It seems to be a matter of spotting the person who has no chance of game time where he is - Schweinsteiger is a little too old. Picked up some offered odds on the FA Cup today - Chelsea 13/2; Liverpool 11/1 Palace 28/1. A couple of cup runs (no loss before January could help.

Yeah that's if you plan on having his contract run down and not selling him on renewing his deal.

His wages would be about £6.5 mil and £7.5 mil and the transfer fee divided by 4 or 5 years is the difference between 6/7 and 12/13 millions.

When has Parish let any player run his contract down? (and don't anyone use Nathaniel Clyne)

And your agreement with the other poster on the transfer spend each season, or to be precise, January, has flaws. Mainly Adebayor. We paid him £67k a week. If we could pay him that with FFP we could've paid someone else instead?

And the wage increase allowed was either £12mil or £16mil for every club before league finish money and all other club revenue. It goes up again this season.

After trimming the squad this Summer and another allowed increase in wages I'd say we can afford Benteke's wages. The problem however is how that affects the team and squad when the current highest earner is £80k and the next couple are at £60k and then down to £40k. Having someone come in on £130k must create issues.

Edited by Rudi Hedman (06 Aug 2016 9.49am)

COYP

Thanks Rudi. The first proper answer. I'm going to think about it. Do you think 130m revenue and 90-100 on net player spend per year are about right?

If you want to live in a world full of kindness, respect and love, try to show these qualities.

Net player spend -- my definition -- is net transfer spend plus everything we spend on wages bonuses etc across the club.

90m spending on that out of 130m seems reasonable to me on that basis. It's 69%. It leaves 30m-40m on other stuff which I think is okay. I am NOT saying net transfer spend of 90m to 100m.

I agree that would bankrupt us but net player spend on the level I describe wouldn't seem unreasonable to me. (Or is it? I'm not looking for an argument, I want facts.)

If I ever said net transfer spend of 90m to 100m, then that was an error.
..

If you want to live in a world full of kindness, respect and love, try to show these qualities.

So I accept you are right that we wouldn't let his contract run down (unless he was such a terrible flop nobody would take him, god forbid).

He's 26 in Dec. So I think a fair assumption is that he'd have zero transfer value at 32. Certainly for budgeting that would seem reasonable.

Now, say we renew his contract with 3 years to go to make it run for 2 more (ie a total of 5, and 8 from when he joined). By then, he's 27 going on 28 and his contract takes him to 32 going on 33.

So we could say 8 years to amortise his transfer fee down to zero. If we assume it's 32.5m, then the cost to us is 4m/year in transfer fees and (a reported) 140k a week of wages (7.28m a year).

So the annual net spend would be 11.28m a year. Assuming we went for net player spend (see earlier definition --I'm sure accountants would have better jargon) of 100m a season he would account for 11% of it.

I promise you: we need to raise a good chunk of change to get him in. I bet, if we still want this, we are trying hard to flog non core players to fund this. Me, I think they'd sell one of Wilf or Yannick for 20-something if they could.

If you want to live in a world full of kindness, respect and love, try to show these qualities.