- May 20, 2005
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when you've got Wimmer, bought for £4m, going for £18m I don't think you can correlate anything about how Daniel does business with
I think you're not factoring in amortisation - writing off a players' contract over the length of their contract. The transfer fee when a player is sold also takes into account their wages which shows up as one amortised figure in the profit column, showing a 'profit improvement'.
So it's it's not just about the 'market inflated figure' as you put it - it's not that black and white.
However, if you want to look at it like that, then when your £10m player's 5 contract is down to last year (so £2m left to write off against tax (plus wages off the books improvement once sold)) and you sell him for £17m, you've a profit improvement of £15m PLUS the wages off the books. It might be that that fresh £15m gets put into a transfer kitty, but at least £8m of the original fee has been written off against the club's profits each year over 4 of the 5 years of his contract.
(It may be used to buy houses and land. Who knows?)
I'm aware of all that. I'm just pointing out why Levy would take the fee touted for NDombele and also that in real terms, we very rarely profit from player sales, despite Levy's reputation of wanting to profit from players. It was two different points I was making.