Salary Cap

[bigbobjoylove]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulfletcher/2010/11/how_to_improve_the_football_le.html#277626

Well, clubs in the fourth tier are currently limited to spending 55% (it used to be 60%) of their income on player wages or risk a transfer embargo. This is technically known as Salary Control Management Protocol (SCMP).

League One clubs agreed to trial the system at their last meeting in October. They are currently filling in the necessary paperwork and will continue to do so for the remainder of the season, although at this stage there will not be any punishment for clubs that fail to stay within the limits.

Would that be with a view to introducing it officially next season perhaps? If so, would that effect us with our 2m yearly losses?

[Summerof69]

Considering Notts County broke the cap by a large margin last season, and they got away with hardly any punishment, I'm not holding my breath.

[luckyluke699]

I was reading this the other day too, seems very sensible to me.

It is one way to achieve the desired goal of ensuring that clubs don't overspend, though it might penalise "richer" clubs who have the money to invest in their team?

[jonny72]

Depends what our player salaries are as a percentage of total turnover. Not sure you can actually tell this from the annual accounts as I think there is just a single wages line, which would cover non-playing staff as well. I'll check my copy of the latest accounts this evening and will post the relevant figures.

Whether it affects us or not, it's the way forward and it will apply to everyone. Wages have spiralled out of control as one club pays more in wages, then the next does, then the first spends even more and so on. Controls like this should help get clubs breaking even, or at least getting close to it.

[The_Plagiarist]

Problem is with these % caps is there are ways around them.

If a club wants to break the % cap they can easily artificially inflate their income

Sell a couple of golden season tickets in house suddenly your income rockets hence you have a bigger allowed wage budget

Or you could just ignore the rules like notts county

[Simon Pieman]

I think the trouble with the cap is that they still don't make a lot of teams break even.