Selling a player to pay for loans; same number 2s different owner, Bates with a smile - we will see, irrespective feels like another short term decision from the owner, and potentially demonstrates issues with his and the clubs cash flow.CorkWhite wrote:As others have mentioned we need to balance the books and that is understandable considering we have raised a lot of wages over the past 2 years and some are on long contracts too.
Talk of getting rid of the deadwood is something of a thorn in every club, but, we as a club have a lot of players who Bielsa loaned out last season in the hope of raising their potential or raise their value to sell. basically putting them in the shop window. I think some of those players will be sold off cheaply just so we can get our wage structure back on track.
This is not easy to do as some of these players won't want to leave as they won't be offered wages like they are on now unless they are motivated by resurrecting their careers at a lower league and in fairness some of them will do easily enough.
Not all the players we see as deadwood are deadwood, as i often said before that there are only some players who can raise their game at Elland road and for Leeds United while others balk at the chances they get. Our system might not suit them, they may have issues with other players or the coaching staff, they may even feel intimidated psychologically by our faithful and vociferous fans as we are every game. Either way I would hope more energy is put into selling off those who can be sold and release those who cant or loan them out again as we do need to shore up the gaps for a major signing to come in which will eat up most of all those deadwood players wages in one go.
On another point are Leeds United merchandising making any money? With our level of support worldwide i would of hoped to see a huge upturn in merchandising sales over the past few seasons and in turn this could be a huge benefit to the first team recruitment.... I haven't seen any facts or figures mentioned or i simply missed them all if posted. Not sure how it all works in this regard. Were too huge a club to be scraping the barrel if I'm totally honest.
As regards the Merchandising, I know it was / is in a rude state of health. To put things in perspective (these numbers are from a few years ago) the Mega store at Man Utd turns over circa £10m ours does about £7m - at the time we benefited as a result of being the one shop in town for shirts however that performance is off the Richter scale in comparison to other championship clubs. Things may have changed slightly in the past 5 years but as regards merchandising revenue we are in the top half of the premiership.
