dibo
Well-Known Member
The idea of "happy to be here" hasn't been put as a permanent thing - it's been pretty clearly put as "what needs to happen whilst we build a sustainable club. To have a successful future, we must *have* a future.
The TV deal is sorted with Fox, but not with FTA, and neither the salary cap nor the club distributions from FFA have been set.
We literally don't know how much money we will be getting nor how much we need to be competitive. In that context, we'd be *bonkers* to be committing to deals that go into the new rights period. We don't know if we're going to be massively high-balling or low-balling our offers to people, we don't know if the resulting squad standard is going to be competitive based on what others will be able to spend.
There's far too much that we don't know to go "let's start spending". And that's before we get to the fact that we're still operating on the distributions from the current deal.
Yes, everyone else gets the same increase. But if the increase in distributions (over and above the cap) mean we no longer need to spend the floor to avoid making recurrent losses, then (marquees aside) we will improve significantly compared to others.
I'm not sure that other clubs are going to race to spend f**kloads more money though. On average, the league's clubs lose >$20m a year, so if we're losing $1m a year, that means most clubs are losing more than us. They might be more likely than us to use the extra money to consolidate their positions, and the cap situation means that they've got less room to grow.
There was that story from Tom Smithies comparing clubs' spends last year, and it said we were spending about 90% of the salary cap and City were spending about 120% (thanks to various sponsorship agreements and whatnot that allow additional spending). But City were maxed out - they couldn't spend any more on their cap players.
If the new deal gives us a 30% increase in the cap, and we go merely from spending 90% to 100%, and City stays maxed at 120%, it does interesting things to average salaries.
Our average salary (split across 23 players) goes up by 44%. Theirs goes up by 30%. We won't *close* the gap, but it narrows. They go from offering nearly 50% more per player to only offering 30%.
It won't put us at the top, but unless we find another $3m a season we're not competing with City on wages. We really need another $1.5m or so to be able to get marquees and match the other clubs, but it's really hard to see where that sort of money comes from. But that's where investors need to be attracted to the club.
With the COE plans and the stadium plans, we're actually going to need bucketloads of capital going forward. But those things raise the potential of a future where the football club's able to be sheltered somewhat against fluctuating fortunes on the field. The development plans make the football club more attractive and the football club makes the development plans more attractive.
If the football club's bleeding red ink and there are doubts over its future, none of it works. If the football operations are breaking even, the odds of an investor (rather than donor) coming through who wants to partner to do the development work increases massively, and there might actually be some serious progress.
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