jones wrote:
goon wrote:
Then have a look at our finances. If it wasn't for player sales we would have made a loss of 44m last year. This year the AST estimate a loss of £70m before player sales. The AST also came out with the £40m budget estimate long before Ornstein had it. It's just a fact of life for a club that was massively wasted it's resources over the last half decade and is set to miss out on CL riches for the 3rd year running despite having a CL level wage budget.
I don't know what Fulham's wage budget it like, but I'm guessing it is considerably smaller than our 236m. Also people love to highlight a club down the table going on a one off spending spree but ultimately, whenever you look at a longer term view, we've always spent considerably more.
Last time I cared or looked at the finances was around 2012. That was the time when we had cash reserves bigger than the rest of the league combined
I refuse to buy into this story that a bunch of failed purchases (and we're not even talking about several 50m flops) must have led to this outcome. It may have if your policy from the onset is you spend only what is immediately available in terms of active funds. Anyone will struggle with a signing that didn't work out, everyone's darling Liverpool burned through a couple hundred million until they got where they are, and even if we suck at selling duds it doesn't change that we struggle with a self inflicted issue that we only invest the most liquid assets at the clubs disposal.
I’m not going to sit here and argue we spend every penny we can without FFP constraints, that would clearly be nonsense, but at the same time the club is clearly spending close to its limits, the financial statements spell that out quite clearly.
I’m going to paint a little picture. We spent somewhere in the region of 140m in 2018, not bad but not enough. That was without CL football and despite letting go of 3 players in Alexis, Aaron and Danny for free, those factors combined amount to a further 170m odd we could have spent on top of that 140m. That would have secured us CL football this season too in all likelyhood and we would have had another £100m to spend this summer.
So yeah, the cautious way we are run might result in us spending a few million less than we could, but bad decisions have cost us at least £200m in lost funds over the last two years, and that’s a conservative estimate.
