James and the giant paycheck?
Posted on July 10th, 2010 | 94 Comments |
Perch sign a four-year contract at the start of the week and on the surface it looked like a decent deal. We got a player who can play in a number of different positions for what should have been a knock price, including the salary.
That was until Nottinham Forest chief Mark Arthur revealed that Newcastle United had offered to quadruple the wages the player was earning at the City Ground, and how it would be unfair on Perch if Forest stopped him from earning a much higher salary elsewhere, although the reported £1.2 million fee would have no doubt helped incite this sudden bout of goodwill.
So is James Perch really worth a four-fold increase in his wages? I’m not so sure. Let me go on record to say that I very much doubt that he was on mega bucks at Nottingham Forest. After a bit of digging, I found out that Perch signed a new contract whilst Forest were in the midst of a fight to stay in the Championship. So on that basis it is hughly unlikely that he would be offered a Championship wage given that the club didn’t even know what league they would be playing in the next season.
Salary details are very sketchy for players in England, and as such it is harder to track down what a player is earning in England compared to looking at what sort of salary a player is earning in a foreign league, so much of this is just guesstimating.
I really can’t imagine that Perch was on a fantastic wedge at Forest, perhaps no more than £2,000 a week. So if we have quadrupled that, by my simple calculation, that makes it £8,000 a week that Perch would pick up at Newcastle. But even that sounds too high to me.
My point is that being sucked into the quadruple wage trap is easy, but relatively speaking there isn’t that much difference to what he would have been on at Nottingham Forest. It wouldn’t be like giving Joey Barton or Alan Smith a four-fold increase in their wages , that’s for sure.
On the other hand, the guy has been handed the chance of playing his football in the Premier League, and playing at a higher level should surely warrant a pay raise, shouldn’t it? I mean, if you got promoted to a higher position at work then you would expect to recompensed accordingly, wouldn’t you?
At the end of the day, and contrary to my headline, I very much doubt that the club has spent anymore than was absolutely neccesary in securing the services of Perch. Fair play to the lad if he managed to wrangle the increase himself, or if he got offered it without having to do much negotiating. I would happily accept the sort of payrise Perch has just had, so it would be hypocritical if I was to mouth off about it.
Time will tell if his rise is justified though.
NUFCBlog Author: toonsy
toonsy has written 643 articles on this blog.
he was on the same contact that he signed when they got promoted to the championship which would have been no more than 3k a week. of course we were going to increase it alot as it would be so unfair if a player signed for less than 5k a week and all our other players had over 20k.
it would cause major fractions in the squad, its just the press trying to stir crap again.