The9

Ah, ok, I understand where it comes from now - I thought it was just referring to his wages, not also including the value of the transfer divided by number of weeks.

Just tracked down the 2013 figures... "•Total group wages, including player wages, increased to £47.1m in 2013 from £28.7m in 2012.". I guess we could be at or near the £52m limit. Oh and Sour Mash: "Crucially, all payments from the ‘Central Fund’ (mainly derived from Sky/BT TV payments) are excluded from the calculation of ‘Own Revenue Uplift’"

The phrase "Luke Shaw along provided over 600,000 pounds a week in salary cap space" is one of the places where the source is puzzling me.

Yes, he's the stat guy for FM. I'm sure he'd love to tell you how one gathers that data. He's also to blame for the Echo not being a paper in the game, and Saints having a "sign Italians" policy in FM14, apparently.

This, I agree with. Can't decide what it is we ARE doing, but pretty sure it's neither struggling to stay within FFP or asset stripping. Even the comments about "inherited a difficult financial situation" outright refuted the need for player sales - though Ralphio has also said "the silence was necessary to get the best price" so who knows, really?

The argument is that we've HAD TO SELL 5 players to enable us to meet FFP, and somehow can't buy replacements because FFP stops us doing so. This is clearly absolute cobblers. We were nowhere near the wage cap, and the Chairman has said the sales had nothing to do with it. Bearing in mind that he could have lied and said "errrr, absolutely it's to meet FFP", completely got out of jail free, and no-one would have been any the wiser for a year or so. That's not an oxymoron either. It's a self-contradicting term, like "the hairy bald man", "the intelligent idiot", etc. *Awaits thread tangent*.

Me, last summer.

Obviously. What were they expecting, the Scouse Suarez? He's only ever going to be a 20 minute sub for them to retain possession up the field late in the game and bring the midfield in, and he looks like a less agile Henderson who runs less in their pre-season games. They also keep playing through balls 10 yards in front of him for some reason. We had our ENTIRE STYLE built around him in the Championship and in the first season in the Prem when he was most successful, and he's two years older now with a lot of lower-league mileage on his legs. The weird bit is them signing Origi and then loaning him back to Lille - they'll be wishing they could recall him soon if Sturridge gets injured.

We are a club that will happily field a (basically) free left back for a couple of seasons until someone realises he's a £30m left back though, right? Ditto the £8m CB who turned out to be a £20m one, the basically free reserve right back who is actually a £16m Champions League CB/DM if you believe Wenger, the free tricky attacking midfielder who turned out to be a £25m England international, etc. The trouble with Bertrand is there's no way we're paying £10m for him next summer. If he's good enough to merit it, someone else will buy him, and if he's not good enough we won't sign him. I guess we'll see if Targett is worth a place and having him floating around just in case will be a decent enough safety net.

No point debating this one hypo, it is the one point all summer on which you are correct and I'm surprised anyone is arguing.

They are, but having sold 5 players we're nowhere near the cap. The only proof I need that we're not close to it is that Gaston hasn't been sold.

Seriously, a there was a POINT BLANK DENIAL TO A DIRECT QUESTION about FFP, but we're still debating it? FFS.

This is surely only relevant if we were actually showing any signs of doing that.

It jarred at the time, but it clearly gave away that he did not intend to come back and had already said goodbyes to people in the area, even if there was a rapid climbdown from her (presumably after Lovren got in touch). That shows that the theory above, that we wanted to keep Lovren and get rid of Schneiderlin, wasn't viable in the timescales as they happened. I'm sure Morgan now sees his World Cup call up as a double-edged sword, you can bet he'd have gone before the likes of Chambers if he hadn't been hastily whisked away by France.

Only because his standing in relation to Prem game time is so low. We know that. It doesn't mean his wages are "high", just that he's not value for money. We pay plenty of players not to start for the first XI every week though. It's actually difficult to find a comparison - who are his peers from the same signing period to compare him with? Tadanari Lee came in the same transfer window and has left for a lower standard. Cork, De Ridder, Fox and Hooiveld were all signed the summer before for the Championship campaign (possibly lower relative wages but bigger [Championship] success bonuses)? Rodriguez joined in the June soon after Prem promotion and would be on a "Prem deal" not a "Championship deal", if such distinctions can be made. I guess based on that, as De Ridder and Fox have left and Cork is clearly a tier above, only Hooiveld is really comparable. I'd expect a striker to be on more than a CB anyway (especially when we were just out of L1 when we signed Hooiveld and looking good for the Prem when Sharp joined). So what we're really saying here is that "Sharp doesn't play much and should be loaned out if money is a concern", which is what we've been doing anyway.

Lovren's hairdresser bidding him goodbye on Twitter the week after the end of the season suggests we knew Lovren was going to go a long time before anyone went away. I wouldn't be surprised that part of the "been promised to leave" stuff was Cortese spin designed to keep any unsettled players last summer, with the hope that his goal of Champions League football would keep them this time around.

Not really, the FFP we're covered by only applies to Prem clubs, and no Prem club is going to sign Sharp at the moment, he has no pedigree at this level and hasn't really featured that highly for even a Championship side for 3 years. If there were Prem clubs interested and then baulking at his wages, there's your evidence. But there aren't. A few Championship sides have had Sharp on loan - we can only speculate about how much of his wages they were paying. But as they're likely to have a lower threshold for wages overall anyway due to the lower incomes at that level (as well as a lower wage cap limit), all it really says is that his wages are too high for Championship clubs, it doesn't say anything about his wages in relation to other clubs' Prem wages.

Read: "A big fine". i.e. Big whoop.

It isn't, that's why the top clubs want it. All the noise about the top sides pulling up the drawbridge so that no-one is even allowed to spend massively even if they want to was gone over hundreds of times when the rules were passed (and Cortese voted against it). As for the "Saints trying to meet FFP by selling loads of players and getting loans in", it just doesn't add up. As already noted Ralph said this was nothing to do with FFP when asked (on Sky Sports). What I CAN believe is that Cortese promised the players huge bonuses for coming 8th and it wouldn't have been financially prudent to keep them IF all we wanted to do was establish ourselves in midtable, but even that makes no sense when you consider Gaston is still here. I'm afraid this is nothing more than the club not realising the full implications of Cortese leaving on the playing staff he'd been mollycoddling, and the degree to which the top players leaving will affect results. This was not a the plan - Krueger himself also stated they weren't looking to sell. All of those things considered, the failure to get the replacements in place before the players left was still a mistake - I can only assume on THAT front that FFP might have been an issue and the club wouldn't go over the wage cap for a month or two whilst sales were agreed, but it didn't really take long for the leavers to go, so that's a pretty weak excuse too.

I'm starting to doubt the sanity of some of the people on here - do you really think our currently decimated squad without any further additions looks good enough? As for playing Cork at right back, do we never learn? He's utter gash there. Does raise an interesting question about cover though - I'd assume at the moment Stephens would cover, but he's off to Swindon isn't he?

I hear he can't count.

You're happy to wait 3 or 4 years between opinions too... OUTLIER!!!! OUTLIER!!!!

I missed the bit about postcode on the site, seeing as I've recently changed loads of mine anyway I just assumed it wasn't what I thought it was and hit the "Forgotten..." button.

Mine are all in the list - whether they'll actually still be there when it comes to buying tickets, who knows? That "customer number and postcode" is the usual process to add someone (also not very secure, but at least it doesn't ask for, and then ignore, their DoB any more).

Ok, so to clarify, Bear was (clearly) referring to the none-too-accurate ages of a number of recent African international footballers. That Skate Kanu and Obafemi Martins spring to mind.