

If that does happen I promise you I’m giving up and buying a Sky Sports package.

 

[Indian Dan]

Rather you had Hylton up front than Walker

 

[Conker]

Rather you had Hylton up front than Walker

To be honest we were limited budget wise due to Steve Evans signings so if we are still *going for it* we will probably sign two.

Hopefully Craig Davies will not be injured, Danny Rose has lost all ability in front of goal and he might be off to be honest.

 

[Luke Imp]

We were told last season we had a top 5 budget, but according to Wellens we had a budget between 1.25 to 1.5 million, i can imagine we will have the same this year.
i think attendance wise we were in the top 5 or 6 in the division, but according to power he says he had to lend the club a million or so to keep us ticking over.!
Hopefully, Power allows Wellens to get into the transfer market early, and not wait until the last couple of weeks before the season starts, Power hates paying for players that are on holiday, then its always a mad dash to get hold of any decent players that haven't been picked up and so we end up with young professionals, on loan from championship or the prem clubs.
Wellens has stated that there will be an all out push for promotion, but I will not be holding my breath! Don't get me wrong I think Wellens has the making off being a decent manager, as since hes been here he has made the football much more entertaining, but, lets see how his recruitment goes then we will see.

How can it be that low? That's not even a mid-table L2 budget.

 

[Indian Dan]

Don’t think it was. Power has said next season’s budget will remain the same - £2-2.5m.