swipe right wrote: Share some numbers please. Don’t see how we could have been in the top four salary wise during the 2006-16 time-frame.
You should know the history, how can you keep debating when you don't know the facts? We have only been out of the top four wage payers four times in the last fifteen years ... we slightly
'under-perform' on position in table versus wages, we are not alone in that all the old top four Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea are slightly under, that's entirely due to Spurs being well over, and that one-off Leicester season ....
Here's our comparative wages spend, the first position, and our comparative net transfer spend the second position ...
2002/3 - 2nd - 8th
2003/4 - 3rd - 14th
2004/5 - 3rd - 2nd
2005/6 - 3rd - 14th
2006/7 - 3rd - 9th
2007/8 - 3rd - 20th
2008/9 - 4th - 8th
2009/10 - 4th - 16th
2010/11 - 5th - 18th
2011/12 - 5th - 10th
2012/13 - 4th - 17th
2013/14 - 4th - 3rd2014/15 - 4th - 2nd
2015/16 - 5th - 5th
2016/17 - 4th - 3rd
2017/18 - 5th - 18th
2018/19 - 5th - 5th (summer only)
As you can see we were massively under-spending on transfers right up until 2013/14 when desperation cash was thrown around to stop the rot ... to little to late as it turned out. What these numbers show is that while the squad was regressing over a decade, when every year at least 10 clubs were spending more money on better players than us, we still somehow managed to pay our lesser players even more money in salaries ...
If you look at 2007-2014 we spent almost nothing on net transfers for six years, yet somehow our wages bill increased by a greater amount than 17 of our rivals, how did that even happen? the money certainly didn't go on new players so just where did it go? ..... stupidly expensive long term socialism based contracts on a whole bunch of injured, lazy, just plain average players that's where .... a problem that we are still dealing with today.