Is SW correct or making excuses on behalf of owners ? | Vital Football

Is SW correct or making excuses on behalf of owners ?

DRAYTON GREEN

DRAYTON GREEN

Vital Football Legend
I started a thread before on the owners amateur video which was removed due to readers reporting rather than doing the right thing of actually putting their point of view forward, which is whole point of a forum.

This time we have SW coming out arguing for clubs decision for furlowing non playing staff.

https://www.pinkun.com/norwich-city/webber-defends-city-s-use-of-furlough-scheme-1-6623711

https://www.pinkun.com/norwich-city/deferrals-not-yet-being-considered-by-city-1-6623665

A simple question is being raised.
Should supporters / tax payers who are likely to be in financial predicaments themselves and already having paid out for games not being played this season / next season and away priority schemes for away games this season / next season, be footing the bill for non playing staff whilst the overpaid players continue to earn full wages ?

A quote from SW :
City’s sporting director, Stuart Webber, said: “It almost became an obsession of putting the footballers out on the street and they all have to have a sign saying how much money they’ve given back.

Is ' putting players out on the street ' a good message to send out when they are all safely tucked away in their large houses on huge wages whilst NHS staff on small wages are working long hours risking their lives everyday ?

Should owners of football clubs keep their own money and use tax payers money to pay their staff ?
If they have morals they would not.

Is the argument of picking on footballers fair when richer companies are not mentioned ?
Football is in public eye and other companies are not and are likely to provide a product and need to make a profit. Football club owners often run it as a hobby and take a loss as the obscene wages of footballers defy economic logic.

More from the article.
The wages saved on 200 non-playing staff during the shutdown has contributed towards saving £2.5m for the self-funded club, with senior staff sticking to their guns despite seeing wealthier clubs Liverpool, Tottenham and Bournemouth reverse their decision to use the scheme.

If we have 200 staff and even allowing for earning maximum £ 2500 per month gross for full 3 months, my maths makes a saving of £ 1.5 million and that is assuming they are all paid up to this amount and work 12 months a year.

Its a simple question.
Should Norwich City owners take our money to pay their non playing staff in addition to the costs we already incur towards overpaid players ?
 
Last edited:
If the vast majority of PL clubs think it is morally wrong to furlough non playing staff , but the Smiths think it is OK to take tax payers money as they think they hold the moral ground as a self funded club , then they should not be in charge of NCFC as they cannot run it without us bailing them out
 
Phew, that’s a big question, DG. I’ll try to answer it with an eye on both sides of the question.

As I’ve written before, I don’t think that any Premier League club should be furloughing staff due to the huge amounts of money being paid to them by the TV companies and their sponsors, which has to be used to pay players huge wages.

The amount that players earn has become incredible over the duration of the PL years and the days of players finishing playing and then having to run a pub, or join the Police in Greg Downs’ case are long gone. Greg told me that he played football a decade too soon to earn any really big money, meaning he’s had to forge a whole new career upon retiring from football.

The amount paid to the players is not their fault though and everyone would accept such huge salaries if they were offered in whatever their occupation happens to be. That is a fault with general human greed, which explains the needs of TV companies to grab subscriptions from the paying public to their TV channels and they have needed to keep paying more and moreover the years to beat the opposition.

I understand Webber’s point about targeting players and I think Matt Hancock was wrong to publicly do so, simply because as Webber says, there are plenty of other industries where people are well paid that are not being asked to take pay cuts, such as bankers and politicians.
I particularly enjoyed Piers Morgan (who I normally despise) spearing Hancock with a question of whether he would take a pay cut, as his opposite numbers in New Zealand have done. Hancock refused, by the way.

I understand that the playing staff, coaches, board members and owners here at Norwich have established an initial £200k fund to help the local community. Their point being that they want their money to go where it is most needed rather than to just be swallowed up by central government.

It’s also worth noting that any salary cut will mean less tax paid to the Treasury. Virtually every footballer at Norwich will be paying the 45% rate, which means Hancock’s suggestion that footballers take pay cuts would actually hurt the government’s income - showing his ignor on the subject, which I note he hasn’t repeated.

I still think that PL Clubs shouldn’t be furloughing non-playing staff and we all know that Delia and Michael are not wealthy enough anymore to own a club of Norwich’s size, hence the financial model that attempts to make the club self-funding. Their personal fortune of around £30m (as reported) is tiny by comparison with say, Mike Ashley at Newcastle who has a net worth of around £2 billion!

All of the net worth figures printed on the internet will have been reduced by quite some margin after the COVID associated stock market crash and it’s also worth remembering that those figures relates to everything and not just cash in the bank.

Even so, Norwich City could afford to pay their staff that are currently without a role. Having said that, we are financial minnows in this league, literally, and the multi-billionaire owners of the bigger clubs will not even notice these issues. They also won’t notice issues with transfers and running costs when football does eventually re-start.
These clubs will be in the best position to pick the bones of other clubs, particularly in the EFL or abroad, who are struggling with cash flow.

I’m guessing that Norwich are trying to keep a level of financial competitiveness (comparatively speaking) by furloughing these affected staff.

Would us fans be happy if we had paid our staff from the club coffers rather than furloughing staff but then not have the ability to work in the transfer market to buy some new defenders? Meanwhile the likes of West Ham, Brighton, Burnley etc, those clubs were are up against, can still buy players due to either years in the PL behind them or owners with deep pockets? What if we had to sell one of them Max Aarons at a knockdown price as we were financially struggling?

It’s a tough decision and one that Webber is clearly trying to justify. I think the sad reality is that Delia and Michael aren’t wealthy enough to run this football club as we would all like. Having said that, we are only two years into the “new model” and it hasn’t done us too badly so far. The academy and scouting teams have unearthed plenty of young gems and I’d hope they can keep doing that as to become truly self funding we will need to produce and develop players for a small fee before selling them for massive fees.

Some of what I’ve written here is devil’s advocate, obviously.
 
The Athletic carried a story yesterday in which Micheal Bailey interviewed Webber, his missus and Ben Kensell. The crux of it being their explanation for furloughing.

One interesting point being that non-one knows how long or how bad the pandemic is going to be with us for. It could last another 12-18 months yet.

Money and human greed is the driver for all this. Trying to make your business the best but also making sure you can sustain paying your staff, at least in the short-term. I think the furlough scheme is set to run until June at the moment. How much longer can/will it run though?

The amounts of money being borrowed by every government to try to protect their economies is mind boggling. If you thought the last decade of austerity was bad then imagine how the future is going to be...
 
Bailey wrote that the club’s revenue budget for 2019/20 was £123m with £93m from TV money. expenditure was predicted at £125m...
 
Tuckster.

Thanks for your comprehensive response and looking from different perspectives to arrive with a balanced answer.

I have always understood the ' large pay resulting in big income tax payment ' argument but am not totally convinced that the players are thinking of NHS benefits from their 45 % of wages contribution.
It has always been an argument that it is not the players fault that pay is so high
as clubs pay them that and that us standard wage earners would not refuse it.

Firstly there cannot be a comparison between us fans and footballers in terms of wages and principles.
Footballers earn obscene wages. Nobody can possibly disagree with that.
Who is to blame for that ? It comes down to sky and other media companies.

These companies pour millions into football but if we look at where this goes and its affect on people in football, only the players benefit.
The clubs receive the money but pay virtually all of it out on inflated transfer fees and wages.
The fans pay higher ticket prices for games being played at the most awkward days and times.
The players earn ridiculous wages and associated benefits.

Secondly in the current difficult times we can again look at the 3 different groups affected.
The club is in danger of losing income from the likes of sky and to a much lesser extent casual tickets and associated match day purchasers.
They have looked at asking players to take pay cuts which in general have been refused. Pay cuts would have helped the owners with outlay in times when income could drastically reduced.
The fans have paid out for ST games this season and in my case all of next season, away preference option fees and 4 Arsenal away tickets.
Most fans will be experiencing a big percentage loss in earnings and paying out for football not being played.
The players are still receiving their huge wages and living in comfort without having to do any work at all.

Who is coming out best again in this scenario.

If we can turn out attention to Norwich City and their incredibly unlikely
' self funded ' status and stay in premier league philosophy.
We have already see it does not work as we sit bottom of the league 6 points adrift. Nice idea in theory but not being able to sign premier league standard players has caused us to be in the position we find ourselves.
Many owners are extremely wealthy and do not rely on balancing the incoming and outgoing money and as such can buy players for large fees and survive
these times by paying players and non playing staff.

If Norwich City owners cannot afford to pay non playing staff their assumed low wages for 3 months then although abundantly clear before and now totally obvious they cannot be owners of a premier league club.
As an elderly couple without children sitting around with nothing to do for days on end, they should be thinking about the future of the club and how it could best be kept afloat and a premier league club we all desperately want it to be.
There is only one answer. The club has to be sold.
They must not cling on to ownership of what will soon become a championship club when a chance to sell up and pass on to a suitable rich owner would greatly enhance our chance of retaining premier league status for a long time.

I can only estimate that they do not need the money at their age and without children to leave it to, have no incentive to sell.
Therefore they will continue to place their ownership above the fans desperation for the club to succeed and if these terrible times do not change their attitude then nothing ever will.
 
A lot of very valid points, DG and I don’t disagree with any of them.

A couple of observations though and not all about Norwich City.

The Premier League has been bankrolled into what it is today by Sky and more recently BT Sport, as well as the overseas TV companies such as “Eleven Sports” who are owned by Andrea Radrizzani, who also owns Leeds United.

The sums of money paid for the PL TV rights is obscene and at this time sits at £5bn for the rights 2019-22. That suggests to me that the real money for those TV companies is for people watching from their armchairs on subscription packages.

Of course, if you’re a real football fan then you’re probably buying one of these packages as well as a season ticket at your club, like I do. It costs me not far off £2k per year!
I‘ve just added it up and that‘s the first time I’ve ever done that - it’s shocked me a little. That’s for 2x adult season tickets and an U18 one for our boy.
That‘s before you thrown in a few away days as well.

I subscribe to The Athletic and read there that players at some clubs are concerned that if they take pay cuts it will not go to the right people and that some owners might just use it to help pay bills.

I also think that football players are targeted, like Webber suggests, because they are young, very wealthy men, getting paid a fortune to do something they love. Many, much more wealthy people who aren’t in the public eye are not targeted.
Webber said in the Athletic that several Formula 1 teams have also furloughed staff but there isn’t a word of bad press about that, suggesting there is a stigma attached to footballers because of their huge salaries.

In any sane world, nobody should be paid as much as they are, or indeed any other profession. The extremes of poverty and wealth are frankly sickening in modern society but maybe that’s going off topic a little.

Delia and Michael are not wealthy enough to own a club of our size, no doubt about that. I don’t know if they are actively blocking a sale of the club anymore. I‘m sure that I read that they would now be open to selling to the right person (?) instead of the depressing thought of handing it down to Nephew Tom.

I‘m not privy to whether or not any realistic offers to buy the club have been made lately - does anyone know on here?

If there have t been any such offers then we are stuck in this position with the self funded model being the only option, I’d say.

SW has definitely put us in a much better position than we were when he arrived and that is all anyone can ask for. He seems a very savvy and astute guy in terms of the football world and how it works and I think we’re lucky to have him.
He certainly knows more than I do about it all.

There are a lot of morality issues around these huge salaries and the amount of money involved. I’ve tried to cut & paste some of the Athletic article in case you guys don’t get to see it but it won’t let me ☹️
 
A great response Tuckster and I agree with it all.

Just a couple of points as I really should be working.

A solution to the wages position to keep everybody happy could be that
the non playing staff wages are paid directly to them as usual with this total figure each month taken out of the players wages.
1. Players are helping out their own club and staff who assist in the running
of the club to help them play and earn.
2. Income tax more or less the same. Just a short fall in the 45 % paid by players
for the small wages of non playing staff who will pay 20 %.
3. No bad press for furlowing.
4. Non playing staff retain full wages.
5. Club continue to pay same outgoings.

SW is clearly an astute guy and maybe we are lucky to have him but also he is lucky to have us. He and his partner are both paid well for being involved in our great club and he has openly confirmed he will leave after 3 years of his latest signed contract and we are therefore a stepping stone.
Just look at Huddy and where they are now. We could well be in a similar position in a years time with him taking another club in an upwardly direction.

The Smiffs have to sell the club if we are to become a premier league club.
If they do not it is very likely we will be a long time in championship ( at best )
and I personally believe they would be happy with that as long as they cling on to control.
 
Good ideas about the salary donations to staff etc, I like it.

I think we’re ok as far as the similarity to Huddersfield after SW left them.
After he’d gone, they decided to change tack and closed their academy, which is of course, key, if you want to be a self funded club. Their academy manager, I think, then joined us and Colney was rejuvenated. I think we pinched a couple of youngsters from them too.
 
I sit on the fence about Piers Morgan but understand why people do not like him
but this is his rant about rich people furlowing staff.

 
True Bears.
This is why under the Smiffs ownership we will never be a genuine premier league club for several seasons.
Only time we appear to get into a debt free position ( which is crazy anyway as all success is built on borrowing sensibly to thrive ) a relegation follows and we go back into debt again and have to sell players.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.