Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Counting cost of the current financial pinch

- By STEVEN CHICKEN

IT was no secret throughout January that Town’s capacity to bring in new players was limited by whether or not they would be able to clear room on the wage bill by moving on several unwanted players.

Permanent transfers could not be found for Terence Kongolo, Adama Diakhaby, Isaac Mbenza or Reece Brown but all four were sent out on loan to Fulham, Nottingham Forest, Amiens and Peterborou­gh respective­ly – while Florent Hadergjona­j’s desire to play regular first-team football to prop up his internatio­nal credential­s with Kosovo meant he went out to Turkish side Kasimpasa.

Danny Cowley explained: “Phil [Hodgkinson] inherited a club that was a Premier League club with a significan­t wage bill and we’ve got to make sure the wage bill going forward is one that we can sustain.

“We’ve all seen football clubs that spend more than they can afford and we all know how that ends up.”

The next job is to try to turn those loans into permanent deals, either with their current loan sides or elsewhere, and recoup as much of the money they spent on those players as possible.

That could be much easier said than done given that many clubs are feeling the financial pinch of the current delays to the season, of course.

Clubs across the world – from Birmingham and Leeds United to Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund – have started to ask their players to take voluntary pay cuts to protect their cashflows and stop themselves from going out of business.

Once the football world is back up and running as normal, one might expect even the biggest and wealthiest clubs to be reluctant to spend anything like as freely as they did before – not just because their cash reserves will need topping up, but because this crisis has served as a (potentiall­y quite welcome) reminder of how precarious the entire football indus

We’ve all seen clubs spend more money than they can afford and we all know how that

ends up

try is. Have we mentioned that Championsh­ip clubs have racked up a combined £1.2bn of debt?

Town showed their ability to drive a hard bargain even with an unwanted player with the fee north of £15m they got from Bournemout­h for Philip Billing last summer, but a collapse in the market would likely mean even the shrewdest negotiator would struggle to recoup anything like the millions they have spent on some of those wantaway players: a reported £9m for Diakhaby, £11m for Mbenza and a club record £17.5m for Kongolo: a combined outlay of £37.5m.

That is to say nothing of the wages those player would continue to earn if they stayed on the books past the end of their current loan deals.

It is worth rememberin­g every other club would be in exactly the same position, and that means Town would also be able to pick up players for less money than they might previously have expected to have to spend.

That would make any losses on their existing players somewhat easier to swallow, and should – in principle – leave them in much the same net position as they would have been in anyway.

As the club found in their Premier League years, having a lot of money is only any good if you don’t then have to spend it.

 ??  ?? Town sold Philip Billing to Bournemout­h PHOTO: DAVID
HOWARTH
Town sold Philip Billing to Bournemout­h PHOTO: DAVID HOWARTH

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