by Bashmachkin Fri Jun 13, 2008 1:16 pm
We have spent too much on player wages in the past, and what is worse, we have spent these really high wages on the most undeserving of players. I'm not a Newcastle fan who sees Freddy Shepherd, our former chairman, as the Antichrist - I think his motives were often good, that he was genuinely ambitious for the club - but he had no footballing nous or knowledge and he increasingly spent quite reckless amounts of money. The legacy of that is still with us, we still have some undeserving players on silly amounts, but under our current owners we are trying to rectify this.
We've supposedly offered Owen a new contract reduced from his current £104,000 a week - which is more than fair, especially considering that he hasn't deserved that wage for most of his time with us. We are in the process of selling Emre, who is always injured yet who has been picking up £60,000 a week. The suggestion is that we are asking Barton to take a 50% pay cut if he wants to stay with the club - I hope he doesn't accept, and again, the rumours are that he's inclined not to, so I hope we see the back of him - but that would move his wages from £60,000 to £30,000. Damien Duff, who has his house up for sale, seems to be on the way out, and he's apparently on £70,000 a week. We released a few fringe players a short while ago, amongst them Stephen Carr, who I think was on something like £25,000 a week, and we have just sold Rozehnal to Lazio.
Like I've said elsewhere, we need players at the club, and players need to be paid - I'm not for being really tight with wages, for losing out on certain players who would improve the team just because we refuse to give them an extra £5,000 a week. The money has to be spent, but it should be spent on the right people. And there are still players at the club receiving too much money - Smith is on £60,000 a week, Viduka is on more than that apparently. But overall, we are moving in the right direction here - we are trying to reduce the wage bill, to get rid of what is perceived as dead wood, to lower what we pay as our top wages. The club has changed in this respect - I don't think we can be grouped with those who throw money about any more.
The article DS posts doesn't sound that reliable to me - lots of 'around's and 'between's, whilst I have read that Ferguson is on £3.6 million rather than £3 million. I don't know what Keegan is getting paid, but as far as I'm concerned, it is irrelevant, it's not emblematic of the club as a whole - it is fair enough for the manager to be paid a big wage, and I think it is odd to have clubs where the manager is paid significantly less than the top earning players.
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