I would say you will be surprised when the total wage will be reported, at that time this will be forgotten and you all will be saying how next year financial report will show lower wage bill because you offloaded few high earners.
Btw, where is this 80K even reported?
Like I said, we'll see. For me it was crystal clear long before they were ever published that the last set of accounts still had a massive wage bill because most of all it was a bizarre rebuild year with a temporary 32-33 man squad that had lots of experienced players on prime contracts which were signed when the club were basically guaranteed a place in the UCL.
Let's take some examples for you to scratch your head at:
Kante (£300K) --> Caicedo
Koulibaly (£290K) --> Disasi
Havertz (£250K) --> Nkunku
Azpilicueta (£180K) --> Gusto
Kepa (£170K) --> Sanchez
Aubameyang (£160K) --> Jackson
Pulisic (£150K) --> Palmer
Loftus-Cheek (£120K) --> Lavia
Mendy (£70K) --> Petrovic
Kovacic (£100K) --> Ugochukwu
Ziyech (£100K) --> no replacement
Felix (£250K) --> no replacement
Mount (£80K) --> no replacement
Zakaria (£90K) --> no replacement
Adding up the departures and their estimated salaries comes up to around £2.3M/wk give or take some depending on which source you use for the salaries. Do you honestly think the average salary for the 10 players on the right sided column comes close to £250K/wk, because that's roughly what all of them would have to be on for the salary bill to not have decreased? Good luck convincing anyone that players like Ugochukwu, Gusto or Petrovic are on that kind of money. And if you say they're not, then that just means the rest of them must all be on £300K+ to make up for the difference. Or maybe the salary bill has decreased after all?
Right now we're not a CL level club and most of the contracts will reflect on that fact. The few 'marquee' players signed since the 22/23 winter transfer window (namely Enzo, Caicedo and Nkunku) will admittedly be earning huge money for a non-CL club (£200K or thereabouts) but I can guarantee just about all of the others are nowhere near the salaries of their predecessors. For example it's just common sense for a player like Malo Gusto (signed at 19) to only be earning a fraction of the salary Azpilicueta was earning, and the same argument holds water with most of the other 19-21yo signings as well who've come in to replace more experienced players who'd seen it all and gone through numerous transfers and/or contract extensions with sizeable pay bumps along their careers while most of these new guys are still at the very beginning of their careers and signing only their second pro deals.
As for your claim about next year, I'm personally under no illusion that the salary bill will again be going any lower than it currently is because at this point there aren't exactly too many high earning players to get rid off anymore. The likes of Sterling and Cucurella would definitely get sold if an opportunity presented itself but sadly I just don't think that's very likely to happen. I'm not including Lukaku & Kepa here because due to their loans I don't think their salaries are included in this years accounts anyway so permanently offloading them in the summer shouldn't affect next years' wage bill either. If anything I can easily see the salary bill for 24/25 being higher than 23/24 because chances are we'll be making a few new additions in the summer and it's possible some of the long term deals get scaled with some incremental pay raises etc.
The last set of accounts had the club's total wage bill at £405M including all club staff, not just players. Just of the top of my head I'd throw an estimate for that number to be maybe 15-20% lower (so £320-340M) for the next ones while you say it's stayed high. Again, feel free to quote me when the next numbers are released and we'll see who was closer.
e: the Swiss Ramble graphs had the wage bill for last seaso at £360M and referenced Deloitte which I checked as source for the £405M number as well so maybe the lower number is for the men's first team squad and the higher number is for the whole club. In any case I'd say the next one will be 15-20% lower than the previous set.