Claudius wrote:

arsedoc md wrote:

Think you guys are misunderstanding Clrnc point.  Think he's expressing general frustration at how we're supposed to be a big club, have been underachieving, could be in the market for multiple positions, and are still unable to seal a left back from a Scottish club this late in the window.
That is what it looks like and it goes to support my theory which predicates on us not being or aspiring to be a top tier club or at least the people that run it having no such ambitions.

There is the basic reality that we are carrying premium players on a Costco budget. So we have a few problems where

• we have all these badly scouted players who we overpaid on the assumption that we would continue to be a Champions League club with money raining in every season. Nobody wants to take them off our hands
• and now we need to go into the market and improve the squad but keep costs as low as possible while we are a Europa club

So I’m not surprised that we are coming up with complex, delayed payment structures for all our deals re Tierney, Saliba, Zaha. We are in a shit financial position and will be so next year as well if Emery doesn’t turn water into wine and get us back into Champions League this season

We are not doing anything different from what we have done for more than a decade with the odd exception the season we wasted the Puma money on £35m donkeys at £90k a week each.

Except we have built up unsustainable costs. The chickens are coming home to roost

No argument from me about that.
We are in a tough spot as Celtic are negotiating from a relatively strong position as we are desperate.

I wouldn’t say we are desperate. There are other options and we can choose to spend our money elsewhere or prioritise another position

Our moving from an initial £15m valuation to their original £25m valuation for an unproven injury risk player whose head is turned tells them that we haven't got an alternative, imo.

Celtic have rejected Arsenal's latest bid - thought to be about £25m - for 22-year-old Scotland left-back Kieran Tierney. (Sky Sports)

we wanted to pay the £25M in installments, £500,00 per year for the next 50 years

Bold Tone wrote:

Our moving from an initial £15m valuation to their original £25m valuation for an unproven injury risk player whose head is turned tells them that we haven't got an alternative, imo.

Celtic night ger £15m from a foreign club for Tierney but they’re not getting £25m from anyone else. Chelsea can’t, City wouldn’t, Liverpool isn’t an option, doubt Spursor United are interested. We may not be looking at alternatives according to the media but I’m sure there is a list of potential other targets and I’m sure Celtic want to get this deal done too now.

Anzac wrote:

Celtic have rejected Arsenal's latest bid - thought to be about £25m - for 22-year-old Scotland left-back Kieran Tierney. (Sky Sports)

It seems like this phrase is said in every second post these days but it’s to do with the instalment plan not the overall value.

Our cash flow issues are killing us. No one wants our terribly structured deals.

I’m pretty sure our cash flows have been dire for years. This is a problem that’s been threatening to bite for a while, only now it’s not just biting it’s absolutely mauling us apart. It’s compounded by the fact that there is so much more cash flowing about the league elsewhere and making our situation seem even worse by comparison.

Absolutely. Other teams at least have TV money, many have big transfer fees that have come from cash rich clubs. Meanwhile we've wasted all our TV money on sky high wages for poor players and lose our biggest assets for free.

According to SR, our cash flow has always been fine till 2017. Signing all the flops for big money + not qualifying for UCL impacted us massively. Then the high wages killed us completely now.

It’s been a few years since I’ve looked at them but I seem to remember the cash flow statements never appeared as strong as the Profit and Loss account. I always suspected that’s why we were hesitant to go for bigger transfers, as if they didn’t work out it would have taken quite a while to replace the money we invested in them.

Qwiss! wrote:

Absolutely. Other teams at least have TV money, many have big transfer fees that have come from cash rich clubs. Meanwhile we've wasted all our TV money on sky high wages for poor players and lose our biggest assets for free.

Totally agree.
Even when we were getting CL TV money, our wages were high for average players.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/arsenal/9782420/Arsenal-manager-Arsene-Wenger-defends-his-socialist-wage-plan.html

Of course none of us will ever know the exact details (breakdowns and justifications) but i have always been struck by how much we pay players who barely make the first team (Elneny, Mavropanos, Bielik) and even Guendouzi's wages seemed quite high for a guy from Ligue 2.

We have the 5th highest wage bill in Premier League again. We're absolutely not spending too much on wages. If anything we're spending too little. We're not willing to spend enough to maintain the good players, and the few exceptions to that rule are players we've generally gotten it wrong with, like Mkhi and Özil, so they are used as a strick to beat the club with. It's the wrong approach to take. There is zero reason for the fans to cheer when we're slashing the wage bill.

If we're not willing to spend we'll never be competitive. The club saving a few nickles by withdrawing the contract offer for Aaron Ramsey doesn't look like a genius move right now when any replacement would cost £30+ million in transfer fee alone, for instance. I read the interview with Dick Law where he said that we could easily afford Özil's wages since transfer fees and wages are amortised across the length of a contract, and in Özil's case there is no more transfer fee. That means the annual fee we're paying for him is not significantly higher than what we're paying for anyone who came here with a fee attached, like Leno or Lacazette.

It's not handing out big wages that is holding us back. It's the way we keep getting all our business wrong, whether it's buying players or appointing people. We just restructured the entire club, and there isn't a shred of evidence that the new people are any more ambitious or clever than the last ones. If anything it's been the opposite so far.

Tam wrote:

It’s been a few years since I’ve looked at them but I seem to remember the cash flow statements never appeared as strong as the Profit and Loss account. I always suspected that’s why we were hesitant to go for bigger transfers, as if they didn’t work out it would have taken quite a while to replace the money we invested in them.

This is what Dick Law said too. He spoke about how, before our debt started to loosen up a little around 2013, we had the cash to maybe go all in for a high profile target, but it would have been disastrous for us if that player had flopped, gotten badly injured, etc. Even among elite players moving to top clubs one out of every three players or so seems to flop, so I think there was a lot of sense in that approach.

i don't have a problem with how wenger and the rest ran the club financially in between 2006-13, it was sensible. they got exposed when the cash loosened up. i guess the signs were there from the highbury days, big money (for the time) wenger signings seemed to fail (or never quite live up to) quite a bit.

Klaus wrote:

We have the 5th highest wage bill in Premier League again. We're absolutely not spending too much on wages. If anything we're spending too little. We're not willing to spend enough to maintain the good players, and the few exceptions to that rule are players we've generally gotten it wrong with, like Mkhi and Özil, so they are used as a strick to beat the club with. It's the wrong approach to take. There is zero reason for the fans to cheer when we're slashing the wage bill.

If we're not willing to spend we'll never be competitive. The club saving a few nickles by withdrawing the contract offer for Aaron Ramsey doesn't look like a genius move right now when any replacement would cost £30+ million in transfer fee alone, for instance. I read the interview with Dick Law where he said that we could easily afford Özil's wages since transfer fees and wages are amortised across the length of a contract, and in Özil's case there is no more transfer fee. That means the annual fee we're paying for him is not significantly higher than what we're paying for anyone who came here with a fee attached, like Leno or Lacazette.

It's not handing out big wages that is holding us back. It's the way we keep getting all our business wrong, whether it's buying players or appointing people. We just restructured the entire club, and there isn't a shred of evidence that the new people are any more ambitious or clever than the last ones. If anything it's been the opposite so far.

100%. I was quite pleased to hear Sanllehi make a similar point about our 'high' wage bill not being an inherently bad thing. If we have to sacrifice our transfer budget to sustain a bigger wage bill, I'd be happy to go down that path. But with the lack of CL football and the losses pilling up, it does feel inevitable that we're going to have to downsize unless we get back into the CL pronto.