Redslo

While this sounds plausible, it ignores some of the financial realities faced by the club. The salaries of the high earners we have shifted may well cover the incoming salaries, but there are number of pay increases that have been granted to get people to want to stay. Our payroll is undoubtedly up significantly. If it is up more than 7 million pounds, some of the transfer profit needs to be retained as profit to permit the increase payroll under the Premier League Salary cap. Also, there is the question of cash flow which is different from paper profits. Our clubs cash flow has barely been positive over the two seasons before last (last season's results are not out yet) and that was only because of net borrowing. This was very likely due in large part to the costs of the new training center which, hopefully, is mostly paid for by now. Assuming I am right about that, it will give us more flexibility in the future when combined with the increased TV money--but everyone gets the increased TV money so that is not an advantage we can exploit against other clubs in the league. And it is pretty clear our owner does not want to constantly be putting in more money--and under European FFP rules that money would be limited to under 15 million pounds a year. (That is an estimate because the information we need to calculate an exact number is not publically available and it could change due to exchange rates). That being said, I agree that it would be good to strengthen at CB. On the other hand, I think the club believes it has done what it is going to do in the midfield and may decide that Rodriguez can fill the bill up front. It is too soon to judge whether this will be an improvement, a deterioration, or neither. But it is simply unreasonable to expect the club to reliably progress year after year. Every other club in the Premier League is also trying to do that and they all have lots more money too. Our only competitive edge is if we continue to be better run than most clubs and, therefore, better able to find good new players and sign them for relatively reasonable fees. You may not like that we cannot hold onto our better players when richer clubs offer them big pay increases but that is the way it is. Resisting that by refusing to sell only makes things worse. Think about how little we got for Wanyama and Clyne as opposed to Shaw, Mane, Schneiderlin, Lovren, and Lallana. That is what happens when you let the contract run down to one year. If we held onto all players until they had one year left, the system we have would not have a chance of working and we would face a relegation battle. Of course, none of this proves that the new manager will end up being good or that our new players will be able to do the job or that we won't get hit by lots of injuries. All of that is possible, but our club is well run and it appears that they have taken the reasonable steps to be avoid or mitigate this problems. That is all we can reasonably ask.

I would guess that most of us doubt that. I would have written something like that myself except that I have been busy and, if I had written it, I would have posted it on my blog. I do wonder where you post came directly from. And of course the same people were running the club then. But I went back and check and after three games we have one more point that year than we do know. You are right it is time to panic. Nonsense. Oops. Just realized you were being sarcastic. Good post. But we did not sell our three best players. At worst we sold two of our four best players or three of our six best players or four of our 20 best players.

I think he sounded disappointed with a poorly played game and determined to not let it happen again. Better said than I, but correct. I think at that particular moment Redmond was the main striker. Austin had that position at other times. I think you fail to recognize how important it is for our players to look happy when they are not winning. It is the one not touching the ball in the box at the moment. Sometimes we have two main strikers, but never zero. The happy clappers are not trying to rewrite last season to prove all is good now. We are trying to rewrite the present. Pay more attention. I have no idea whether you are right, but at least you expressed an on point thought that has not been repeated zillions of times here. But don't waste your limited responses continuing a discussion with me.

With the Financial Fair Play rules including the salary cap, a rich owner willing to spend is not enough either.

When I first starting posting here just over two years ago, the only thing that really bothered me was when people seemed to overreact to a stupid post with insulting responses that seemed way out of proportion to the level of stupidity demonstrated. I failed to recognize how annoyances can build up over time to justify and explain these reactions. Thank you for clarifying this for me. Also, I apologize to various otherwise intelligent posters who I erroneously thought less of over the past couple of years. That being said, your post makes no sense on any level. Please excuse me for not being inclined to analyze it in detail. In the future, I plan to treat your posts as some type of psychotic performance art and enjoy them on that basis.

Lewis will be playing in the under 23s on Monday and therefore would not be used on Sunday (or maybe even Saturday). Not bad at all. Says they want Lewis to play regularly with the under 23s all year. In fact, the desire to play Lewis regularly explains the Gazzaniga loan.

I think you would be wrong. Coaching, training, medical, and scouting staff wages are staff, not player, wages for FFP purposes. Also, the various quoted figures for what players are getting are not reliable not just because they are not reliable, but because they are under inclusive. Money paid to for social security and other pension costs counts, but may not be included with the weekly figures we see quoted. The same applies to bonuses, appearance fees, loyalty fees, and whatever. Someone who has been on the inside of a Premier League club and was familiar with all this stuff probably knows what is what here and I would be thrilled to hear from such a person, but baring that we just can't calculate the effective salary cap limits on Southampton this season.

This illustrates one of the problems we have in analyzing this. We simply do not have the information we need. Even the published financials are only of a little help because the wage limit applies only to players whereas the published information includes all staff.

You are probably correct, but we did give lots of new contracts so they will eat into what is available. However, I an confident the club has this well under control. Even the posters who think the club is crazy to sell good players every year will probably agree that the club understands the salary cap.

European TV income can also increase allowable wage bill.

Only a few of them.

If he is at his peak then he has nowhere to go but down. And even if there were no other consideration, at his age he will take longer to recover from injuries and is more likely to suffer them. We should definitely keep him, but we should also sign another starting quality CB given all the games we have to play this year. I think you will find that is not true. Most players we buy are still here after two years even though, in some cases, we wish they were not. () indicate player still here. 2012-2013 buys lasted 4 (4) 3 0.5 3 (4) (4) (4) 2013-2014 buys lasted 2 3 1 2014-2015 buys lasted 2 (2) (2) (2) 2 (2) 2 2015-2016 buys lasted (1) (1) (1) 1 (1) (0.5) (1) VVD last summer meets the requirement. True, we had identified him much sooner. EDIT: No idea why I quoted this. And Wilson is the club's go to leak source for this kind of thing. EDIT: No idea why this appeared again. I think the official position would be that Austin replaced Pelle, Redmond replaced Mane, and Hojbjerg replaced Wanyama. The only one not replaced is Juanmi. I would agree that I would have liked to see someone else come in for Mane and have Redmond be a squad strengthening move, but it might still happen. EDIT: See above. Maybe a phone call asking if we wanted to sell him. We said no convincingly so they didn't bother bidding. But who knows. Maybe it was an inquiry from an agent trying to stir up some business. Maybe it was a newspaper article written by someone the club knows has good inside contacts with Man U.

The FFP rules are not unfair to clubs like us. They are unfair to clubs that are owned by people who want to spend a lot of their own money to improve the club quickly. In other words, if a new Roman Abramovich or Sheikh Mansour arrived on the scene right now and bought Sunderland and wanted to spend 150 to 200 million pounds a year on new signings, FFP would block that. Because in recent years the only way a club could rise out of the middle of the football pack to become a big club was to spend like that, the FFP rules have the effect of locking the current pecking order in place. This doesn't mean that FFP was designed to do that. It was designed to stop clubs from overspending themselves into bankruptcy. Locking the current pecking order in place was just a nice bonus (from the perspective of the current big clubs). The only way things can change is if the system undergoes a major overhaul and adopts a North American style league with true revenue sharing and a hard (or nearly hard) salary cap. However, that cannot work if you have a relegation/promotion based system especially one with multiple competitions. If Manchester City were told that they couldn't spend more than 150 million a year on player salary they would rightfully ask how they can possibly be expected to compete in the Champions League. Plus, any such system would effectively force the owners of the richer clubs (especially Manchester United) to take out a few hundred million a year in profit. The Glazers would be heart broken. This would change if the European Super League comes into existence. Presumably, they would pick 20 to 24 clubs to permanently join the league and impose some kind revenue sharing and salary cap. If they were smart, they would grab clubs from beyond the five biggest countries but who knows what would happen. As an American, I have the current experience of hearing a Presidential candidate say the most ridiculous things which he plainly means and then later claim that he was being sarcastic (but not too sarcastic). This, along with some of the comments in this thread which struck me as both seriously meant and nonsensical may have caused me to misjudge your comment. That being said, I did wonder as I was typing my response whether your comment might not have been seriously intended. I decided to go ahead because even if you didn't seriously intended the comment, some people here would agree with it or at least the laughing stock part of it and so a response was not entirely out of line. I have never understood why people think that sporting leagues have sold their soul when they sell the rights to broadcast their games to media entities for lots of money. That lets more people watch the games. The idea that, somehow, fewer people are watching the Premier League now that it is more widely available to be watched is just nonsense. I also don't understand many of the complaints about rising ticket prices. If prices didn't rise, there would simply be longer and longer waiting lists for tickets and more of an incentive for the current holders of tickets to resell them for a profit. The fact that a person has been a Southampton season ticket holder for thirty years should certainly give him a priority on buying a season ticket next year but there is no reason it should entitled him to get the ticket for 1000 pounds if someone else is willing to pay 2000 pounds for it. On the other hand, governments should not be using tax dollars to help privately owned sports clubs build expensive new stadiums and the contractual terms that FIFA and the IOC insist upon putting in their World Cup and Olympic deals are unconscionable. They border on extortion and it would be nice to see a government address that. Maybe if Los Angeles gets the 2024 Olympics the US justice department might do something. Certainly, no one else is so inclined. That being said, there is nothing wrong with a country that can afford it deciding to hold the Olympics if they recognize in advance that it will not be a profitable endeavor. I like the Olympics and would like it to continue, but it would be nice if it were run by a less corrupt organization.

I am not sure why I was inspired to take so much bait tonight, but this ends it. When a company operating in a country with competent regulators publishes its audited financials, it is unlikely they are wildly dishonest. On the other hand, if you can provide me with a link to FIFA's financials statements for the past ten years, I would greatly appreciate it.

Possibly you should look at the financial reports yourself and/or talk with fans who know what they are talking about. That 50 million, even assuming it is the right number, does not account for fees owed to other clubs such as Bournemouth's share of the Lallana deal. Also, money had to be paid to retire outside debt and for the new training center. Net actual cash flow for 13-14 and 14-15 was basically even and that includes net inflow of 28 million from loans. We are not sitting on profits, they have been used to run the business including increased salaries for the player who signed contract extensions, building the training center, and, if I understand what happened this past season, paying down debt to outside creditors. Good question or at least close to one. I would have to research this to be sure, but I suspect that we are the poorest club that has built significant improvements in recent years. We have a rich owner who wants us to be self-sustaining rather than kicking the maximum allowable of 15 million or so each year. We have no significant foreign following so we cannot generate the kind of overseas income that helps the six richest clubs. Our stadium is smaller than many clubs so we cannot generate as much match day revenue. The big new TV contract should help, but that gives us no advantage of the rest of the league--only the rest of the world. And that advantage may be mitigated some by the uncertain effects of Brexit. While I cannot prove that this is not true, it was certainly not true as of June 30, 2015. Also, it seems unlikely given everything else we know. but good paranoia. I think this has been greatly overstated. The rules are still in effect. As always, there are ways to dodge them temporarily. See http://www.express.co.uk/sport/football/700174/Chelsea-news-Joao-Mario-FFP-Inter-Milan-medical-underway-Sporting-Lisbon-president I last posted about the changes in the rules last summer on my blog here: http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-new-financial-fair-play-rules.html I have seen no sign of major changes since then. Another good question, but not really answerable by us non-billionaires. Clearly, some people, i.e. FSG, bought a big name club believes that their sports expertise would transfer over to football and the FFP rules would allow them to run a successful club that will appreciate in value without dumping in lots of money every year. Others, i.e. Roman Abramovich, wanted to buy and create a winning club because he liked doing that. Clearly, he didn't do it as an investment because he cannot possibly make a profit given what he has already spent. Sheikh Mansour has probably done this for political reasons to make his otherwise appalling government look good. The more interesting development is the large sums spent on Championship clubs hoping to hit a big payday when they get promoted. Of course, if you don't sell right after promotion, the certainty of the big pay day goes down. Since you took the trouble to look at the financial statements, why didn't you look at the cash flow part? Over the past three seasons, the club would have been in trouble financially without transfer profits, but there is nothing wrong with that. They allowed the club to pay improved salaries to retain some players and attract higher quality new players. Also, to pay debts and the cost of the training center. It would be foolish not to have a plan for relegation but that is not what is limiting spending. And, again, what exactly is it the board should be doing to kick on better than we already have or to show ambition. No one seems to be able to say specifically and instead simply repeats those words. I too am in favor of kicking on and showing ambition. In fact, that is what we have been doing.

I think they are trying to get them out earlier. The 14/15 ones came out in Early October. Especially since, barring negotiations, we also owed Bournemouth 25% of the fee. Of course, it was taken into account. How could it not be? And the roll over part of your post is nonsense. I am pretty sure you need to look up "surprised" in a dictionary since you obviously have no idea what the word means. Actually you probably don't know what "embarrassing" and "laughing stock" mean either. I approve of this message. I wish the people who post things like this would, for once, explain exactly what Southampton is supposed to do differently. We can't make people sign contract extensions. We can't make clubs overpay for people on the last year of the contract. (Actually, maybe we can, but they will still pay less than the player is worth on a longer term contract.) We can't spend money we don't have in violation of Financial Fair Play rules to compete with the richer clubs on salary and transfer fees. So what would you have us do?

I just posted: "The Completely Unproofed and Long Out-of-Date Transcript of Les Reed's May 26, 2016 Interview" Just in case anyone is interested or still cares. The Unproofed state of the transcript is the result of me being too busy back then and not thinking it was worth the time now. Also, too busy now too. http://redsloscf.blogspot.com/ http://redsloscf.blogspot.co.uk/

Just to be clear, I do not think you owe me an apology.

Does Batman post drivel on YouTube? That might be interesting. That is not how it works. You might as well say that I took in $100K year as a lawyer and didn't spend any money on lawyers for myself so I must have $100K sitting around someone. And I know that it is a weak analogy, but it is good enough for the target audience.

This would be more convincing if you demonstrated any understanding of what financial statements actually tell us. Here is a link that might help you understand better: http://swissramble.blogspot.com/search/label/Southampton To make it simple, there is no big cash profit that can be withdrawn for the benefit of the owner. In the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 seasons combined net cash flow has been barely positive (plus 400K pounds). However, that includes a positive cash flow from financing of 28 million pounds--net new loans. Supposedly some loans were paid off last season, but the club is not sitting on big piles or cash--much less paying them out to our owner. And before you ask for my source, I am looking at the PDF of the clubs financials which I bought off company house. You might want to do the same before you blither further.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/may/25/premier-league-finances-club-by-club-breakdown-david-conn

I agree, but the person to whom I was replying said that he was show to be inaccurate.

Yet another phony claim. What were you thinking?

I am glad someone finally had the courage to point this out to Alpine. I assumed AR10 was making a joke. When has JS been show to be full of S--as opposed to being wrong when circumstances changed? I also agree with Alpine. On the other hand, I would hope that Fonte would be more sensible about this--which does not mean that he shouldn't push for an overpaid transfer to Manchester United if one is on offer. He is of an age where the club needs to be prepared to replace him in the starting lineup at any time. There is no guarantee that a fully motivated and fully healthy Fonte will be good enough to start for us by the end of this season. What did he say that was false about Pellegrini? Do you know for a fact that the club was not seriously considering him? You think so, but it often doesn't work that way. Also, they have already bought their younger CB and probably don't want two of them at once.