croadyman
Full Member
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2018
- Messages
- 39,150
We are still handicapped by having a bloated squad and a huge wage bill, so for me our business this summer will be impacted just as much by who can we move out than by whatever our supposed budget turns out to be.
Sanchez, Smalling & Rojo are all loaned out and without knowing the specifics of how much these players are costing us I'm sure that it is a significant number. We need to get them off of the books, and probably only Smalling of the three carries any real value in terms of transfer fees, but even so they have to go
In terms of who is still in the squad, Mata is reportedly on around £8.5m a year. As much as I like him its a ton of cash to be paying someone who isn't contributing. Lingard, Jones, Bailly are all on the fringes and earning a good salary. Crucially none of these four will be likely to bring in a noteworthy transfer fee. Same with Pereira.
This is where people still underestimate the issues we have within the squad. We have some very valuable players but we want to keep all of those. The ones we don't want are draining the club, bloating the wage bill and are almost worthless. Those 8 players listed above are probably costing the club somewhere in the region of £40-50m a year in wages, none of them are contributing, and this absolutely has an impact on our budget and what we can offer incoming players, but...….how do we get rid of these players? Its not easy. Buying clubs are not stupid and have little desire to solve our problems for us.
This is why I think fans should prepare themselves for a relatively quiet summer. We may see three coming in and perhaps three of the above going out, but if we want Sancho then we will be forced to look around for value elsewhere, which rules the likes of Grealish out IMO.
Staying confident we will still get Sancho, Grealish/VDB & CB