[Blue Baggie]

With Dowling's vision - if he carries it out get ready for a relegation battle next season.
Lai - Jenkins - Dowling are going to rip the heart out of the club.
Sell off any player worth money plan? madness - some will want to leave, some are still happy to stay, why make them all feel unwanted?
Balance the books, get Lai some more money back short term. Albion do NOT give in and sell up, not in my world they don't.
We will become the new whipping boys - I'd rather us go bankrupt and they all get the boot and we rebuild without them.

[Salopbaggie]

There is no chance Albion will sign Dwight Gayle permanently this summer, technical director Luke Dowling has confirmed. (Express & Dingle).

This has to be the most concerning press statement in years https://www.expressandstar.com/sport/foo...is-summer/

[St Charles Owl]

With all due respect, you can no longer afford Dwight Gayle, aside from the 3m quid in wages per year he would want, what would the transfer fee be on top of that?? You may not have spent much of your PL parachute money, but your wages as a club will be right up there near the top. I assume you kept your Season Ticket prices down at PL levels as well to keep the fans happy but the revenue from that is about to become the key thing for you over the next few years, and you do not have the crowds to sustain any players on PL wages!! You cannot lose more than 39m in a rolling three seasons under P&S, that clock started ticking the minute you were relegated and last season you kept a lot of the players you had in the PL and no doubt a lot of them on very high wages, you don’t have to pay big transfer fees to eat into your revenues, players wages will be higher than revenues already.

I’m not having a go, but I am speaking from experience. We have had one of the highest number of ST holders and attendances for the past few years, and we have some of the highest prices as well yet despite a 27k+ average we have made a loss of over 20m pounds in each of the last two seasons, which saw us under a transfer embargo and still today under serious threat of more sanctions. Our highest earners are on about 40k per week but those are players with quality that we didn’t pay a transfer fee for, we got them when they were out of contract and so could afford to pay the higher wages we needed to so we could sign them at all.

You are at a crossroads as a club, you tried to keep most of the squad together after relegation, you added Gayle and Barnes and you gave yourself a shot to go straight back up. Had you had a better manager you might well have achieved that goal but it wasn’t to be. Now the financial reality kicks in, if you don’t cut your cloth accordingly and sign players on championship wages you will be saddled with players on 3-4 year contracts costing you a fortune each year and unless you get promoted you will miss that 39m loss by quite a margin!! Of course you could go the opposite way and spend some money and keep your better players like we have seen clubs do before, but the EFL have become wise to that and under the new P&S rules they can stop you doing that as well, just ask Brum about that!!!!

I don’t know the personalities involved in your club but what is being said here makes a lot of sense if you are to stay the right side of the rules, it just feels like a lack of ambition on behalf of the club at a time when you want them to really go for it but that path is fraught with future dangers that might be best avoiding. Unless there is something in your accounts that shows money draining from the club into the owners pockets, I think the financial reality is what is behind that statement.

---

And just to drive the above points home, today it has emerged that it seems SWFC PLC or whatever we are called these days have sold Hillsborough directly to our owner for a sum not yet disclosed. Essentially Chansiri’s company that owns the football club which he owns 100% has just sold the stadium to himself!! That money will go directly towards our P&S statement and will be the only way we can stay within the 39m loss limit this coming season and avoid a points deduction or transfer embargo. The P&S rules have to change at some point but I can guarantee this loophole will be closed pretty quickly by the EFL.

[Beefy 1965]

Ah great so at least next year we will have HRK
We got kanu, Robson Kanu !!!

[Blue Baggie]

We only have 3 problems
Lai - Jenkins - Dowling, not a clue between them.

[4evaabaggie]

Phil, i disagree, they are three of our problems, others include biased media, biased governing body, p@@s poor refing decisions .... Dwight dives .... three game ban plus an extra one if we had then gotten past the vile, Grealish dives ..... gets motm, no ban and wins the tie. We get three reds in three games for two yellows, Grealish kicks lumps out of people hand balls it dives not even a single yellow. Bile breach ffp, dingles breach ffp no punishment, blues do it 9 point deduction ... need I go on.

[BaggieSteve]

Dowling’s statement made me really angry. It was the outrageous assertion that redundancies would be required in non playing staff if we signed Gayle on his existing wages. To make a direct causal link between signing Gayle and firing staff was, in my opinion, a disgrace. Like all of us, I fully appreciate the need for the club to be financially strong but, bearing in mind the aim should be to regain our premiership status, then I would suggest a good way to do it would be to sign one of the best three strikers of in the division and look for savings elsewhere, savings that don’t require firing back room staff. We shall sell Rondon regardless, and we are releasing other well paid professionals including Morrison and Barry. It’s this lack of empathy with the supporters that really angers me, particularly when accompanied by a plea for us to “trust them” as Dowling said in his statement. I wouldn’t trust them to organise a p*ss up in a brewery, their incompetence is attaining breathtaking proportions. All we need now is for them to make another incredibly successful managerial appointment as indicated by their recent track record

[Slick_Footwork]

I can accept that we will not be signing Gayle and the fact we will probably sell a few others - Rondon, Dawson, Livermore, Gibbs, Phillips, at least - and replace them at a fraction of the cost, that's the cost of relegation.

What I'm worried about is the capability of the idiots that run our club in signing replacements.

These guys couldn't even identify a manager to replace Moore - when there were dozens of experienced managers available - so how on earth are they going to find someone to replace Rondon for £2m?

If these guys had an ounce of footballing knowledge between them then we would've been promoted with the squad we had.

The one thing that p*sses me off is nature of the Dowling's statement and some of the tripe he spouts to try and keep fans on side. In particular "We don't want to keep players on big contracts and have to lay the general staff off and make people redundant." What an absolute disgrace of a statement this is, to scare normal people with redundancies in a desperate attempt to try and keep the fans on side when they try to do things on the cheap.

This muppet needs to realise that fans aren't stupid. We know there are another year of parachute payments available and we know there is absolutely zero comparison with a player's wage and what a general staff members earns. We know that someone like Jake Livermore earns more in 1 week than probably 3 members of general staff earn in a year.

Please get this guy out of our club and replace him with someone with half a brain. If his ability to recruit a footballer is on par with his ability to articulate a logical story to the press, relegation is nailed on.

[4evaabaggie]

In the interest of balance, not supporting his comment but relegated clubs have in the past, in the name of cost cutting, laid off backroom staff, you can do without a tea lady for example but you can't do without footballers ...... laying off backroom staff makes no sense because as you rightly say a footballer on 55 grand a week costs the same as three minimum wage staff do in a year ....... but as with politics scaremongering keeps the public worried and compliant.

[Blue Baggie]

In the interest of balance, not supporting his comment but relegated clubs have in the past, in the name of cost cutting, laid off backroom staff, you can do without a tea lady for example but you can't do without footballers ...... laying off backroom staff makes no sense because as you rightly say a footballer on 55 grand a week costs the same as three minimum wage staff do in a year ....... but as with politics scaremongering keeps the public worried and compliant.

Dowling is thick the £6 million it would cost to bring Gayle to the baggies £3million wages per year £3million transfer fee per year for 3 years =
£6 million pounds a year - if we paid a tea lady - let be gererous and say £6,000 a year for 2 days work per week. With Dowlings threat to remove back room staff we would have to get rid of ONE THOUSAND TEA LADIES to fund Gayle's costs
This is a man who is charged with making decisions at our club    He hasn't got a fkn Scooby Doo