swipe right wrote: Thanks for the detailed response. Appreciated. I am surprised to see these numbers particularly between the time Henry left and Ozil arrived. Who were the top earners? Fabregas at 135k. Nasri was only on 90k when City poached him and I think Ades new deal was only 100k. RVP was not earning much all the way till the end. So where were the salaries going? I assume it was giving a whole heap of u23s pro deals. Any thoughts there?
It's all very odd, unlike a lot of clubs we've always included our management and support staff costs in player salaries, whilst all clubs do that now they didn't ten years ago, We know Wonger was on a huge wage, maybe that applied to all the support team as well. Because accounts don't include salary breakdowns that's all a bit of a guess. You could be right that we gave large contracts to the youngsters, certainly a lot of them hung around for many years getting almost no first team playing time, that would indicate they were being well payed.
Truth is we'll probably never know. My opinion for what it's worth is that Wonger believed what he said about player contracts losing significance and thus salaries not transfer costs would become all important. Whilst he had a point on salaries going up he was disastrously wrong on transfer fees. His mindset was reflected in us focusing all our efforts on paying large salaries whilst not spending heavily in a transfer market that Wonger wrongly believed would collapse. When the opposite happened the TV deal kicked in and and the transfer market went crazy we were left behind. Unlike many of our rivals, who had packed their squads with high value players on reasonable contracts, we ended up with low value players on huge contracts ... it wasn't until 2013/14 when the Board took over transfers that Wengernomics started it's slow death.