This is the sort of stuff the yellow mob come up with.
Maybe. I'm sure all their speculations about our financial shape, and our fans defence of it, will be well tested over the next few seasons if Andrew Black is looking to sell the club. We can all assess then whether our strategy was a success then.
Even so, our spending relative to size has never been in the same ballpark as Bournemouth.
Our biggest name players have mostly come in on frees or loan. A few of those players have been rumoured to be on 3-5k, a reasonable amount at this level but not unusual weighted against the other teams fighting for promotion (tranmere excepted). I think over the 3 seasons prior to this we never spent over £150,000 for a player, and only on young players with a view to being able to sell them on for a higher fee later on. The one time we tried to sign contracted players this season (Collins/ TAH) we were sent over budget by a £350,000 tribunal fee (for both) and put ourselves by choice under embargo.
Bournemouth on the other hand have been spending £800,000 on people like Tubbs (who has very little resale value and sits on the bench), making £500,000 bids for unproven 18 year olds from the SPL, spending £400,000 on Grabban, trying to sign Ritchie for £800,000, paying wages potentially up to £14,000 a week across the biggest squad in the division, while averaging attendances of 5-6,000.
Other teams can compare us all they like but those figures are way above Swindon's spending power as its been deployed since the takeover.
This isn't a bitter on attack on Bournemouth. It's hard to be jealous of anyone else's club the way Swindon are playing at the moment. It just seems an unbelievable indictment of the FFP Rules that their current model can fit anywhere on the spectrum of FFP, assuming it was brought in to prevent the boom and bust of clubs like Pompey spending massively beyond their means.
If the Russian investor pulls out and leaves the club paying that wage bill they will be completely f*cked. The rules should be there to prevent that possibility from existing.
(have a gold star anyone that read all that)
