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Its been said before but it would be so counter productive if he was sold. If its 20 mill then half of that would be needed to replace him at least. Its reported that Man City has agreed a fee of around 27 mill for Dzeko which Im pleased at as their eyes could have easily been turned in Carrolls direction.

If you look at the other teams around then not many others either could afford him or really need him. Man U dont have stupid money anymore (unless they get taken over, Man City as above, Liverpool no money and doing sh17, Spurs have a lot of strikers and I dont think 20 mill would be enough for even Ashley to part. Arsenal wouldnt pay the money even though they have it so that only leaves Chelsea which would mean old Roman going back on his word of no more stupid money signings.

He cost us nothing and isnt on a kings ransom. Im not saying that Ashley needs to spend a fortune (though it would be nice) but bringing in the right players to compliment him is a must.

He's a once-in-a-generation talent shouldn't be sold, regardless. I don't think Dzeko is much if any better than him and is three years older. So I think it would take more than half of 20M to replace Carroll with someone of similar quality (if there is such a player available at all).

the incoming rules on financial performance should mean that taking a punt on a player like carroll is less appealing to a club like man city.
i dont claim know the fine detail, but the amount you spend/owe at any one point will be linked to how much you, as a club, earn in a particular period. say, if you turnover Xm a year, you cant spend 2Xm in one window, or whatever. so what you spend, and what you spend it on, will be more closely scrutinised whoever you are. indeed, to pay over the odds for a striker who wouldnt get into your first eleven wouldnt get past the clubs accountants.
i think it starts next season, there will be penalties for clubs who overspend.
this is a bit half baked, when i'm next on i'll have had a look to see what the details are, but basically its less likely that any club will pay top whack for a bad boy striker in the first flush of on-field success. its more likely you pay big money for a sure thing, after this window...

That's interesting. I had heard something a few weeks ago about it. But I know very little about it. Seems like your a bit more upto speed with it. But if like you say its based on raw turnover I don't think it will change much.

TV rights alone are around 45 million, plus gate takings, plus merch, plus season tickets, plus corporate intake, plus sponsership, plus well you get the point.

Turnover for Prem. clubs is massive so these new rules are not likely to change much. The effect is likely to be similar to the 8 home grown squad members rule changes which started this season.

Which are framed so lightly as to not make the big clubs squeal too much that they end up making little to no impact whatsoever. Essentially all it means is that big PL clubs have to start poaching foreign talent younger which I'm not sure is a good thing.

The reasons you cite (bad boy, first flush of success, upcoming financial fair play rules), lmk, are likely why City is showing open interest in Dzeko and not in Carroll. I don't think they're worried about the turnover so much, especially as it's affected by acquiring forwards since they're going to look to sell Santa Cruz and probably Adebayor too. It's also quite possible that Tevez will go soon as well.

here's an article from the guardian about the new rules. they dictate how much an owner can add above the clubs turnover:


Three-quarters of the Premier League's clubs will need to reduce significantly their spending on players' wages if they are to qualify for European competitions after Uefa's "financial fair play" rules are introduced tomorrow. The European governing body's executive committee is set to approve the regulations, which will require clubs to break even, not make persistent losses, from 2012-13.

In 2008-09, the most recent year for which the Premier League's 20 clubs' accounts are published, 14 made substantial losses. One other, Blackburn Rovers, made a £3.6m profit but were subsidised with a £5m loan from the club's owners, which will no longer be permitted.

Most clubs in the Premier League are funded by owners, most spectacularly at Chelsea and Manchester City, where Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour subsidised losses of £47m and £93m respectively. Owners will, according to the rules, be permitted to invest in clubs, via permanent shares rather than repayable loans, to build solid infrastructure such as training grounds or youth development facilities, but not overspending on wages or transfers.

Uefa has taken more than three years to develop the rules since the organisation's president, Michel Platini, warned of the "danger to football" posed by debt, overspending and "rampant commercialism". They will be phased in, with club owners allowed to subsidise €45m (£38m) losses over the three years from 2012-13, reducing to €30m in total over the next three years.

Platini has described the need to staunch overspending as "a question of survival for our sport". In the Premier League, besides Chelsea and City, Aston Villa, subsidised by the club's owner, Randy Lerner, lost £46m in 2008-09, while Sunderland lost £26m. Liverpool lost £55m, principally because they had to pay £40m interest on £250m borrowed from banks. Manchester United made a profit only because of the £81m sale of Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid; in previous years since the Glazer family took over what was then the world's most profitable club and ladled huge debts on to it, United have sustained losses.

The Premier League had argued that clubs should be allowed to be continually subsidised by owners, but was overruled, as Uefa insisted it wanted to steer clubs across Europe to a more sustainable existence. Yesterday a Premier League spokesman acknowledged the clubs will have to rein in their spending in order to comply.

"The vast majority of what is being proposed is common sense, and has already [been], or is about to be, incorporated into Premier League rules," a spokesman said. "If the regulations are introduced as reported, we envisage a difficult period of adjustment for our member clubs who play, or aspire to play, in European competitions."

a further article explains that amortisation is used to assess a players value to the squad. this means a player who costs 20m and signs a 4 year deal appears on the balance sheet not as a 20m cost at the time he signs, but as 5m a year over the four years. this means that if you spend 50m this january, on players who all sign ffour year deals, you have spent 12.5m a year for the next four years. now think about the players city already have, and how much they will account for under these rules for the fees they commanded over the last few years. city are used as an example in the following COPIED article:

"Those who believe City will escape the rule's effect by having spent extravagantly before it comes in to force misunderstand simple accounting mechanisms. The exact dates when cash changes hands on transfer fees are not relevant; instead there is a balance-sheet instrument known as amortisation by which the total value of the fee is written down according to the length of the contract, causing a natural lag in the financial impact of transfer activity.

When David Silva joined City for £26m on a four-year contract in June, it added £6.5m a year to City's amortisation charge. By the end of last season the total charge had already reached £71m — almost 57% of the club's £125m turnover. Between them the additions of Jérôme Boateng, Yaya Touré, Mario Balotelli and James Milner added close to £17m, which the departure of Robinho and his £8.125m a year in amortisation charges could only partially offset.

Unless more of City's expensively acquired superstars join Robinho in going through the exit door, it is safe to say that their 2011-12 amortisation charge will be close to £90m. Wages, the drain demanding so much cash support from Mansour, further compound City's difficulties.

That bill reached £133.3m last season, with Touré alone having added another £10m in the meantime. Given the summer arrivals, even conservative estimates would assume the club's basic wage bill is now beyond £150m."

so, you can see from this that clubs maybe arent going to take a risk on unproven players like carroll, unless they are expecting him to be the only major purchase, or they are having a major clear out. his value to our club surely prices him out of the current market, when prices must be about to fall?

[www.uefa.com]

these are the rules uefa play by. its very dry, but the info is there. section 2, article 57 onwards, for those who are interested.

it begins - All licensees that have qualified for a UEFA club competition must comply with
the monitoring requirements, i.e. with the break-even requirement (Articles 58 to
63) and with the other monitoring requirements (Articles 64 to 68). - and is worth a look. if this goes ahead as stated, and it looks that way, the landscape will change for all of our clubs.

re, comments above, this has much sharper teeth than the homegrown player rule, or the 25 man squad. much.

Yeah it would seem that way. I thought it was attached purely to transfer spending not the entire balance sheet of the club. This is definitely going to have some major effects on the PL clubs.

To be honest I don't see how some of these clubs are going to be able to abide by the rules. Granted they will have the grace period where ownership can continue to inject cash but what happens after that.

In saying that with regards to the second article comparing the depreciation of an asset to the club's turnover, which I'm assuming does not include the club's intangible assets (ie. the players), is rather redundant. But that's my understanding and it may be wrong.

I can see this getting very complicated, boring and corrupt in the future. Perhaps in 10 years we will be on here discussing the signing of the next big thing accountant because I can see them becoming just as important as the players in time. There is bound to be alot of grey area and your average layman supporter is not going to understand any of it.

the players values are treat in a way which would appear to be very different to the guestimated transfer fees a player would command if he moved, which we read about every day.
they arent said to have a value as saleable assets (for this calculation), but they have an entry on the costs column each year as their initial contract runs down.
i.e., take collocini. we signed him for 10m on a four year deal. this would appear as a 2.5m cost on the accounts for each season of the initial four years he spent with us. its true that he has a potential transfer value, should he and the club decide to part company. unless he is actually sold, though, this value is meaningless as far as the above calculations go. so, if the player was bought cheaply and performed well, (bassong?) the club may value its assests as having increased in value, but this increase isnt realised until the player is sold. so potential transfer values are redundant (just for these purposes of course, clubs will use this data elsewhere in their accounts - accounts dont exist just for uefa, obviously), but amortisation costs are the important figures.
its actually normal practise to pay for a players transfer over the length of his initial deal, so a £10m player like colo, signing for four years, would be paid for in four annual installments to his old club. mike ashley wanted to pay for newcastles transfers in a single installment, but this would not change the accounting method used to calculate our performance against the uefa rules.
its worth pointing out that these rules can only be enforced against clubs who reach european competitions, but any club prepared to overspend beyond the limits would surely have these competitions as targets, and they must have a clean record considered over three seasons at the point of entering, so in effect it concerns all clubs.

the overall effect, if the rules work as intended, should be a reduction in transfer fees, and a reduction in average wages. the best players will still command the best fees, but the next level wont be paid as highly quite so readily by ambitious clubs.
it is a wage cap, but its a variable wage cap built to suit each club, rather than a blunt figure set each season across the board. this actually rewards positive performance over the ability to attract investment, and allows for creativity and business talent, secondary to footballing talent of course, in that balancing the spending is the aim. to be successful in the future, no club will be risking financial ruin in the way so many are now. what would chelsea/man city fans make of a few trophies over a ten year period of it left their club bankrupt and in the 4th division when the owner got bored/skinted? that scenario becomes less likely in future, in my opinion.

Yeah your right it is for the best, or would appear to be in theory. We both know in practice it will probably not be. Football is big business and it's plainly obvious that big business operates in what could kindly be described as 'cleverly'. I think this opens a massive can of worms for the future of the game.

What if teams get caught 'cooking' the books? Are they penalised points, money, relegated, banned from European competition for x no. of years. Surely that has the potential to be just as damaging to a club's future? And I don't think the 'natural deterent' argument suffices for football when it doesn't apply as one would assume it would in other matters of business.

It is not a matter of if clubs cheat, just a matter of when they get caught. Then what?

yeah, but something which is not currently against the rules, will be soon. thats a step in the right direction, and makes the portsmouth situation less likely to be repeated, and the potential worst possible situation at the highly leveraged champions league clubs less likely to be so damaging. it should also take the heat out of the market - its less likely a club will throw money in in such risky amounts if the prices have been lowered, and if the wages have been lowered too.
it doesnt really have full effect for another 6 years, but by then it should be almost unthinkable that a qpr could be bought by billionaires and headed for the top 4 of the premier league by way of the best players money can buy. (i understand that qpr's owners may not have such ambitions, but its true that they could well do this, and quickly). to get there, a club will need to be run well, managed and coached well, and maybe just a bit lucky, too.
as long as we have collective tv rights, there is a pool of clubs who can earn enough through normal football business to be on a reasonably level footing with the elite. this isnt the case just now, and there may well be some changes to combat this on behalf of the elite, but its a light at the end of the tunnel for those who have had enough of the same old clubs fighting for the same trophies. maybe.