Salaries

[baggieal]

Let?s be fair if you were Oxford or Portsmouth you would be fuming that Leicester and West Brom have broken the rules. Their player salaries are modest and 15K is considered a top salary. Swift at Portsmouth is the exception on 20K and for sure they will ditch him as he?s garbage as he was before he left us!

Our salaries are totally out of control and reported:

Phillips 40K
Mepham 35K
Taylor 30K
Bielik 25K
Dike 25K
Wallace 25K
Mowatt 22.5K
Gilchrist 20K
Grant 20K
Molumby 20K
Maja 17K

To be honest I would shed no tears if the lot of these get kicked out of the door. I like Phillips but 40K FFS! How much are Millwall paying our Caleb? So do we honestly think all these high earners mostly who are garbage or injury prone crocs are any better than what?s at Oxford or Portsmouth? Even Molumby who is bog standard average in my eyes is on 20K a week FFS! A huge wage for what he does!

How many of these injury prone crocs actually play and represent value for money?

I honestly feel the financial problems are of our making when you see these salaries versus contribution and yes Oxford and Portsmouth have every right to be angry.

Surely next season all these players need to be kicked out and like Portsmouth or Oxford - 20K should be about the ceiling of what we should be paying for a quality player. We need to sensibly rebuild!

Clearly it?s not just salaries but with any business salaries are the largest bottom line cost. Then you look at shockingly low prices for the likes of Fellows and Palmer and oh my God - we paid almost 5 million for Heggebo who has two left feet!

Our mess is our own making. The most important job for me at any club is Director of Player Recruitment which should include retention and salaries.

[baggiematt]

I would bet my mortgage and throw in my wife that those salaries from a google search arent accurate.

[baggieal]

I would bet my mortgage and throw in my wife that those salaries from a google search arent accurate.

Nothing is ever accurate but I would throw in my wife too that they are very close. The point in question is a club like West Brom should only be offering 20/25K a week absolute tops to quality players. Yes there was no transfer fee for the likes of Wallace and Swift but apart from West Brom no other club were willing to pay huge salaries on lengthy contracts. Dike and Grant cost us around 25 million then had high salaries on very long contracts. Why?

Got to stop! All these players need to be gone and a sensible salary structure needs to be in place to reflect we are a mid championship club at best. Our troubles are our own making!

Salaries are one of the largest bottom line costs of any business. If anyway thinks injury prone players like Dike and Wallace who have no pace should be kept on are deluded. I would not keep them on even with a 50% deduction in their salaries!

We can?t afford free loaders anymore!

[baggiematt]

I do agree with you though, a salary cap is key for our future and only to be broken by exceptional talent players already in the club and with high value.

[Omegstrat6]

My understanding is that the vast majority of both Premier League and Championship clubs will have posted losses for 2024/25 with those of the Greed League being substantially higher than those in the Championship.

Moreover, wage costs in the Premier League take up an average of around 75% of any income. In 2022/2023 (a season that saw total Premiership club losses of over ?1billion) Leicester's wage bill even exceeded their total income.

As for the wage costs themselves, for the 2022/23 season, according to a BBC report, the average weekly wage cost for the playing squad for most Premier League clubs was around ?70k, with Arsenal being ?109k, Spurs ?116k, Manure ?154k, Liverpool ?173k, Chelsea ?187k and Man City ?196k. These are weekly wage figures for the first team squad and whilst they are for 3 years ago, the figures do seem much smaller than expected. Even so, I doubt that any of our own individual players are therefore on ?25k a week let alone ?40k.

It's very difficult to find an accurate report of our player's salaries. The FanCast website, for example, had Albion down as the Championship club with the fifth highest wage bill for 2023/24 at an average weekly wage of ?16,866 for first team players. The Salary Sport website For 2025, on the other hand, has the (thankfully!) departed Illing Junior on a whopping ?53k a week, Mepham on ?37k, Phillips on ?24k, Taylor, Gilchrist and Wallace on ?23k, Dike and Grant on ?22k, Mowatt and Heggebo on ?18k, Maja on ?17k, Bielik on ?15k, Price on ?13k, Molumby, Campbell and Mikey on ?11k, Styles on ?7.4k, Diakite on ?6.8k and Griffiths on ?4.1k. Even if the figures are not accurate, it seems pretty obvious that the likes of Campbell, Mikey, Molumby, Styles and Diakite should be earning more and the likes of Wallace, Dike, Mepham, Taylor, Gilchrist, Grant and Heggabo less.



For 2022/2023 in the Premiership, only Fulham and Man City avoided having a net debt and whilst the former probably managed their finances well, the latter only just scraped into net profit due to their far greater income from broadcasting and commercial revenue. In that year Spurs recorded a net debt of ?670 million, Manure ?663 million and Everton ?331 million. Chelsea's ?109 million net debt was only prevented from being far more by Abramovich spending some ?900,00 a week on interest free loans.

As a business model, surely the higher echelons of football are not sustainable long term but in the meantime, with all that money swilling about, there are plenty getting rich on the back of the present set up so can't see it changing anytime soon.

As for ourselves, the club needs to be much smarter in its recruitment and avoid paying higher salaries to those whose performances do not warrant it whilst still ensuring that our better players are rewarded with an appropriate salary that reflects their worth.

[kettering_baggie]

I do agree with you though, a salary cap is key for our future and only to be broken by exceptional talent players already in the club and with high value.

A salary cap must surely be brought in but rather than it limit individual player wages it should be for the entire first team (named) squad. So, if a club wants to sign a player on very high wages, that should be offset by the wages for the remainder of the squad not exceeding the ceiling. How to set the salary cap, though? Maybe on the Clubs turnover for the previous season? Whatever, something should be done.

Maybe controversial but I would also like a limit of three foreign players allowed on the pitch at any one time (per team, of course). This would, hopefully, bring more British (& Irish) players through. Such a move might bring more revenue into lower league clubs through player sales. I expect to be shot down over this one!

[Calgarybaggy]

Will a salary cap even work for those teams competing in Europe? They are the ones driving the salaries higher and they wont wont to be disdavataged by having a domestic salary cap when the likes of Real Madrid and PSG don't have to follow it. And even if the European teams agree to a salary cap, will the European Court, which gave us the whole Bosmann mess, ever allow it?

I agree with salary caps because they help to level the playing field between rich and poor clubs, and North American leagues have salary caps that work but they were put in place after numerous player strikes and missed seasons etc. Even then, they could only impose a salary cap because the players were unionized and so it could be built into a collective agreement. I don't think the PFA and Premier League and the Football League has a collective agreement as such do they? so is the PFA an actual trade union or is it little more just a player advocacy organization? They have agreements to co-oporate on various issues and pensions etc but not a collective agreement governing salaries etc. do they. Without an enforceable collective agrrement with the players, I don't think a salary cap can ever happen.
Plus, if you play American Football, baseball, Basketball or Ice Hockey, where are you going to go if you refuse to agree to a salary cap? But soccer players can find plenty of money elseswhere other than the Premier League or even the Champions league.

Having said that, the current team finance rules are a complete farce - if you are one of the favoured few teams you can get away with anything it seems, but if you are struggling at the bottom of the championship, they can ding you points for a highly disputed issue without a hearing with four games left in the season. But hey, I'm not bitter at all.