OI – it’s an interesting conundrum. Perhaps it’s similar to the motivations of people owning Racehorses. When I sold my 2nd business back in 2005, I threw myself into developing and coaching a sporting talent hotspot for young kids. I undertook all of my coaching qualifications and pumped a load of money into getting it off the ground. 15 years on we had produced 9 Olympians, including a number of finalists and medallists and secured a number of British, European & world Records. That was my payback. It wasn’t financial, but it was probably the happiest time in my life and the achievement I’m most proud of.

Can we put that money towards the contract staff who pour the beer?

All EFL academies receive funding, monies from Premier League. There are also lots of grants available. When we applied for academy status it was near £300,000 iirc. There are also funds earmarked to help pay salaries for specialist staff that academies are told they must have.

6MDM - Harvey Elliott at Villa is a current example, if he plays many more games Villa have to turn the loan into a purchase and they apparently don't want him.

There was an article in the Financial Times at the weekend (bear with me here), that maybe shows why there are plenty of rich people willing to throw money at football clubs. There are in effect two elites, the rich but boring people (bankers?, INEOS owners?) and the cool but maybe less wealthy folk (actors, artists, sportspeople etc.). Many of the former are willing to throw money at the organisations around the latter because it gives them an aura of cool. The thrust of the article is that corruption occurs where the two groups meet. Anyway, I'm not sure how much a League 1 or League 2 club is part of the gilded elite but maybe that answers jg's question about why would anyone cover the losses of EFL football clubs.

I know Koppel sacked Terry Burton for playing Peter Hawkins, which triggered a bonus payment because he reached something like 50 appearances so this sort of arrangement is not uncommon.

Leds, perhaps some of our lower paid players are only paid enough to sit on the subs-bench, if they actually got on the pitch they'd need to be paid more.

6MDM - In a similar fashion to the criteria necessary to tender for County Council contracts (which require Living wage undertakings and a range of Community benefit criteria) it may be that only companies who agreed to Living wage tender requirements, like Aramark, were able to tender for our catering. Clearly that may not be the case.

My understanding is that around 20% of current L1 & L2 clubs don't have an Academy - including Tranmere, Accrington, Crawley, Barrow & Harrogate. I'm not necessarily passing judgement on whether we should or shouldn't - and I acknowledge that Junior Nkeng is an incredibly exciting player. I simply say that we should only have an Academy if the Commercials stack up.

How does club know agency workers are paid the London Living Wage and it isn't the agencies keeping the extra themselves as extra margin? Agencies take a percentage of wages as their margin so even if they were not they still make more money because of our generosity.

Sounds ideal OI .you don't throw money around till you can afford novelty projects etc.

I thought we received some central funding for having the academy? Not to cover the full costs, but certainly a worthwhile amount.

In a purely capitalist world we should scrap the academy (not to mention the women's and girls' teams). The Premier League clubs more and more hooverr up anyone remotely talented and then dump them at 16 or 17 if they aren't going to make a profit on them (that is capitalism of course) so we have few talented players left at the club when they get to the end of academy years. We'd be better off with an under 21 group where we try to pick a few of the better discards who might actually be sold later or move into our first team squad.

Henry Ford gave his workers a decent wage so they could afford to buy his cars.

JG - I do agree with your post below. To me two things jump out on that - (1) we need to determine what we think is a reasonable level of player sales to budget for - that will be somewhere between zero (too low) and the levels of sales we saw in 2023/24 (probably higher than is sustainable) - it would be reasonable to assume that level of income in our budgeting (2) we currently seem to see the academy as being a vaguely "good thing to do" without actually questioning why that is the case. Realistically we should do an assessment of the costs vs the revenue it brings in (both from player sales and from the savings made by developing our own players who actually play for the team. If the revenue exceeds the costs then that is all good, if costs exceed revnue we should make an active decision whether this is just "something that we want to do", even if it is loss-making. We shouldn't just "have an academy" without thinking why we are doing so (eg there may be some sort of FA rule that you have to run an academy, if so that would obviously change the debate). Of course, I may be wrong and this assessment may actually have been done but just not shared with fans/ widely known about.

One other thing I found strange from the “Meet the Board” presentation was the assumption that we need to break even without any benefits from the proceeds of player sales. Presumably we only run an Academy, and thereby have all of the costs associated with it, because of the revenues we receive from sales. It would seem rather odd to take the hit on all of the expenditure without targeting and expecting something in return. Presumably the No 1 KPI of the Academy is to generate more in revenue from sales than it costs. Or is there some other altruistic Community Spirited alternative rationale? Over the last 5 years we have averaged around £800K per year in Academy player sales (£1.5m inclusive of non-Academy player sales). Obviously, I have no idea what the cost of running the Academy is, but hopefully it is a lot less than £800K.

I can see the value of paying the LLW, as the club staff impacted by it are still quite lowly-paid and it seems a bit mean to restrict their pay, and if the club was profitable or supported by an owner who thought it was a “good cause” for him/her to subsidise the consequent higher losses then I certainly wouldn’t oppose it on principle, but it needs to be acknowledged as a political, rather than commercial, gesture and one which, as a club, we currently can’t actually afford (as we are running at a loss)

Trebor - you may well be right. I wouldn't mind betting that the Club will only offer contracts to firms who agree to sign up to the Living Wage Foundation - i.e: we might be preventing firms from the process of tendering for our business on this basis. A bit like we appear to be excluding potential shareholders who don't share the same "Values & Principals"!!

Nick - Well said. I totally agree. I'd go further and state that it's quite scandalous to expect fans to make donations which are then being used for this kind of "Socialist" nonsense.

Laurence asked the other day for us to provide an example of the club not being run in a commercial manner- I think that the payment of the London Living Wage is a prime example of this. It’s all very nice as a gesture, and if I was an employee getting more than the market rate for the job I would be very keen on it, but it’s certainly not what a commercial business would do

Micky Dolenz seems to have 2 heads 😁

When the club goes bust, it won't matter in the slightest what "minimum" wage they pay staff.

From memory, London Living Wage applies to people you contract with, too, so catering and bar staff? Working for a third party would fall within its scope?

Onto football matters and I feel like there’s a point available at Barnsley but we’re going to have to take it rather than be given it. We went a point above them in the table with the Reading win but they do have 2 games in hand on us. Of most concern (to me)is that only once in their last 7 home league games have they failed to score 2 or more goals - but they also don’t tend to keep clean sheets either.

OTD can't be real, since I don't see the Manager with his massive rosette and equally massive cigar in the background of the picture standing in his favourite spot. :o)