Pardew: We can’t match big clubs on wages.
Posted on June 12th, 2011 | 11 Comments |
This is something which seemed obvious to many fans when promising stroker, Andy Carroll, was spirited away to the latter club for a transfer fee of up to £35 million, and a contract which dwarfed anything which Newcastle were willing to offer him. However, the Magpies’ supremo has assured us that despite the imbalance in finances, we can compete with the likes of Tottenham and Liverpool on the pitch.
Pardew said of the imbalance:
“I don’t think we’re anywhere near Spurs in terms of the wage bill. Theirs is double ours, so you can forget about Spurs.
“That doesn’t mean to say we can’t compete with them on the playing pitch. On transfers, we can’t compete with their wages. We can’t compete with Liverpool’s wages.
“We’ve got to face that reality. We can’t.”
Sports economist, Stefan Szymanski, may beg to differ with Pardew about competing on the pitch with clubs who spend far more on player’s salaries, as he estimated that a Premier League club’s spending on wages explains around 90% of a clubs league position at the end of a seaason (Szymanski and Tim Kuypers, Winners and Losers, 1999; Szymanski and Simon Kuper, Soccernomics, 2009), though perhaps not in Newcastle’s case as the club was relegated despite having a wage bill of over £70 million, which was higher than Tottenham’s £67 million for a squad which came fourth and qualified for the Champion’s League the season after.
I did a little checking with Deloitte’s ‘Annual Review of Football Finances’ for the 2009/10 season, which reported that Tottenham’s wages were the seventh highest in the Premiership, with (as mentioned above) the North London club having a wage bill of £67 million. Of the other team mentioned by Pardew, Liverpool, their wage bill for the 2009/10 season was almost double that of Tottenham’s, with a fourth highest total wage bill of £121 million in the 2009/10 season.
He’s right on this, we can’t afford to double our wage bill at this point in time with no regular euro football.
spuds will be hating not getting champs league again like, ouch!