Newcastle to double Carroll’s wages? Maybe!
Posted on January 24th, 2011 | 31 Comments |
Warning Will Robinson! The story comes from the News of the World, which is somewhere between Viz and The Beano in terms of reliable, factual information, so treat it with extreme caution.
On the back of Alan Pardew’s “I will says this one more time – Andy Carroll is not for sale” statement in response to alleged interest in the player from Spurs, it now seems that the club are prepared to double Andy Carroll’s wages in order to fend off interest from a brace of Manchesters.
This would apparently take the player’s wages from £30,000 a week to £60,000 a week and help to stop Carroll from being tempted by Manchester City and Manchester United, who are both – allegedly – interested in acquiring Carroll’s services.
There are no quotes from the player, the club or even nameless ‘sources inside the club’, so the chances of this being true are probably close to nil. Having said that, I suppose it’s reasonable to expect a club to have to increase the wages of a desirable player and £60,000 a week or more isn’t an unusual wage for a highly-rated striker.
It would of course call into question the maximum weekly wage caps the club has supposedly set for players, although I have personally never really believed that in the first place. I don’t think it has ever been about specific wage caps as such, but more about a sensible intent to stop paying over the odds for players who either underperform or spend all their time queuing up outside the doctor’s office.
I’m usually interested in players wages just so that I can decide whether I think they’re worth it or not, but I don’t subscribe to the ‘we pay their wages’ philosophy. We, the fans, do, indirectly, pay them in part I suppose – along with sponsors, TV companies and other sources of club income – but we don’t ‘pay their wages’ any more than we pay the wages of the check-out desk operator at Tesco. Which is to say that we give the ‘company’ some money in return for an end product. From Tesco the end product is a trolley full of shopping and from our football club the end product is entertainment on a Saturday afternoon and an appropriate degree of expectation in terms of success. How the wages are allocated is an internal matter.
Yet we are of course entitled to voice an opinion and if we know a player’s wage we’re entitled to pass our personal judgement as to whether we think they’re worth it or not. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t support the ‘we pay their wages so we can tell the club what to pay them’ philosophy.
Anyway, I’ve soapboxed a bit there, so I’ll climb down off it and have some breakfast instead.
As to the story about Andy Carroll’s wage doubling, it’s probably twaddle anyway.
NUFCBlog Author: Hugh de Payen
I'm a baby-boomer of the punk rock persuasion, currently exiled in Somerset for crimes committed in a previous life where locals keep trying to poison me with something called 'scrumpy'. Hates sprouts, coat-hangers, Cilla Black, ornaments, Steven Seagull movies and 50 Cent (he's not worth 10).
Hugh de Payen has written 634 articles on this blog.
The club seem to be stumbling towards a professional approach to managing its affairs and wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something in Carroll’s contract that triggers rises in his wages as a matter of course……… I hope!