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Old 11-21-2018, 01:24 PM   #43
Greyfriars Bobby
College Prospect
 
Join Date: Sep 2013
30 December 2017, Part Two

There's more to the story at Wantage Town, enough to make me decide it warranted a second post.

Things are going very well on the pitch. At the halfway point of the season, we're looking for all the world like a solid, mid-table club after we were predicted to go right back down to the Conference South. The board are delighted; I have an Untouchable job rating, which I've almost never earned--even when I was managing teams to four straight league championships.

The fact we're doing so well on such limited funds is one thing that is making the board so happy. Wantage Town are now a fully professional club, with a stadium that is undergoing its second expansion in two years. Still, as you'd expect, we haven't grown as fast as we've ascended the pyramid. Look how much some of the teams in the Conference Premier are paying their players:



Compare this list to the league table in the last post, and you'll see some similarities. All the teams in the playoff places except for one are also among the top ten salary per annum.

Now, look at the rest of the salary rankings:



There are Kidderminster, top of the league, and 13th in salary per annum. And there are Wantage Town, all the way at the bottom of the list.

That's great, right? Well, there's another side to this part of the story, a far less uplifting one. In six months' time, the contracts of eight of our most important players will expire. You recognize every single name: Beesley, Booth, Douglas, Hart, Hutchinson, Osman, Seidel, and Wilkinson.

I've asked each of them, or their agents (yes, some of our lads have agents now), what it might take to sign them for next year. In every case, they want considerably more money to return to the club and, to be honest, they've earned it.

Unless the board will agree to raise the wage budget, I will have no choice but to say goodbye to most of those players and build another team. And, as I've been reading scouting reports over the course of the season, I've noticed that players as good as the ones we have will want just as much money as the ones we have right now. In other words, it would be very hard to bring in the kind of quality we'd be losing.

The Alfredians, as we know them, could soon be breaking up. I'm not sure I want to be there when that happens.

I'll see what the board says to a bigger wage budget. Then, we'll see what happens next.
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