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Ask any City fan if they thought Mackay would get them promoted, I think most would have said very likely, to probable. It's always a gamble but we stood a good chance.
If you look at Boro, Wolves, Fulham, Reading, Derby, Leeds etc who have all spent 15-50m this summer, what we're doing is incredible. I think most thought play-offs would be tough but just about possible. Boro, Wolves, Fulham, Wednesday etc have bought one player (or near enough) for the cost of us rebuilding a team over the summer and let's not even discuss wages! Villa are paying Terry 60k a week, and they have about 10 players on about 40-50k. Henri Lansbury quadrupled his Forest wage to go to Villa. Quadrupled!
No doubt Grabban is on 30k
I'd not be scared to put my money where my mouth is with Ledley being on 20-30k plus either.
We have by all accounts, rid ourselves of those kinds of earners.
Let's say we have the 10th biggest wage budget in the league (anyone care to agree disagree)
We have also been outspent by more than enough teams to put us outside the top 6.
Yet here we are.
If you look at transfer market,we are joint fifth biggest spenders overall in Championship this season at just over 10m. Villa,Derby and Fulham behind us because they have sold players for a lot more than they have spent.They say the only two players we sold for a fee were Saadi and Huw’s.
Latest data on wages I can find is the 15/16 season, we had the third highest wage bill, behind QPR and Fulham.
I guess we have reduced since then and the likes of villa have joined the league, wouldn't be surprised if we weren't still in the top 6
Yes but that site claims we paid £6.12m for Madine (Warnock insists it was £5m including 'add ons') and £2.97m for Lee Tomlin (Warnock clarified that months ago and the real figure was something like £1.6m - a number that even the Bristol Post is now quoting).
My best guess is that the club have spent £4-6m net this season over the summer and January windows. Wages - who knows - but I expect the bill has come down.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/...koumas-2335332
West Brom wanted £2m, most of it up front. There's also an interesting line here "Their (City's) wage bill currently remains too high and much of the money from Jerome will be used to make up the shortfall over the next couple of years." Back then we only sold 5,500 season tickets.
To go back to the original question, I usually say it's very hard to judge the quality of the Championship from one season to the next and so tend to stay out of such conversations, but, more than most years, I have some thoughts about this season's Championship compared to others. My impression is that, with lots of clubs carrying long injury lists, it is a league with even more emphasis on power and physique this time. There are reams of Championship related stats available these days and for me the most relevant one is that we are second in the table with twelve games to go despite playing the least number of passes in the division and having the highest numbers for unsuccessful short passes and unsuccessful long passes. This tells me that possession of the ball is not as much of a factor as it has been in an era where, generally speaking, the trend has been to try and retain possession - I think since we returned to the Championship in 2003 after a long absence, there has always been more sides than the average for other divisions that play in a direct and physical way, but there seems to be more of them this season than ever before.