He turned down a new contract with Huddersfield before coming here. I spoke to some of their fans at the time who said that their chairman was paying out silly wages for League 1, so if he's turning down Huddersfield wages...
Why should I believe that Hudds fans are any better informed about what their club pays in wages than you are about what our club pays?
I think their total spend on playing costs, including all transfers, signing on fees, agents fees, and probably the scouting network, was about £7.5m last season. Even if the vast majority of that, say £6m was spent on wages, which it wasn't, it still only works out at an average of about £215k p.a. or £4.1k a week for a 28 man squad (and they had a decent sized squad last year cause Clarke was a shopaholic of near PDC proportions).
So either Roberts was one of their top earners, which seems unlikely, or we paid massively over the odds for him.
Which is besides the point as there was no lucrative Huddersfield contract to compete with because the facts are:
- he turned down a new contract under Clarke at the beginning of the 11/12 season, with a lot of talk about him angling for a move to Wednesday or Leeds, but that never came off
- by the summer of 2012 Clarke was gone and Grayson had taken over and didn't fancy him so there was no contract offered when his old one ran out
So he wasn't exactly "turning down Huddersfield wages" as there was nothing on the table for him.
You're living in a fucking dream world if you think we're paying Roberts £7k a week. That's over £360k a year. With NI close to £400k or over 9% of the old playing budget, over 17% of the new one. And we know that one of our long serving mid fielders has just been binned off because we aren't prepared to pay him less the half that.
It's just bollocks and you must know it.
Either that or you're insisting that PDC saddled us with a massively overpaid player. Do you think he's fucking useless in the transfer market, or do you suspect he was lining Spencer's pockets in the process.
