Let’s start with what we know before getting on to the speculative stuff. Having loaned out two forwards for the upcoming season last week, we’ve now seen the first of the expected sales of contracted players we were warned about a couple of months ago when the 24/25 season ended.
As to why we need to sell, the loss of television revenue following our relegation is around £10 million and that has been more or less entirely covered by the release of nine out of contract players, some on wages that would be considered high by Championship standards.
So, effectively, Vincent Tan would have to be stumping up the cash again if City wanted to keep all of those currently contracted, while also bringing in new players for fees or on free transfers which would include things like signing on fees and bonuses.
If Vincent Tan has decided that, with bids in for the club it seems, money for new players has to come from the sale of others, then I find it hard to blame him – surely, the issue when it comes to our owner’s spending on the team it is that it has been so inept, not that there hasn’t been enough of it?
Anyway, the player who has left is Callum O’Dowda who was captain of the team for much of last season. It was confirmed yesterday that O’Dowda had joined Robbie Keane’s Ferencvaros (City played, and lost to the Hungarians in the Cup Winners’Cup in 1974).
As someone who, besides his captaincy, had an attitude that could not be questioned, generally performed consistently and had an excellent relationship with media and supporters, O’Dowda was, for me, the closest thing we had to a “model pro” last season and, as such, was always the most likely of the contracted senior players to be sold first.
If we accept that City want to retain the likes of Alex Robertson (who is constantly being linked with Portsmouth), Yousef Salech, Rubin Colwill and our other younger players, then I think they may have a problem shipping out the number of players they want to. After all, who else out of the senior players did enough to convince Championship teams, or their equivalents, that they would be an improvement on what they had already? I can only think of Callum Robertson, reportedly still recovering from the injury which affected him in the closing weeks of last season, who could be a priority target for some clubs who would be influenced by his dozen league goals in 24/25.
Managing to score ten plus in a season for Cardiff City is a feather in the cap for any striker who has played for them since Dave Jones’ departure in 2011 and there has been talk of Robinson linking up with Wrexham or his former club, Preston.
Robinson, like O’Dowda, signed a new contract earlier this year and, as such, you would expect that we could get a realistic, or even enhanced, fee for them. However, although I’m far from an expert on Hungarian football finances, I’d be surprised if we received a seven figure fee for O’Dowda like we might have done from a Championship team- my completely uninformed view is that it was something like £250,000.
Whatever the fee was, we’re now four weeks from our first League One match and I can say that I’ve still not seen anything linking us with what I’d call a realistic looking transfer target.
This has to be a concern, but not a crisis – I think we will make signings, but until we do, or we’re confirmed as meeting players to try and finalise a deal, there has to be a slight suspicion that we’re going to try and make do with what we’ve got.
This is definitely not true when it comes to our age group squads – these links from the club website show details of additions to the under 21 and under 18 squads.
Talking of the under 21s, the pre season game at Yeovil on 15 July has been designated as a under 21 game, rather than a senior team one. The reason given is that the match is too close to the return of the senior squad from their week’s warm weather training in Spain. This sounds reasonable enough, but it also carries a hint that the first team squad looks somewhat light on numbers at the moment.
One good thing that you thought would be a consequence of relegation would be more Saturday 3 o clock kick offs, but it’s not looking like that during a first month which sees games with Peterborough, Plymouth and Luton switched to 12.30 kick offs and the first away game at Port Vale, a side we’ve only visited once, in a League Cup tie, in the last twenty plus years, switched to a Thursday evening start – as has been remarked on social media, thank you Sky Sports!
Early in the week, there were suggestions that what I’ll call the Gareth Bale consortium had put in a bid to the club which was described as “very fair” – a figure of £85 million was mentioned, but, with independent football finance experts valuing City at something £30/35 million, this seemed too high.
A day later the Times posted a story claiming that a bid had been made, but they valued it at £40 million and were reporting that the it was likely to be rejected. There have been claims since then that the bid had been made before this week and there had been no new one. Finally, Sky Sports reported yesterday that the latest bid was, in fact, £20 million and that there were bids from other groups that were higher than the Bale group’s had been.
Although there has been little to indicate Vincent Tan will accept a bid from the Bale group, there does appear to be the odd sign that he is willing to consider a sale.
Of course, talk of £30 million valuations and £40 million bids surely makes no allowances for the £100 million plus of debts owed to Tan and the company in which Mehmet Dalman has an involvement. While it seems very, very unlikely that any buyer would be willing to give Messrs Tan and Dalman the full value of what the club owes them, it’s equally true that both of them can have little expectation of getting much of their money back if they insist on having their debts repaid in full.
There’s also the Emiliano Sala case to be considered. That’s likely to be completed by the end of this year and with Cardiff’s claim being in the region of £100 million, you have to think that a favourable outcome for City would only increase the chances of a sale of the club.
A lot of the “traditional” summer events when it comes to your club’s off season times happened this week at Cardiff City, so let’s get them out of the way first.
On Monday, the players returned for pre season training. and there was what I’d call a pretty surprising winner of the first day back bleep test competition as Rubin Colwill came out on top for the test of strength and stamina that everyone hates. Rubin’s longer stride than anyone else at the club probably helped him, but, even so, it does rather dispel the view from many of his growing number of social media critics that he is lazy and lacks fitness.
It had been reported that we would be facing just the one team while over in Spain for our weeks warm weather training early next month, but it turns out we’ll be playing twice while based in Murcia. On Wednesday 9 July, we’ll face Johor Darul Ta’zim who won the domestic treble in Malaysia in their last season, they are coached by former Watford and Sheffield Wednesday manager Xisco Munoz and so you would presume that they will provide us with a pretty stiff first pre season game.
Three days later, we face Southend United who will again be competing in the National League next season following their Play Off Final defeat by Oldham earlier this month.
All in all then, a pretty uninspiring group of pre season games for City as they head into their first third tier season in twenty two years. While a week in Spain indicates that we aren’t quite counting every penny as part of an economy drive, our set of pre season matches suggests we aren’t too far from that stage.
As I hurtle towards my eighth decade, I must admit that the club’s annual kit launch is something that excites me less and less (truth be told, we didn’t have annual kit launches in the days when I might have been excited by such things because we tended to only change our kit once every three or four seasons!).
Anyway, here’s a link to.this year’s offering and all I’ll say is that it makes me feel all of my nearly sixty nine and a half years old when I say that I can remember us wearing that shirt forty years ago (we wore a pin stripe shirt between 1985 nnd 1987 and switched to a broader stripe for our promotion from Division 4 in 87/88).
There was also the release of our league fixtures for 25/26 on Thursday and, speaking as someone who does not think relegation need be the disaster that many feel it is, what it really brought home to me is how isolated geographically we are in our new league. For example, while a home Boxing Day clash with the club that is closest to you geographically in the league has a kind of old fashioned charm to it, it’s misleading in this case because Exeter City are based some 107 miles from Cardiff.
Swindon is around 35 miles closer to Cardiff than Exeter is and the League Two outfit will travel that distance to play us in the First Round of the Carabao Cup in the week commencing 11 August. Meanwhile, Exeter will also face us in the group stage of the Vertu Trophy (which I’ll try, and almost certainly fail, not to call the Mickey Mouse Cup from now on). Other teams in the group will be Arsenal’s under 21’s and Newport County who are, comfortably, the closest team to us in the EFL geographically, but the reality is that our game with them will probably struggle to attract a crowd of 2,000.
So, certainly by the standards of this close season, it’s been a busy week, but, still you get a feeling that Cardiff City are about six weeks behind the rest when it comes to certain aspects of pre season preparation.
In particular, where are the new signings, indeed where is the speculation about new signings? The only transfer news and speculation that City fans are seeing this summer is about who’ll be leaving the club. This week saw the first departure of a contracted player of the summer I believe as striker Michael Reindorf left for a season long loan with Newport, while there’s been plenty of speculation about a loan move to Croatia or Germany for another striker, Rocco Simic, who did not report to the Vale for training on Monday. Also, Alex Robertson to Portsmouth rumours, which I’m sure we’ll be hearing plenty more of in upcoming weeks, started yesterday.
The lack of news concerning new signings is understandable up to a point because it was reported in Wales Online this week that some work had begun on bringing in new players, but new Head Coach Brian Barry-Murphy had wanted to go in a different direction to that and has targets of his own. Given that Barry-Murphy has only been here for about a fortnight, it’s no surprise really that we have no news whatsoever about the identity of possible newcomers, but then again, Barry-Murphy had spoken of hoping to get all of the new players in early enough for them to be involved in the first friendly games.
Of course, all managers tend to talk like that in May and June and very few of them actually have the squad they wanted completely in place come the closing of the transfer window in early September! However, it should be noted that Barry-Murphy has said he prefers to work with a smallish squad as that will mean that he is able to give the individuals within it the sort of attnetion he wants to with the implication being that this would not be possible in a squad which was, say, as big as the one we operated with last season.
I would assume that this will be music to the ears of Vincent Tan and the money men at the club because it’s worth mentioning here that there are different rules applying in Leagues One and Two regarding what I will continue to call Financial Fair Play rules in comparison to the Championship.
I’m grateful to Trust Chairman and football finance expert Keith Morgan for providing this breakdown as to the financial requirements for League One clubs;
“At our AGM on June 19th, I briefly mentioned the different EFL financial restrictions which our club will have to abide by in League 1. So I hope you find this more detailed note useful to understand how different it will be from the restrictions on Championship clubs which applied to us last season.
In the Championship club annual losses are restricted to an average of £13m a financial year (provided £8m of this is covered by non-refundable cash injections into the club by its owners) over a three year period.
Some adjustments are allowed to the reported loss figure by things like spending on youth and stadium development but this is the “base” figure.Any breach of these limits can lead to transfer embargos or points deductions.
In League 1 and League 2 these profitability restrictions don’t apply. Instead the restriction is based on player wage costs under what is known as Salary Cost Management Protocol (SCMP). League 1 club total player wages costs must not exceed 60% of turnover (55% in League 2). There is no restriction on transfer fees paid, just on wages.
Compliance with the above rules is closely and regularly monitored by the EFL based on projections submitted by the club and if a club looks like it is heading for a breach, then a transfer embargo will be applied until a club becomes compliant again.
The definitions of turnover and player wages are important in the above calculation
Cardiff City also have another potential favourable interim wage adjustment as a club that has just been relegated from the Championship. If a player was signed before September 2024 on a contract of over three years then their wage is also excluded. This exception is aimed at protecting relegated clubs from committed longer term contracts entered into before their relegation. I must be honest here and haven’t checked to what extent this will benefit our club, if at all,
Turnover would normally just include match day income, commercial sponsorship and TV revenue. It can also include profits from hospitality events as many clubs use their stadium facilities far more often than on match days.
However in League 1 turnover is also allowed to include cash injected by the club owner by way of new non-refundable share capital ( i.e not loans).So an owner can greatly increase the allowable limits of player wages by this method
Turnover also will include any profit on player sales, but only when the cash from those sales is actually received – many deals tend to be done on an instalment basis to ease cash flows
The wage cost for players loaned out in the season are excluded from the calculation for the period in which they are loaned out.
An exclusion from wage costs also applies to players on a professional contract who are under 21 at the start of a season who have come through the club`s youth development scheme and have been with the club for three years or more.”
As a rough guide, I’m pretty sure that there have been times, including under Vincent Tan’s ownership, since Sam Hammam’s takeover of the club early in the twenty first century where the annual wage bill has exceeded club turnover. I have asked Keith via the messageboard whether he could give me the wages/turnover percentage in the latest publicly available accounts, but haven’t had an answer from him yet – i’ll put it on here when I do*.
The situation isn’t helped either by the £10 million loss in television revenue due to our relegation, but I understand this has largely been covered by the wage savings made from the release of nine out of contract players. However, although it has been stated that the club do not have to sell contracted players at this stage, I would have thought that, privately, they’d be quite happy to get some of the higher earners off the books.
Therefore, operating with a reduced squad size begins to make more and more sense. However, we’re talking about a squad of players that finished bottom of their league last season here, so, clearly, it was lacking in many areas.
A bugbear of mine was the lack of leadership in last season’s squad and I also think that mentally we were very weak. Now, it seems to me that a lot of store is being placed on Brian Barry-Murphy being able to improve players already here and you’d definitely like to think that his reputation as someone who is good at developing youngsters will pay dividends when it comes to the promising crop of Academy products we have coming through.
It may not sound much, but, if Barry-Murphy, and Lee Riley, could improve all of the players currently with the club by five per cent, that would lead to a pretty big upturn in results and form. However, is it realistic to expect Barry-Murphy and his coaches to turn someone like Dylan Lawlor (who has captained our under 21s as a teenager and Wales at age group levels) into a leader respected by his team mates who is capable of influencing the attitude of the whole of the senior squad within weeks or, at most, months?
Similarly, with us having lost two of our biggest dressing room leaders among the senior players in Joe Ralls and Aaron Ramsey who were more in the lead by example category, and having no obvious “up and at ’em” type leaders in the Paul Ramsey, Kav and Darren Purse mould, are there any characters among the seniors who Barry-Murphy could transform into leaders of the type we require?
Maybe there are one or two, but I would suggest that, rather like our 17/18 promotion squad, you need about five or six of them to be successful in competitive divisions like the Championship and League One. So, with little or no serious evidence that there are half a dozen such players in the current squad, you have to look outside of your club for at least some players with the required characteristics.
I can see that the financial rules for the lower divisions would encourage clubs to look to younger signings, particularly on loan where you might be able to get the parent club to continue paying most of the player’s wages, for team development.
With that in mind, you’d think that Barry-Murphy’s experience with loaning youngsters at Rochdale and his contacts at Man City and Leicester might lead to us being able to bring in good young players on loan with, perhaps, a lower percentage of their wages to pay than other clubs would have to.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that we’re going to make more use of the loan market than we did last season and you’d like to think that we could get some good quality young players in. However, it would be expecting an awful lot for any young loanee from a Premier League or Championship outfit to come in and immediately start behaving in.a manner which marked him out as one of the dressing room leaders we require.
Maybe there are older loan players out there who could do that, but they will surely be quite expensive won’t they? I’d say it’s also likely that they’d be well the wrong side of thirty and so you start to wonder if they could keep their place in our team.
Broadly speaking, that’s why I believe we have to have at least one or two permanent signings in the squad – perhaps such players could be tried and tested performers at this level in the mould of Paudie O’Connor who recently signed for Reading from Lincoln. Another example would be someone who I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere as the sort of player we should be looking for, Eoghan O’Connell of Wrexham whose contract it seems runs out on Monday despite him having been a regular in their promotion team last season, was signed by Barry-Murphy at Rochdale in.2019..
I asked a messageboard question yesterday as to whether we’re currently a weaker or stronger squad than last season. On the positive side, Brian Barry-Murphy may be able to implement all of the improvements in attitude, individual and team performance and tactically that we hope he can and it might be that three or four of our younger players settle seamlessly and immediately into the first team.
However, for all that they mostly under performed last season, we’ve lost nine senior players and it’ll be almost unique for this division if we, as a relegated side, do not lose some of our senior contracted players to higher division clubs before the window closes in a couple of months time.
For me, anyone who answered my messageboard question by saying we’re stronger than we were at the end of last season (by which time we were comfortably the worst team in the Championship) are deluding themselves.
Yes, I accept that sounds pessimistic and negative, but I’d prefer to call it realistic. At the moment, it seems that we’re putting so much faith in Brian Barry-Murphy being as good as his record at Manchester City suggests he could be. However, he’s facing an enormous task with, at the moment, minimal coaching numbers and with the Vincent Tan knows better than everyone else attitude still prevailing. Tan knows best is a proven recipe for failure – Brian Barry-Murphy may be good, indeed, he may be very good, but is.he a miracle worker?
*Keith informed me that;
“In 2023/24 turnover was £23.2m and player wages were £19.9m (85.8%). In 2022/23 turnover was £26.7m and player wages £14.2m (53.4%) – all of those figures rounded very slightly. “
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