Winter mercato January 2015

[ACMILAN1983]

We have plenty of cover. He was never used to full potential this season anyhow.

About Ibra.....Dev, Ibra's salary may have been a problem depending on how you look at it......but with the revenue that we have, we can still afford a couple of those players in the squad. Sure we were paying Ibra 18/19mil a season but he deserved it. He was a big name, brought people to the stadium, sold jerseys, made us relevant to the world of football, and helped us win games and a title.
It's not a problem to pay him the money that he was making.....if we don't WASTE money of players like Essien, Muntari, Bonera, Matri, Birsa, even Mexes, etc. I would gladly give up Essien, Muntari, and Matri and pay all of that money to Ibra. There is no need for 30+ players in this team when most of them are useless anyway.
About squad discontent afterwards and wanting more money because Ibra makes a lot....I don't think it'll happen. He's a marketable name and nobody will despute the money that he makes. The problems start when Muntari and Essien make 3mil after tax, so players of similar kind also want to make that much. This team has been poorly constructed and it's continuing now with the apparent offer to Pasqual for 3 years. This is unbelievable.

In a squad of 25 and a wage budget of lets say 120mil (we should be able to sustain that especially if the squad is well built and it gets you into the CL).......you can have up to 2 players making 8-9mil a year......4-5 players making 3-5mil.........5-6 players making 1-3mil and there rest right at 1mil or less as they are back up players. Just to do a simply math (and even overestimate)...... 2x9 + 5x5 + 6x3 + 12x1 (25 players all together) = 140 (tax included). That is an overestimation as you can see that I used the highest possible number of players and with the highest possible wage in that bracket. So that number can be brought down to 120 easily. So again, the problem was never paying a couple of players 7,8,9 mil. The problem is paying a ton of players like Matri 2.5, 3, 4mil a year. You turn around and you see 30+ players exhausting our wage bill yet the return is nowhere near the quality that you should be getting back for the money you spend.

A really good post. I agree on wasting resources on the names you mentioned, it's insane to think how much the club has wasted in this regard.

Aside from footballing reasons as to why I'm not a huge fan of Ibra, I'm still not sure the maths adds up in this situation. Taking your example, if the club spends 120-140m a year on wages, that would mean more than half the club's revenue to pay for player salaries. That leaves a 100-120m (maybe a little more) to pay for all other staff in the club (coaches and directors certainly aren't cheap), as well as other expenses and overheads (not even considering tax etc), as well as giving a transfer budget. It doesn't seem feasible all of these costs can be covered by this.

To put it into perspective, Bayern have recently set a wage budget of 180m (http://www.espnfc.com/bayern-munich/stor...lion-euros) for both players and coaches. That's only 40-60m more to what you suggest about Milan. However, at the same time, Bayern's revenue is at about 487m per annum (sourced from BBC), which is over 200m more than where Milan are right now. It's a pretty big discrepancy between cost of salaries and revenues when comparing the two clubs.

I'm no expert in this topic by any means, but looking at the figures there and comparing them to other clubs, something doesn't seem to quite add up. Obviously I'm open to anyone with an explanation on this topic.

Dev don't really want to get into the Ibra debate with you again.

But anyhow, it really makes you wonder how Milan is run over the past 10 yrs. As 10 yrs ago, Milan is arguably the top brand in football and now it is not even top 15

Fair point on both accounts