We'll not get very far trying to be the tail wagging the dog of football.

The leagues, even the Premier League don't see the system as sustainable, thus PSR in the Premier League and various attempts at financial controls in the EFL. Naturally the players don't like restrictions on how much they're making and their union is good at making sure everything is fairly lax. Overpaid is subjective, you can think footballers and CEOs on the 'going rate' are overpaid or you can think it totally fair.

Nick - I doubt it also but it makes no sense. Most L2 (and L1 clubs) would be better off and owners would be better off. The current structure benefits very few clubs or owners.

It's reality. At all levels of football, subsidy by individuals has increased massively. And will continue to do so.

If we adopted free market forces then the premier league would also not have a collectively bargained tv deal and only the top clubs could actually get a good deal and pay top whack for players (like Barca and Real Madrid used to have in La Liga). At some point there was agreement that there was a benefit to sustaining a 4 tier professional football league system and they collectively bargain and distribute accordingly. If that’s what they are going for then a bit more redistribution is probably needed to sustain the current structure. If not then we should just sort out our own tv deals and it will probably result in us selling the rights to the occasional game to Dave TV for a couple of quid a time.

Silk- or alternatively I am living in the uk not in Spain or France. If you think that we just need to wait a while and everyone else in L2 will suddenly start spending £1.75 m per year less on players, so that we can compete without making a loss than maybe you are right, maybe not, we shall see, but I doubt it.

that is how it always has been done.

The idea would be not to give clubs more money to throw at players and agents but for them to collectively spend less. I do not think most L2 clubs are sustainable in their current guise regardless of the ownership model but we have got the ostriches spouting the same old bollocks of that has it has always been done.

French FA relegates clubs who don’t live within their budgets

Nick - well there is the lamented FPP and the fact that there is the EFL spending rules. The Spanish FA sets individual budgets for their teams. So I think you are living in the past. I think the modern and fan-friendly way is to regulate club spending. That does not prevent investment. But what it should do is to prevent clubs spending what they do not have.

Maximum wage! You don’t think chairmen weren’t slipping fivers in boots before Jimmy Hill poked his chin in?

And that Comrades is why Niall wants the Premier League to subsidise footy at this level. Rather than accept it's not actually sustainable for a 'fans' commune to run at anything other than...a loss

Silk- not sure why you think that you (or anyone else) are able to say what our wage bill “should be”. The model in football has always been that owners subsidise losses, for their own pleasure, so in effect the amount that the wage bill “is” is going to be determined by the income that the average club can bring in plus the amount that owners are willing to subsidise via loans or otherwise. Whether we like it or not football isn’t (never has been and never will be) an industry where the main aim is to make a profit or even break even. If we choose to cut off the option of getting an owner to put in money that is our choice and one whose consequences (good and bad) we have to live with.

Or in other words - AFCW is now discovering what every other professional football club has realised for the past couple of decades at least

Double gates,vast corporate ,events, Broncos,.massive increase in merchandise sales since km,but we can't break anywhere near even 🙈

Nick - we and other clubs are losing £1 million or more every season. That is the very definition of overpaid. Our wage bill for the coming will probably be between £2.5 million and £3 million when it should be £1.5 million tops. The only reason we don't it that other clubs are losing money from overpaying their players and if we cut our cloth accordingly we would go down like Forest Green and Sutton.

KD - yes it was. There was the maximum wage once and it was more sustainable before the Premier League. Just think for a minute .What real business budgets to lose a certain amount every year? It is madness. Not saying every club should be the same size but it should be bleeding obvious that they should have to balance the books every year. And owners should not be able to loan clubs money - it should be a non-refundable investment or nothing.

Not sure that you can say that L2 footballers are paid “too much”, they are paid the market rate and the fact that some of that comes from club owners rather than gate money is just the way that the game has been structured for a century or more. It’s more than we can afford, but that’s down to our choice of ownership model.

Chesterfield have just signed Paddy Madden from Stockport on a 2 year deal he wouldn’t have come cheap

Has football ever been 'sustainable'? Haven't owners/chairmen always spent their own money to plug the gaps?

Mick Buckley did say the truth though. L2 players are paid too much and more than they deserve. Until the L2 owners get this sorted they will continually have spend their own money to plug the gaps.

Interesting that MB makes a big play about the We are Wimbledon Fund, as a way of attracting money from fans. I had been contributing to that since it was set up and stopped this year, it was notable that nobody contacted me to ask me why or try to persuade me to change my mind, so it’s obviously not being taken that seriously.

DTB chair getting things wrong, deliberately or just out of incompetence, nothing new.

Interesting that we will be making a bigger operating (ie pre transfers) loss this year- which is definitely not what we had been “soft spun” to us. No idea where MB gets a figure of £1.1m for that, as even with the dodgy accounting approach of ignoring depreciation the “cash” loss was still more like £1.7m last year.

A discussion regarding D&I issues took place. Enlightening.