Quote Originally Posted by jon1959 View Post
Not good reading, but the % profit/loss ranking is less interesting than the raw numbers.

Cardiff have signed a few expensive duds in recent years (up to 2019 anyway) but have not splashed the cash in the way that some other clubs have - those that have been in the EPL in the last 5 years and a few that haven't. The club also got into a habit of paying up a lot of contracts (and in the case of Murphy, letting it run down) which just bled value and assets. A few transfer successes like Ken Zohore do not balance those books.

But it is also true that the club have changed their strategy in the past 2 years - under Tan, Dalman and Choo. It may be planned, or it may be through financial necessity (maybe a mixture of both), and it has certainly been helped by the Academy's golden generation finally coming of age at a time when a pathway to the first team opens up. That Academy age group has been highlighted by the club and by posters on here for several years - it is not recent spin to cover belt tightening. Credit where it's due - even if it is overdue.

We are now a club that is looking for value in the lower leagues and growing our own. That is positive and will surely push us up this particular profit/loss league in the next few years. Bear in mind that Derby are above us in the current table - so a bit of context is needed!

(No detail in the source table, but I don't think the Sala fee can be in the totals?)
As alluded to within this Tom Sang interview: https://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/...aster-21663735

"It's class!" Sang said of how far the academy has come.

"When I first came two and a half years ago, the first six months I didn't train once with the first team.

"At that time, you're thinking, 'Is there a pathway?' but as soon as that happened, there was the next one and the next one and the next one.