When you are the one to put it like this, I have to be worried. How come, for example, Arsenal didn’t suffer in a similar manner after missing out on CL football quite a few times, all while having a rather big wage bill? Is Liverpool’s wage bill spiralling out of control?
Theres a real good chance none of those 3 will be here next summer!
Who says they didn’t? United posted a second-quarter loss of 12% without CL.
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Not having actually seen the 2024 numbers, I can only compare the 2023.
Arsenal’s 2023 is a comparable scenario to our 2024, in the sense of missing the CL revenue. Their loss is in the same sort of range, so also problematic. However, Arsenal’s 2023 wage to turnover was 51%, versus LFC’s 63%. That isn’t out of control, but that is a great deal of restriction that LFC faces and Arsenal does not. Arsenal’s match day revenue is significantly higher, LFC’s wages are higher than Arsenal’s by a similar amount. Taken together, Arsenal’s finances have to be seen as far stronger.
Looking through the 2023, and seeing the summary of the 2024, it is not hard for me to see why upper management is incredibly leery of slapping down a huge new contract for Salah that swings these numbers further. There probably isn’t a lot of concern about 25/26, but the back end would be worrisome. Having a faded star playing 50% of the matches and drifting into the EL spots is a nightmare scenario.
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Arsenal probably did, they just announced a loss of 17.7m for the same period and they had Champions League at that time. The year before they had a loss of 45.5m.
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It’s kind of an odd problem with the bonus thing as you end up potentially paying a lot more out in a season with less coming in.
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That was probably when they had trimmed back their squad, and had a number of younger players enter the first team so I would expect their wage bill to have increased significantly as a % of turnover since then?
Quite right about Arsenal’s losses, but I don’t think they care a great deal about that 17M. EBITDA was almost 140M, player amortization is the major loss driver - with the loss nearly matching their interest payments. I don’t think LFC has ever broken 100M EBITDA.
I genuinely had not realized how powerful a foundation Arsenal have built.
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It only moved up to 53% for 2024, the most recent publicly available numbers.
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Yeah, that puts thing into perspective. How come that the wage bill is that high, though? One would think that there were just a handful of high earners left at the club (Alisson, Van Dijk, Salah) - it seems that the initial wages handed to new signings were much higher than I thought and that bonuses are also significant, even without PL or CL trophies in the last five seasons.
I wonder if that was the reasoning behind Mamardashvili’s transfer and rumours of Alisson’s possible exit in the next two summer windows. We can probably expect a rejuvenation of the team, so that the wage bill goes down? If I remember correctly, you were saying that wage bill should ideally be around 50% of club’s turnover every season?
Numbers within the squad has probably increased, don’t think we have had the depth we had this season and perhaps the last before?
I would say 50% is actually a little lean. Nothing wrong per se with the ~60% LFC is at right now, with established stars in a position to win stuff, but a club at 60% has less freedom of movement than at 50%. Much above that it gets crippling (11/12 it was over 70%, it had gone over 100%), and there is no capacity to improve the team.
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How many of them are seniors, though? At least I expect seniors to earn more than the likes of Bradley, Quansah, Elliott… Szoboszlai, Mac Allister, Gravenberch, Diaz, Gakpo and Nunez are still on their initial contracts, though, those contracts are probably much higher than they used to hand out.
So, how much manoeuvring space does the club have with expected sales, Adidas deal and CL football next season? From your posts, I got the impression that club have to qualify for CL literally every season to stay self-sustainable?
Yeah, I think that is a fair statement. Miss out on CL two years in a row, and it is a fullblown crisis, especially if we do not have the quality of squad already in place.
The Adidas deal won’t add a great deal more than the Nike deal, but a larger percentage of it is guaranteed - the Nike payout for this last year won’t be much different than what Adidas is paying. Which is a good thing, however it won’t provide a great deal of additional leeway. The CL is a big swing though, it adds to broadcasting, matchday, and commercial. The increased revenue from this season will presumably push wages to turnover below 60%, and perhaps make it possible for a ‘big move’, where the big move could be just re-signing Salah.
I have to say Schmadtke was an unfairly unpopular stopgap, we were obviously working with real constraints but he was part of laying a new foundation we are now seeing the real benefits from.
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Xabi Alonso, it’s written in the stars. I doubt we will interview anyone else.
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Yep, we won’t be going shopping for a manager in some farmer’s league like Man Utd did with Erik ten Hag.
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They also went from being the best team in England to one that famously made Wenger reframe success as a CL spot once they lost him. His exit was really the first step in the post-highbury malaise the club would fall into, even if took 5-6 years to really become self evident.
We are quite clearly have so much stronger foundations that they had then where the loss of Mo would simply be the loss of a top but aged player and not some harbinger of a new way of having to do business
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Ouch. Guessing that’s going to affect us re-signing guys like Mo.
It will be interesting to see if it makes us tighten the purse strings on upper wages a bit. Maybe VVD renews and Mo and Trent leave? Just guessing. We might have more stomach for paying transfer fees and keeping the wage bill in check, than not paying transfer fees and letting the wages spiral too high.
As I said you’re effectively looking at a period that’s a year ago. Since then we’ve regained a CL spot and look on course to do it again as well as two decent season so far.
Probably explains why we might not be offering big extensions to contracts.
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