For several years people have been shaking their heads and muttering dark things about crazy house prices, exceptionally high share returns, bloated city bankers/directors getting ridiculous bonuses and footballers earning silly money. Well karma is afoot and a massive rebalance is taking place. It would not surprise me if several football clubs go bust because they have followed the general trend and spent way above what they could afford on the grounds that everyone else was doing the same thing.
It looks as if the current chairman/directors of all the football clubs are now caught with a product that is likely to bleed them dry. In the Premier Newcastle, West Ham and Pompy are all desperate to sell but can't find a buyer. It will be a lot worse in the 2nd and 3rd tiers. Who is going to take on a club with massive debts and running costs and find you cannot sell the main assets - the star players, because the banks will no longer loan the buying club the money?
Clubs are going to have to cut back very hard. Squads will be pruned, unfortunately youth systems ditched, players will be loaned rather than bought so they don't have to be paid in the summer months and obviously the players will be paid far less.
We are lucky at Charlton to have already had our fire sale last summer, maybe Murray saw this financial karma coming. But generally it is a crazy situation to have average footballers earning massive sums of money for kicking a ball about. Personally I don't think any Championship footballer should earn more than 100K per year, let alone 20k a week.
I recall Eddie Firmani being scoffed at when he stated that ideally he would have 11 south east London lads playing for the Charlton first team but I would love to have say four youth products in every football league team, with a sensible salary cap that would result in much lower ticket prices (and bar prices).
I dream on.
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Although I'm not a local to Charlton I'd rather see local lads play for the team. Then again I'm still smarting because when I was a youngster my Dad wouldn't take me to see Allan Simonsen. "Nobody wants to see foreign imports" he told me, "I'll take you when the team's full of local lads".