Listening to LP last week he basically said the budget isn’t the be all and end all and tbf he’s correct, small budget teams have upset the odds and succeeded many times.
The last 12 months as been tough on all clubs but looking at it I don’t think we’ve done too bad with a few windfalls, we was rumoured to have got 500k for Ada and Jules in January, there was the compensation package for DC from Vale, the grant from the league to help with covid, Rico money (apparently not received yet) this totalled up won’t be far off 2 million.
Money has been used wisely on the infrastructure by bringing in JF and the new manager and number 2 but looking at it we should be more than comfortable compared to most.
I sincerely hope 3 or 4 quality signings can be made to form the nucleus of a decent team and surround them with what we have or loan players, if we’re serious about getting out this division then this is the perfect opportunity because didn’t LP say we’ll see the financial effects of covid in coming season surely with our windfalls we’ll be fine.
No chairman or director will ever admit to doing well I’ve been at my place of work 17 years and the director of this company in his words makes a loss all the time yet the doors are still open.
Ffs Scooby didn’t realise you work at the same place as me …
I’ve heard several stories from people over the years of their company chairman or director telling them that things are so tight with the business they hadn’t received a single penny in salary themselves for the last 12 months - as they stood there in an expensive suit smoking a big cigar before clambering into the brand new roller parked on the gravel drive of their mansion!
That begs a different question to the original point of the thread - do we expect LP (and/or any others on the board) to do the job of running the club for free or even paying out of their own pocket to do so? (If not, what is reasonable - salary/dividends; flat rate or based on performance; windfalls; something else …)
BTW I do agree with LP that budget alone is not the definer of how well a club will do - big bucks do NOT guarantee success. The key is to spend what you have wisely, and to make the best of the players and resources you are able afford. However, no matter how good they are with turning sows ears into silk purses, I doubt there is any manager in the game who would turn down more cash to spend to help them do this.
The lower down you go the less important budget becomes. In the EPL it is a huge factor because you are talking about very finely honed, almost mechanic, athletes who you know that 95% of the time will perform in an optimum way and exactly as you expect. This means that you can build squads with a lot of performance certainty. Like a great golfer knows that their metronomic swing ensures that they know to within a couple of yards how far each club will project the ball.
At our level, you are dealing with a far wider spectrum of uncertainty. He might trap the ball, it might cannon 20 yards off his shin. He might pick up the runner, he might have dozed off a bit. So whilst a comparatively decent budget helps, I agree with Leigh in that it is far from the be all and end all at this level. If the team are well drilled and know their jobs then any flaw in individual technique can at least in part be mitigated by clarity of coaching and hard work.
Our recruitment challenge should begin with “what are we going to ask our right back to do?” Rather than “we need a right back”. “How do we plan to score goals?” rather than “we need a centre forward”.
If Taylor and McDonald are clear in their own minds about how we will play then actually having say a one dimension right back is OK if they are really good at that one dimension and that dimension fits into a wider plan of how the team and the little teams within the team will function. It also means they are probably more affordable. Especially if they have been a square peg in a round hole at their current club.