If he'd stayed he wouldn't have had this impact, can't blame City for this one.
As for United, shambolic to let a talent like him who is a United fan stay at City for so long. More evidence of how poorly the club was run.
Cole Palmer | Chelsea Player
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As for United, shambolic to let a talent like him who is a United fan stay at City for so long. More evidence of how poorly the club was run.
Possibly not, but unless he's blinded by his childhood fandom (which isn't very common atall these days) I can't see you being anywhere near front runners.
So let me get this straight, to you £80K a week would be considered too low for a player who'd just about cracked 1000 career minutes of first team football across all comps (most of it being in the domestic cups) by the time he moved? What in the feck?
Assuming the figure is somewhere close to reality it definitely feels like a modest amount now given how well the move has actually turned out in the end but I'm pretty sure giving even £80K a week to a player with Palmer's pre-Chelsea record and experience would certainly raise some eyebrows and IMO rightly so. And mind you even £80K/wk would be around 3-4 times the amount he was on at Man City.
Ofcourse 80k is low, he is a first choice player and they don't sign 80k contract for 7 years.So let me get this straight, to you £80K a week would be considered too low for a player who'd just about cracked 1000 career minutes of first team football across all comps (most of it being in the domestic cups) by the time he moved? What in the feck?
Assuming the figure is somewhere close to reality it definitely feels like a modest amount now given how well the move has actually turned out in the end but I'm pretty sure giving even £80K a week to a player with Palmer's pre-Chelsea record and experience would certainly raise some eyebrows and IMO rightly so. And mind you even £80K/wk would be around 3-4 times the amount he was on at Man City.
After all the shit Chelsea owners got, they did very good PR job.
All these "he is only on 80k, 100k" and then you see the total wage bill, it's one of the highest. Like I said, Liverpoolesque.
Edit: where is this 80k even reported. All I see is some shit sites, the usual crap ones reporting it.
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But the point is he wasn't a first choice player when he signed. This is the whole crux of the strategy Chelsea pursued in the summer - going after highly rated young players who hadn't yet signed a second lucrative professional contract. The wage bill dropped by more than £50m per year between last year and this one - currently we spend about 75% of what you and City do on wages.
They offered to quintuple Palmer's salary as a base, along with various clauses based on personal and club performance - for a guy with ~1000 professional minutes coming into the season it's no surprise he jumped at that opportunity.
He's first choice because he's been so good. When the signing was made there were tons of people saying he only swapped City's bench for Chelsea's bench. He was definitely signed to be an immediate part of the first team squad but I'm quite sceptical he was promised a guaranteed starting place. Rather he had to earn it, which he absolutely has.
As for the total wage bill, we'll see how it goes. Right now the latest published figures are still from the 2022/2023 season where compared to the current situation the squad was still very, very different and much larger in size due to the amount of transfer business done midway through last season with very little departures. For this season quite a few of the club's previous high earners (Kante, Havertz, Felix, Koulibaly, Pulisic, Azpi etc.) were moved on and more importantly the squad size was trimmed down by around 6-7 first team players so I would think it's pretty safe to say the overall salary bill hasn't stayed anywhere near the same amounts as it was in the last set of accounts.
If I had to guess I'd say our current wage bill is maybe 5th highest in the EPL behind the Manchester clubs, Arsenal & Liverpool. Still higher than Spurs' but probably not by a lot. Feel free to quote me in a year to mock if the overall salary bill is still the same but I honestly don't think it will.
It's actually quite likely he's on a base 80k salary, highly incentivized towards performances with additional bonuses - which he's probably attaining. Considering his profile before joining Chelsea and his fee (which is usually an indication of the bracket of salary they'll be in), it seems likely.
What's absolutely impossible is that a player who clearly believes in himself would tie himself to a 7y contract on that salary. There's absolutely no way that happened.
Oh yes, on this I agree. And the same goes for any other long term contract signed under the current ownership. I find it highly likely the contracts include some milestones that will raise the salary level permanently when the criteria are achieved and also bonus clauses based on individual and/or team success.
If that's the case I don't see any problem with it. The ones who prove successful like Palmer have the chance to earn more than their initial contract suggests, but at the same time the ones who struggle hard don't have their wages inflated too badly. That way the successful ones are happy to earn more and the flops are still earning a pretty decent wage for doing very little which they should have no complaints about.
All the long Chelsea contracts for young players have escalating percentage-based compounding clauses year over year based on individual and team performances - so his wages will definitely increase next season.
This is why it was attractive for younger players - continue to play well and your wages will scale. Every player on a long deal gets a 10% permanent bump every year if the team qualifies for the CL, and there's individual clauses as well based on minutes played, goals, assists, etc.
You’re talking to fans of a club where we tend to give players double what they deserve. The perception of what is a normal wage is completely skewed. For reference, Mainoo would go for more money than Palmer if we sold him now and rumour is we’ve just offered him a 60k a week contract. 80k for Palmer seems fine, I’m sure it’s incentivised for the coming years, which again just seems like smart business for everyone.So let me get this straight, to you £80K a week would be considered too low for a player who'd just about cracked 1000 career minutes of first team football across all comps (most of it being in the domestic cups) by the time he moved? What in the feck?
Assuming the figure is somewhere close to reality it definitely feels like a modest amount now given how well the move has actually turned out in the end but I'm pretty sure giving even £80K a week to a player with Palmer's pre-Chelsea record and experience would certainly raise some eyebrows and IMO rightly so. And mind you even £80K/wk would be around 3-4 times the amount he was on at Man City.
Yep, makes perfect sense. Which was why it was disingenuous to state "he signed a 7y contract on 80k/week" as one of your buddies had initially reported here.
True - that would be better reported as his wage floor.
He's immense.
Want to see what he can do towards the end of the season.
The shining light in the Chelsea team.
Does he get poached though for a huge fee? Interesting transfer window coming. Chelsea have to sign him down and build around him and also Enzo who I rate.
Want to see what he can do towards the end of the season.
The shining light in the Chelsea team.
Does he get poached though for a huge fee? Interesting transfer window coming. Chelsea have to sign him down and build around him and also Enzo who I rate.
Have you ever seen a player's salary reported like that? I haven't.
All I did was Google the guys wages and posted what it said. I've no idea why there's been some forensic speculation about possible, unreported increases for Cole Palmer but only Cole Palmer.
Anything to back this up apart from Spotrac, Sportkeeda or other shit sites.
He should be asking for Sterling money at the end of the season or he'll walk. He's got them over a barrel.
I would say you will be surprised when the total wage will be reported, at that time this will be forgotten and you all will be saying how next year financial report will show lower wage bill because you offloaded few high earners.
Btw, where is this 80K even reported?
High chance it's a 80K base salary but the problem is how the wages are reported. Pogba was on 144K base wage, doubt anyone used his base salary, same with Sanchez. It was always total package, but for Liverpool and now Chelsea somehow base wage is the reference.
All this to show how awesome they are at negotiating, then the financial reports are published you see these clubs will have big wage bill, as much as us or even higher. Doesn't add up at all.
And we can sell them Maguire at the peak of his superpowers
Ofcourse if one club reports only base wage and for other club wages include all possible bonuses, second club wage will always look bigger. That's why only numbers that matters is total wage bill and IIRC in the last published reports Chelsea had bigger wage bill than ManUtd.
Tripling the fee sounds a little unrealistic. I remember reading somewhere that if Chelsea don't get Champions League football then they'll need to recoup over 100m in player sales before July. It would be interesting if United or someone else tested their nerve with an 80m bid for Palmer in June.
As for palmer, outstanding season to date, deserves the plaudits. However let’s see 2nd season syndrome
Think he'll be very high on any Ineos list. Local, young, plays AM which is a role I think we need to address quite quickly. Can he play off the RW as well?
No I haven't - but this is part of the broader problem with the way footballers' wages are reported. Didn't intent to cast any aspersions your way.
Just some back of the napkin maths - we shed more than £50m in salary compared to last year when as you rightly say we were slightly ahead of you at roughly £200m per year with City a bit further ahead.
Pretty sure Pogba was on 290k per week base salary - though I do recall reports inflating this to ridiculous extents.
Everyone is a victim of it; how many times have commentators referred to Mudryk costing £80m+?
You last reported wage bill was around 360 million, ours was around 330 million
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Pogba was on 144K base wage, his contract was leaked and break down was very clear. Every year our fans including me did all this math of how we shed so much wages but then financial report is published and the wage bill goes higher. Same will happen with Chelsea and no way you will be around 75% of what we spend. When the official reports are published we will see that.
Wage to revenue ratio probably is a better metric.
I’ve not seen that report but I imagine it was taken from a year that we didn’t have champions league football. Ie wages being -25% from usual.
Either way, I’m just surprised this an issue when talking about Cole Palmer. He’d played less first team football than Brandon Williams or Manioo when we gave them £60k a week contracts.
Exactly the point I was making, Brandon Williams contract was upto 60K, which means if he hits all possible bonuses he will earn 60K. This is what I said in my post and how easily fans are manipulated.
It is when we are checking the financial health of the club.
Apart from Arsenal and Spurs, other 4 spend lot of money on wages.
Oh well this is just a difference between gross and net. 360m gross is ~200m net.
Perhaps you're right that I'm off base - but we did get rid of 9 of the top 15 earners at the club over the summer, so the drop YoY for us will be pretty significant.
When a club makes more money then it can spend more money on player recruitment (both wages and transfer fee). It is normal. A club with the income of Man Utd always has higher salary than most clubs in EPL other than City. Whether you get value from the player is another story though. On paper the best salary attracts the best talent.
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He's got six years left on his contract. Chelsea have full control over his future.
Lets see if we all remember this discussion when the financial report is released.
IMO fans should just accept the fact that big clubs spend big wages instead of taking that as some sort of morally wrong thing. That's why they attract players.
Like I said, we'll see. For me it was crystal clear long before they were ever published that the last set of accounts still had a massive wage bill because most of all it was a bizarre rebuild year with a temporary 32-33 man squad that had lots of experienced players on prime contracts which were signed when the club were basically guaranteed a place in the UCL.
Let's take some examples for you to scratch your head at:
Kante (£300K) --> Caicedo
Koulibaly (£290K) --> Disasi
Havertz (£250K) --> Nkunku
Azpilicueta (£180K) --> Gusto
Kepa (£170K) --> Sanchez
Aubameyang (£160K) --> Jackson
Pulisic (£150K) --> Palmer
Loftus-Cheek (£120K) --> Lavia
Mendy (£70K) --> Petrovic
Kovacic (£100K) --> Ugochukwu
Ziyech (£100K) --> no replacement
Felix (£250K) --> no replacement
Mount (£80K) --> no replacement
Zakaria (£90K) --> no replacement
Adding up the departures and their estimated salaries comes up to around £2.3M/wk give or take some depending on which source you use for the salaries. Do you honestly think the average salary for the 10 players on the right sided column comes close to £250K/wk, because that's roughly what all of them would have to be on for the salary bill to not have decreased? Good luck convincing anyone that players like Ugochukwu, Gusto or Petrovic are on that kind of money. And if you say they're not, then that just means the rest of them must all be on £300K+ to make up for the difference. Or maybe the salary bill has decreased after all?
Right now we're not a CL level club and most of the contracts will reflect on that fact. The few 'marquee' players signed since the 22/23 winter transfer window (namely Enzo, Caicedo and Nkunku) will admittedly be earning huge money for a non-CL club (£200K or thereabouts) but I can guarantee just about all of the others are nowhere near the salaries of their predecessors. For example it's just common sense for a player like Malo Gusto (signed at 19) to only be earning a fraction of the salary Azpilicueta was earning, and the same argument holds water with most of the other 19-21yo signings as well who've come in to replace more experienced players who'd seen it all and gone through numerous transfers and/or contract extensions with sizeable pay bumps along their careers while most of these new guys are still at the very beginning of their careers and signing only their second pro deals.
As for your claim about next year, I'm personally under no illusion that the salary bill will again be going any lower than it currently is because at this point there aren't exactly too many high earning players to get rid off anymore. The likes of Sterling and Cucurella would definitely get sold if an opportunity presented itself but sadly I just don't think that's very likely to happen. I'm not including Lukaku & Kepa here because due to their loans I don't think their salaries are included in this years accounts anyway so permanently offloading them in the summer shouldn't affect next years' wage bill either. If anything I can easily see the salary bill for 24/25 being higher than 23/24 because chances are we'll be making a few new additions in the summer and it's possible some of the long term deals get scaled with some incremental pay raises etc.
The last set of accounts had the club's total wage bill at £405M including all club staff, not just players. Just of the top of my head I'd throw an estimate for that number to be maybe 15-20% lower (so £320-340M) for the next ones while you say it's stayed high. Again, feel free to quote me when the next numbers are released and we'll see who was closer.
e: the Swiss Ramble graphs had the wage bill for last seaso at £360M and referenced Deloitte which I checked as source for the £405M number as well so maybe the lower number is for the men's first team squad and the higher number is for the whole club. In any case I'd say the next one will be 15-20% lower than the previous set.
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So what exactly are you arguing now? You wrote whole paragraph and then came to the same conclusion to what I said.
The last set of accounts had the club's total wage bill at £405M including all club staff, not just players. Just of the top of my head I'd throw an estimate for that number to be maybe 15-20% lower (so £320-340M) for the next ones while you say it's stayed high. Again, feel free to quote me when the next numbers are released and we'll see who was closer.
This is what I'm saying, doesn't matter how much PR spin club does, all that matters is the total wage bill. If all the players are on 80-100K then your wage bill will be closer to Spurs than to City.
How is it the same conclusion? If Chelsea's salary decrease from last year to this year has in fact been around 15-20% like I suggested then the new overall figure is absolutely much, much closer to Spurs than it is to City. The numbers you yourself posted from the Swiss Ramble account (best source for anything financial in football) had the top six as:
1. City £423M
2. Liverpool £374M
3. Chelsea £360M
4. Man Utd £331M
5. Spurs £253M
6. Arsenal £235M
Take away 15-20% of ours and it would be somewhere between £290-310M which is a huge decrease from £360M. Difference to 2022/23 Spurs would still be 35-55M higher but compared to City it's around £110-130M less.
Arsenal's next number won't be anywhere near £235M anymore either following the signings of Rice and Havertz on top salaries as well as the new contracts given to their absolute key players Saka, Ødegaard, Saliba and White which no doubt rewarded their good performances with sizeable salary increases. So like I said to you in my post this morning, I'd currently estimate us at 5th highest in the EPL behind City, Pool, Utd, Arsenal but still somewhat ahead of Spurs who are 6th highest.
If you're hung up on the £405M figure I mentioned in my last post which is quite a bit higher, that was something I calculated myself from Deloitte with the mentioned wage to turnover ratio (0.79 x £512.5M = £405M) and made an edit when I saw the few posts ahead of mine. Swiss Ramble had us at £360M and in the comments mentions having used Deloitte as his source too but says he's reduced one-off severance payments from the total amount so it's highly likely the overall amount includes Tuchel and Potter's pay-offs which have nothing to do with how much our players are paid and were rightly taken out of the equation by him. Chelsea's full financial statement from last year is still yet to be released publicly so Deloitte are used (which are 100% correct numbers but not as detailed as the actual statement).
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I'm not arguing whether Chelsea's wage bill is 400 or 300 million, all I'm saying is if all the players are around 80-100k then there is no way your wage bill would be 330-360 million. It's as simple as that.
I'm yet to see any source which says the player is on 80k.
Google "Cole Palmer wages" if you actually give a shit.
Oh certainly - I don't disagree with you there. Will be an interesting one to revisit.
I think I just took issue with the assertion that there's no way a player with ~1000 professional minutes could be on (only) 80k per week. If it's another Pogba situation then of course that changes things - but correct me if I'm wrong wasn't there some sort of kerfuffle over his image rights?
Regarding Chelsea (and not to be an ITK dipshit), what I've heard they've done is not have bonuses paid out retroactively - but instead they apply a percent raise to the base salary for the remaining years going forward. What makes this attractive is that this can compound - so multiple years playing well will further scale a player's wage and is part of why these long contracts were appealing. Reportedly there are also automatic adjustments that kick in once a player reaches different base wage levels - so for instance if Palmer plays well enough to get to double his starting wage, the benchmarks he has to hit and/or the rate at which his contract scales can be adjusted.
And then post shit from spotrac and other shit sites run by teenager? No wonder they get the clicks.