Just out of interest do you have the figures for all clubs budgets and also this season doesn’t finish until today so I couldn’t give a s**t about that anymore it’s next season that matters. Also are you an ex employee of the club?
Don't understand why you seem so hostile and aggressive in your tone to be honest. But yes, I am talking about next season, when the budget will be reduced from the amount that Pep squandered. And far from saying exactly how I know that, it's evident in the fact that nobody has said the budget is going up. We only hear about a "competitive budget" and shrinking down our existing "embarrassingly large squad". At no point has it even been implied that the budget will be added to or even maintained, so it's definitely going down while still being a decent and acceptable amount. You don't need sources to figure that out on your own.
Now let's look at the other clubs in League One next season:
Sunderland - biggest L1 budget ever, hands down. No secret.
Barnsley - large despite relegation. It'll be right up there, probably double ours.
Bradford - always a very, very decent budget for this division, will be no different this time. No way will we match it.
Charlton - really good budget for this level. Double ours, could even be more if their takeover bears fruit.
Portsmouth - mega bucks. The Eisner money will make itself known this season. Playoffs absolute minimum, but should be pushing for automatic.
Luton - would've had a really solid L1 budget last season let alone next, and they'll now add to it. I would wager that theirs will be marginally higher than ours by a few hundred grand.
Scunthorpe - always very financially competitive despite small crowds. Can't see that changing now.
Fleetwood - really solid financially. Will it be bigger than our budget? Maybe, but if not it'll be really, really similar.
Burton - not tiny. They may have had comfortably the smallest budget in the Championship but they still invested. They'll have planned well for the 'yo-yo' and will definitely be able to compete on some level.
Bristol Rovers - really solid. Not as flush as people perhaps expected with their middle eastern ownership, but they can compete and have a very decent size squad indeed.
So that's about nine or ten clubs right off the bat who are going to be either level with or greater than us financially. Five or six will 100% have more than us to splash around even if we creep above a few, so this "top four or top five" nonsense a certain individual is throwing around up north is categorically untrue. They're just planting seeds because they know it'll get out on here, and that people will raise expectations and subsequently kick off if it's a bit ropey. It's just mischief and nonsense.
Realistically we will probably have a budget around about eighth or so. Somewhere between eight and ten, so top half would be about where we should be based on resources, and a playoff place would be a slight overachievement. And when you consider the size of the club, where it would be in the table attendance wise and all that jazz, that's absolutely fine. We are a top half L1 club and that's exactly where the budget will be placed.
I stopped posting before when I got a load of grief for saying things that turned out to be true, so hopefully we can be a bit more grown up and level headed this time around. If not, fine.
And yes, I worked for the club many years ago, and then went on to cover football for national newspapers as well as doing some light scouting for several football league clubs. So while I'm not the oracle and would never profess to be, I do have an idea of how football works, and I still know people in the game who have more information than most about what's actually going on. And I post under my own name, so I'm hardly looking to cause trouble from the shadows. I'm easy to find.
