For a player who has become a first team regular, with 43 league games under his belt this season and 6 goals and 5 assists to boot, he is not in keeping with the other dross on the transfer list: those fringe players (Nunez, O’Brien), forgettables (Connolly) and outright flops (Paynter and Rachubka).

Warnock responded to questioning as to why Clayton found himself on the transfer list in an interview yesterday evening, offering:

I’m looking to sign midfield players, and the contract Adam’s representatives were looking for, we weren’t prepared to go to that extent. Coming into the last year [of Clayton’s contract at Leeds United] it makes sense to see if they can get that offer somewhere else and if we can get an appropriate figure it’s the sort of money I can use to improve the squad … Adam has probably had more games than anyone else, but looking at that area I have my own ideas about players I’d like to bring in and that’s what I’m looking for really.

There are two different reasons mentioned in this interview as to why Clayton has been transfer listed. They are: one, a new contract has stumbled over wage levels, and two, Clayton is not the ideal player that Warnock wants for central midfield. But it is the latter which is more viable to influence Clayton’s inclusion on the transfer list.

Considering how much Clayton’s game has waned since Warnock’s arrival – in comparison to fellow central midfielder Michael Brown, who, when he remains on the pitch, has on occasions shown signs that he is a solid hard working midfielder and worth the punt of another season on ‘reduced’ wages – it is understandable that Warnock might want to try other recruits in central midfield. Who they are, and whether they are better than Clayton are arguments set for a later date…

What is more pressing in the here and now is the way Leeds United fans have jumped on the conclusion that Clayton is on the transfer list primarily because of his and/or his agents excessive wage demands, rather than where he fits in (or not as the case may be) with Warnock’s plans.

To be fair, Bates has led us down this path with an interview on Radio Bates immediately before the release of Wednesday afternoon’s hotly anticipated Schindler’s list of retained personnel.

To quote:

There is one individual whose agent has demanded £15,000 a week for him. That is £780,000 a year and with taxes, you are looking at nearly £900,000 a year, for a footballer in the championship. That is the equivalent of the gate receipts from four home games in a season. It is ridiculous, good luck to the guy if he gets it elsewhere.

For a club that doesn’t name names in transfer gossip, our Chairman sure likes to wave about unsubstantiated numbers.

Putting zero and zero together, Leeds fans quickly deduced the answer wasn’t four at all but Adam Clayton who was churlishly demanding the £15,000 a week. Taking Bates no-words at face value a stream of ire interrupted Clayton’s afternoon golfing session. Forcing him to respond via Twitter:

As my last retweet didn’t seem to make sense to many of you… I DIDN’T ask for 15k a week.

Before capping off a bad day at the office with a movie and a can or two of Carlsberg.

‘Is Clayton worth £15,000 a week?’ is one debate worth having. But it only holds any sense once Leeds United fans can agree on what constitutes a ‘decent’ wage for a first team regular at Leeds United whilst we are in the Championship.

To debate this is to restep into that dirty brown quagmire of Batesism, that whole paradigm of whether frugal management of the club’s finances is the only way to take this club forward v. the straw dog that is the recklessness of the Risdale years and ‘Living the Dream’.

Purposefully, an analogy exists with the current British political paradigm between the Coalition Government and the Labour opposition: either slash the public expense back in order to one day stop paying debt interest and maybe even balance the fiscal deficit v. maintain public provision as this takes up the slack of the private sector during the recession and maintains a level of growth that will at least service the country’s debts and keep people happier if in employment.

‘Why are you bringing all this politics McGuffan into Leeds United’s financial strategy?’ you may ask. Well, because that’s exactly what Ken is doing in order to justify paying a low-end Championship wage to our squad members.

In returning to Ken’s Yorkshire Radio interview about the unnamed player’s unnamed agent demanding exactly £15,000 per week, Bates followed on to say:

All the chairmen I have been speaking too in the last few months are all cutting back. As we point out, there is a recession and we have the fans writing in to complain about the pricing. It seems that player’s agents seem to think they are immune.

Laughable as it may be that a millionaire tax-exile such as Ken Bates feels for the plight of the common man in this time of great austerity, with player’s agent being this weeks stand-in for fatcat bankers, you will have noticed that for all the talk of ‘cutting back’, season tickets have not been reduced, nor the subscription to LUTV, nor the price of a new Leeds top…

The language of cutbacks has been hot on Ken’s lips since just before the January transfer window. Back then he wanted to cut back the wage bill and more urgently the number of players in the squad. From another Yorkshire Radio mouthpiece of 14^th December 2011, Bates answers the question he’d asked Ben Fry to ask him as follows:

We have a very large squad by even Premiership standards. We always used to say two players for every position and an extra one for the goalkeeper. That’s 23. Now we have 28, 29.

Roll on five months and the cutbacks strike again. Yesterday, Bates concluded his Yorkshire Radio stint with:

We have a squad of 30, we intend to cut it to 21-22, and we intend to get value for money. Fans are entitled to it and it is all we can afford.

Depressing as the last sentiment sounds about ‘all we can afford’, however the swinging cuts works both ways. Less players equals higher wages if sourced from the same-sized wage pool. At least in theory!

Here’s the maths…

• Last season (2010-11) we spent £11.6m on wages. Add 4% inflation for what we can guess we spent this season (2011-12) and 4% again for our supposed wage budget next season (2012-13) and this figure becomes £12.55m. Now, take Bates and his desire of reducing the squad to 22 players and that works out as an average of just shy of £11,000 per week for each of those 22 players.
• Yes there are the kids to pay too, and they shouldn’t be spoilt on excessive wages, but also consider that we are – hopefully! – not going to be paying so many wages for a string of unwanted and unused loanees as we did in the 2010-12 seasons.
• Factor in also that there are lads in the current ‘retained’ squad who should be on considerably less than regular team players, and I’m thinking here of Cairns and Thompson as ‘unprovens’ and Bromby, Pugh, and Kisnorbo as ‘bit part squad members’. This only increases the amount of wages available for the first team key players such as Snodgrass and McCormack.

At which point you have to ask, is £15,000 per week that unreasonable a wage to demand for a player’s agent to START the opening rounds of a renewed contract negotiation?

You see, we aren’t even pushing out the boat when it comes to what we spend on wages in relation to turnover. As TimPM illustrated in an excellent article on The Scratching Shed, we only spend 35.6% of our turnover on wages. That is about half the amount (% not gross) of any other Championship club.

Are we being prudent here? Well, yes; but we are being far, far too prudent. Even UEFA’s guidelines states that clubs should aim for spending between 50-70% of their turnover on wages. At 35.6%, and with no debts to service, we are massively under-resourcing our wage options and thus offering a needless advantage to our competitors in the Championship to outbid us on wages offered to the players we are interest in.

Even if we only increased our wage bill from 35.6% to 50% of turnover that would allow us to pay 22 squad players each £15,400 per week. At which point you can see that paying Clayton £15,000 per week is perfectly possible. He would be on the average salary at the club, not the top wage. Only then is it possible to argue whether or not we want to pay him £15,000 per week.

So why won’t we pay him (or almost any other player at the club) £15,400 per week at Leeds United? The answer is of course ‘Ken’. And the clue is in the quote taken immediately before the January transfer window when we once more failed to sign anyone or note and eventually sacked our manager.

Prior to saying his intention was to reduce the squad size to 23, Bates led that idea by pointing out that our “wages bills are very, very high” and need to be cut. And that’s at our current level of only 35.6% of turnover, remember! Therefore it is clear that Bates interest in the squad size is purely about the total wages and not the wage level per player. Less players could mean higher wages for each. It could possibly mean a better calibre of player arriving at the club too. But it won’t. Hiding behind the veil of ‘hard times’ for all, Bates is solely interested in paying less and less for the same old same. The cull of players yesterday was not about improving the squad, it was predominately about lessening the wage bill. Once off the books do not expect the total amount of wages to be used on new recruits – regardless of whether the squad size come August is a slim 22 or a full fat 29-30 squad.

Simply put, accusing Clayton or his agent of greed in asking for £15,000 a week, or whoever it was in our squad (if at all) is once more detracting away from the real joke at our club, Ken Bates and his insistent on paying peanuts for wages and getting nothing but monkeys and the odd nutcracker. We should not be party to such a self-purposed individual as Ken Bates in hiding their self-serving actions behind what is truly a time of many individuals’ real financial hardship. Ken, if you want to slash and burn and pocket all our cash, then at the very least do it on the quiet through some dodgy tax haven scheme, but don’t tell us it is in OUR interest for which you purposefully disserve us.

The system works like all predictions league. You simply input your predicted scoreline for each match and are awarded points based on accuracy. The results of each round will be posted on The Scratching Shed as the tournament progresses.

Click here to visit the predictions page and register to take part.

As the 2010-11 accounts of Championship clubs show, Leeds United spend a lower percentage of turnover on the playing squad than any other team in the division – around half of what UEFA suggest is a reasonable percentage to spend on the squad.

This could of course be considered fiscal responsibility, especially when you take into account that Leeds United are the only Championship club to post a profit for 2010-11. Considering how low this profit was, some fans could – and no doubt will – argue that we simply can’t afford to spend anything else on wages, but I think we can safely reject that argument based on the amount of funds Leeds United have spent on ground improvements over the past few seasons (circa £20m in all).

If it was simply a case of Leeds United being unable to afford additional investment in the first team squad then no one would be complaining. As Ken Bates loves to remind us, Leeds United have gambled before and the result was absolutely devastating (ie. we ended up with Ken!)

But that’s not what anyone is asking for here, a club with our turnover doesn’t need to gamble. It’s always been a matter of misguided priorities that many – myself included – would cite as the ultimate problem. Take the £20m spent “improving” a stadium we don’t own for example. Had that money been invested in the squad over the last couple of seasons, we’d be one of the most financially competitive teams in the division, capable of matching the demands of the highest quality of players instead of losing out on Keith Andrews to the mighty Ipswich Town and seeing a whole host of key players walk away for pittance.

Take for example, the 2010/11 wages. Had Simon Grayson been given an additional £10m he would have had a £21.6m fighting fund, which is up there with the highest in this division. That budget would account for roughly 70% of our turnover, in-keeping with the wages cap UEFA have suggested and still a lower percentage of turnover than almost every other team in the Championship.

The trade-off would be no Pavillion, no East Stand executive boxes and no museum, but does anyone really go to Elland Road for any of that? I’m 100% certain that we all managed to get suitably drunk before Ken Bates came along, and I don’t recall anyone demanding a museum and more executive boxes – we couldn’t fill the ones we had!

That’s not to say these things are a particularly bad idea, they’re just poorly timed. Executive boxes for example are a status symbol for the overly wealthy who care little for Championship football – hence our inability to fill them. A museum will be well-visited initially, but the curator will struggle to keep people interested long term with only 93 years of history to work with and limited to the niche subject of Leeds United. The bars and restaurants meanwhile will always get some trade, but profit margins for these businesses will always be pennies in the grand scheme of things and they would be much more useful to a Premier League team than one that can’t even half-fill their ground most weeks.

You have to invest in the playing squad first, generate the success necessary for these facilities to be worthwhile, then use the additional funds to improve the stadium and add additional facilities.

Ticket sales account for the vast majority of Leeds United’s turnover, yet Leeds United’s expenditure doesn’t fairly reflect this. The supporters pay to see a team they can be proud of, they care not for executive boxes most could never dream of being able to afford, and even less for a Valentine’s day lunch at a football stadium – most of us would be in the bad books for weeks following a stunt like that!

There’s an old Chinese proverb that goes something along the lines of; “If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people”

If the grain is Peter Ridsdale’s approach, then Ken Bates’ approach is probably the trees. But growing people was never a big deal to either of them. Ridsdale failed to recognise the value of the players we already had and indulged in pointless transfers and an eye-watering wage bill. This ultimately led to Ken Bates, who refused the quick-fix approach and instead looked a little further ahead by diverting a huge percentage of the clubs resources into building work and ignoring the playing squad completely.

Neither of these two men tried the third option – the Norwich City, or even the Manchester United approach. These two teams recognised the value of the players they had, did everything they could to keep the team together as they rose to prominence and did so without spending recklessly on quick fixes and bodge jobs. It’s also worth noting that Manchester United didn’t build a 75,000 seater stadium and the accompanying facilities in anticipation of their success, they did so as a response to it. Leeds United meanwhile failed to nurture a team that was capable of achieving back-to-back promotions with a little investment, some long-term contracts and the right set of priorities.

On November 10th, we posted an article called ‘Simon Grayson a Bargain at £56,320 Per Point’. The article used TransferMarkt‘s best guesses on transfer fees to show that, according to TransferMarkt‘s figures, Simon Grayson was far and away the best value manager based on transfer fees paid – almost half of second placed Kenny Jackett. As a post-script, responding to feedback from commenters, the article then included a table from The Swiss Ramble of wages spent in 2009-10. This showed that in our League One promotion season Leeds spent far more than several Championship clubs including Watford and Swansea. It also showed Leeds spent a lower percentage of their income than any other club in the Championship that year.

On January 21st, we posted an article called ‘The £11.5m Leeds United Warchest’. This article reported disclosures in Leeds’ programme notes from our Chairman Ken Bates. He said that Grayson’s ‘player budget’ for this season was initially £9.5m, and had risen to £11.5m as Bates had bent the budget to support the manager. Using 2009-10′s figures from The Swiss Ramble, we highlighted that Leeds United would have been only 19th in the table in terms of wage spending two years ago. We also mentioned that Leeds’ 2009-10 figures (placing them 14th) were incredibly vague – including not only the players, but the managers, physios, and Board and transfer ‘pot’.

On March 1st, last Thursday, we posted an article called ‘The Wages Saga (Continued…)’. This acknowledged Blackpool’s published accounts that showed a combined wage and transfer budget in their Premiership Season of £15.6m and would not suggest Leeds’ £12.5m budget (risen yet again) for the season was overly poor.

Yet more evidence has come out, again to do with Blackpool’s wages. It seems Ken Bates has shot himself in the foot. While Blackpool did indeed only spend £15.6m in their Premier League season, and even sold Adam for £7m, the Daily Mail has analysed the accounts and have pointed out a scandal:

Blackpool’s financial accounts for that 2010-11 campaign, filed in the past 48 hours and relating to their first season in the top flight for 39 years, reveal that one of Blackpool’s six directors was paid a staggering £11 million in remuneration for the season that ended with the club’s relegation back to the Championship.

And the unnamed director, paid through his company, Zabaxe, was the chairman’s father, Blackpool’s multi-millionaire majority shareholder, Owen Oyston.

[...]

That remuneration smashes every pay record for a non-player in English football and puts Blackpool’s majority shareholder among the global game’s highest earners for a single season, whether it is players, managers or club executives.

The wage that Blackpool’s majority share-holder “earnt” is, in fact, more than highly-rated manager Ian Holloway, star player Charlie Adam and the rest of the squad’s combined!

So it would seem that to excuse what seems to be very low expenditure on the playing side of the club, through the Blackpool’s accounts is odd at best.

Fans will be forgiven for linking the scenario at Blackpool: with the sale of star player Charlie Adam for £7m to the reported interest from Cardiff in signing integral club captain Robert Snodgrass for £8m, as well as the sale of Max Gradel and Kasper Schmeichel, and the refusal to pay for the renewal of the contracts of Bradley Johnson, Jonny Howson, and Neil Kilkenny. Indeed, Ken Bates has shown himself far from trustworthy, with the news eventually surfacing that despite assuring Leeds fans all summer that Max Gradel was going nowhere, the Ivorian international was in fact told he could leave at the start of the summer.

Given his quoting of Blackpool as justification for Leeds’ low investment in the club, you have to question whether Ken Bates thinks this is the ideal way to run a club?

In my student/professional tax-dodging years, I studied psychology. From the numerous experiments I witnessed and countless more I studied, and the huge amount of research I’ve read and evidence I’ve seen, my own personal belief is that people are born a certain way, and that other factors thereafter shape who they become.

Their underlying personality is fixed, but their behaviour and how they act isn’t. It can’t be. It has to change constantly, we have to adapt to every situation. We all act differently in a professional sense to what we do around friends and family. We act differently in a crowd of our own football fans, to what we would outnumbered in a crowd of fans from another team.

My point is, people don’t change – circumstances do.

Take Ken Bates for example. He is, quite literally, incapable of accepting he may be wrong, and that someone else’s ideas may be better than his own. That’s just how he is. He’s far too stubborn and his narcissism will never allow him to accept fault for anything.

However, Ken Bates is still adaptable to changing circumstances – he has to be, else he’d fail miserably and wouldn’t have had the moderately successful life he has.

A key example is that Ken Bates has to treat Neil Warnock differently to how he treat Simon Grayson because various circumstances dictate that. Warnock’s past success and willingness to walk away the moment he feels he’s unfairly done by is a small factor in this, but the bigger picture is the financial situation at the club which is determined by success on the field.

Bates only ever came to Elland Road because of the financial possibilities, and he isn’t naive enough to think that he can maximise that potential without promotion. There’s no conspiracy at play here, he isn’t trying to keep us in the Championship to dodge a £5m debt – the returns far outweigh the cost.

The circumstances at the start of the 2010/11 season were Leeds returned to the Championship for a season of transition. Ken could have gambled and spent heavily, but the reality is, it’s rare teams get promoted at the first time of asking regardless of spending. You either need to buy a team of experienced Championship players and hope they gel quickly, or allow your League One side to get some experience and see what needs to be improved. We – quite wisely – chose the latter.

Ever-adaptable, when Leeds started to perform above all expectations and the cheapest promotion in history looked possible, Ken was left with funds to play with. By January 2011, when most of us demanded a couple of quality signings for that final push, Bates had already decided the team was good enough and funds had been diverted into off-field activities.

By the summer, Leeds were heavily invested in improving Elland Road. Vast sums of cash had gone in to various projects, the biggest of which was the East Stand redevelopment, and all this meant that there was less money free to spend on the squad. This was quickly highlighted by the departure of several key players who the club couldn’t meet the wage demands of, so replaced with frees and loanees.

In theory, these players were more experienced and more capable of achieving promotion than those that had departed, but in reality, it was an extreme gamble. There’s never any guarantees when you sign players, sometimes they just don’t fit – especially at Elland Road where expectations are incredibly high.

Make multiple changes to your team and there’ll be a transitional stage which ultimately costs you points. While the management and players spend weeks and months trying to make square pegs fit round holes, the supporters grow restless. The realisation that the squad we had before was more capable than version 2.0 is blatantly obvious. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Tinker with it a little and smooth over the cracks by all means, but when you’re within touching distance of your ultimate goal, you don’t scrap the thing completely and start anew.

So the circumstances had changed again and by January 2012, the fans are dissenting and the ticket sales are taking a huge hit. This was way beyond any worse case scenario Ken Bates had predicted when he started investing money in the stadium, how could he see this coming? Things were going so well.

The fans blame Ken, but Bates is still incapable of admitting he was wrong because he hasn’t changed. People don’t change.

Deep down however, Ken knows the club is going backwards. What he also knows is that there is no great surplus of funding to fix it, it’s already been spent. Look around Elland Road, it’s there for all to see.

The circumstances mean that he can’t simply throw money at the team to fix the problems. His own personality means that he lacks the ability to admit he was wrong and explain the situation to supporters, and even though he knows his attempts to shift blame will be largely dismissed, he also knows football fans are fickle and that a big enough distraction will change everything.

In comes Neil Warnock, and alas, the circumstances have changed once more. A new manager always brings a change of atmosphere, and more often than not, a temporary change in form. New ideas, new approach, same players. The investment is still needed, Neil Warnock was the first to point that out, but by the end of the season the circumstances will have changed again.

With no building work planned there will be more funds to play with. Neil Warnock wouldn’t be here otherwise, not a chance. So why not just say that and give Simon the funds? Because Ken hasn’t changed, he can’t admit fault and he needs to buy himself time and rescue the season ticket renewal situation.

Most supporters already agree that reaching the play-offs this season is unlikely, so Ken Bates has effectively ended dissident uprisings until the summer when he’ll once again be judged based on how well he supports the manager. A couple of marquee signings, optimism levels will rise, attendances will increase and things at Leeds United will be back on track.

All of this without Ken Bates ever accepting he made a mistake. Because people don’t change.

But when circumstances change in a way that negatively effects Leeds United’s bottom line and pushes the club further away from the ultimate goal of a Premier League pay day, Ken Bates is as adaptable as anyone.

Many took this evidence and argued that Leeds needed to spend more. We saw the likes of Max Gradel, Jonny Howson, and a raft of other first team players leaving after rejecting contract offers and we saw figures that suggested a lack of investment at the same time as the club spending £7 million on the East Stand redevelopment project. No readers commented that we should spend enough to top the table, surpassing the jaw-dropping £65 million then newly demoted Portsmouth paid that season – that would have equated to an average wage of £40,000-45,000 per player!

Today, Blackpool published their annual accounts. This takes in the 2010-11 season in the Premiership. Readers will remember that Blackpool famously refused to make megabucks signings and instead signed eleven players before the end of the transfer window whose wages could be afforded should the worst happen, and Blackpool find themselves demoted. Blackpool fought valiantly, but ran out of steam and were indeed demoted.

Blackpool’s figures show that last season they budgeted £12.1 million for wages. This should be combined with their £3.5 million transfer budget for the sake of comparison with Leeds’ budget which combines the transfer budget in a “pot” or “warchest”. This £15.6 million budget places Leeds’ £12.5 million budget this year into perspective. Mainly because the low figure reported by Blackpool would place her only 12th in 2009-10’s table of Championship wage-expenditure. This suggests a very significant drop in average expenditure last season and suggests that to compare Leeds’ current wage budget with past wage budgets is unfair in the current economic climate.

So with this extra evidence, how do well do we think the Board have backed our managers this season?

The statistics are exclusive to TSS and will be available before each of our Championship games.

NB. The guys at Kick Off stressed how difficult the probable line-up was with a new manager set to take charge for his first game at Leeds and Portsmouth desperately trying to clear players out on loan deals (due to administration).

Warnock had been amongst the bookies favourites throughout the two weeks of speculation that preceded his appointment, but I think I can speak on behalf of most fans when I say, none of us ever expected it to actually happen.

It wasn’t that he was wrong for the job, on the contrary, most of us felt he was probably the best option from a largely depressing list of names linked with Elland Road. But we’d all become so cynical of Bates, we expected him to hire a cheap, thoroughly underwhelming manager with absolutely no experience to speak of – possibly just to spite us!

Nightmares of Ken Bates and Shaun Harvey mulling over the speculation and opinions of fans haunted me. “They want Neil Warnock do they? Let’s give them Roy Keane!”

But alas, we were proved wrong. Ken Bates appointed the most experienced manager for the job and deserves credit for doing so.

That’s right, praise for Ken Bates from The Scratching Shed – didn’t see that one coming, did you?

I’ve said all along that I don’t like our chairman, nor will I ever, he’s a horrible human being. But that doesn’t mean I won’t hold my hands up and say “fair play Ken” when he gets something right, that would be counter-productive and incredibly petty. In this instance, Ken Bates responded to the demands of fans and has acted in the best interests of the club – there’s nothing to criticise him for.

There’s no “but” either. Whether Neil Warnock is supported in the transfer market or not is a matter for another day, right here and now, the club have made the right decision and deserve praise for doing so.

And that’s not the only thing they’ve got right this week. My primary argument against our ridiculously high ticket prices has always stemmed from a fear that we’re pricing out the next generation of fans. I’m sure none of us like paying Champions League prices for second division football, but it’s not as though I can’t afford it.

My main issue with the pricing has always been that there’s no incentive for people to bring along the next generation of fans. It’s far too expensive for most people to do so, and when you’re watching a team stripped-bare of it’s best players getting outclassed by distinctively average Championship sides, why would anyone leave themselves short?

This is why I applaud the free shirt for juniors promotion the club are running for our upcoming Championship clash against Southampton. The game is on Sky anyway, so the attendance will take a hit, and it’s not as if we were short of spare seats already. Any efforts made to fill those seats, particularly with the next generation of fans we are in danger of losing completely, is a winner in my book.

Finally, I’m also pleased to see the club using their official YouTube channel to post up some of the content available through LUTV.

I’m sure there’ll be some fans who complain because they’re paying for LUTV, only for the club to make it available free elsewhere but LUTV is a highlights service. Was anyone really paying to watch Robert Snodgrass being interviewed?

Social media is incredibly important for businesses nowadays and Leeds United have been painfully slow on the uptake. Not only can Leeds United exploit the capabilities of social media to further boost their revenues by promoting offers and products, but it also allows supporters to interact with the brand online. As content is shared and exchanged in seconds across the web, the customers of the business are effectively creating free advertising – it’s a no-brainer.

This doesn’t mean all is well and there aren’t other things that need to change at the club, but we all had our individual lists of problems and for me personally, the club have started to address a few of those. You can’t campaign for change and then refuse to give credit when the club start making some.

Overall, this has been a positive week for Leeds United Football Club. Let’s all enjoy that for a moment and hope the club continue to build on the progress made.

Marching On Together!

Neil Warnock celebrates Becchio's winner yesterday

The emotional Lee Clark who spent flamboyantly for no results, a similar possibility in Dave Jones, the whining Billy Davies, and the consistent failure Paul Ince would not have fitted the role. Neil Redfearn was not the right man either. Though we owe him gratitude for spending three tough weeks trying to keep the players focused while fans hurled stick at him and the club’s media pushed him forward as Grayson’s potential successor.

In Neil Warnock Leeds get a strong hand at the helm, with plenty of intelligence and bags of experience to boot. As Shaun Derry told Yorkshire Radio before the match, there’s more to Neil Warnock than the comical pantomime villain that fans see in press conferences. A man who demands hard work and application, and who delivers his side of the bargain. Robert Snodgrass told YEP a few days ago that the team need to grow up:

“The fans get frustrated and whatever they want to shout, us as players need to make things right by earning the right to win games and putting our bodies on the line. At the moment, I don’t think that’s happening.”

“Every game you go into, you have to believe that you’re going to win it. The day when you stop approaching games like that, I’d hang my boots up and never play again.”

This is the mentality that we have so sorely lacked recently, and the mentality that Neil Warnock brings to the club. He’s firm, but fair. His interview after the match showed his paternalistic approach to the lads:

“They’re very keen and they listen.”

“They were trying really hard. I think the problem here, with the expectations and everything, is that they just need to relax a little bit.”

The Warnock we know well as an opposition team is the Warnock I’m sure our opponents will keep seeing. He’s not a miracle-worker, either. It took him a few years to turn a mid-table Sheffield United into a promotion-winning team. Nevertheless, he achieved it. He took over at a QPR that was quite well funded, and he used his money wisely and drove them to the Championship title. But he can’t do it all on his own, just like Robert Snodgrass can’t drag the rest of the team with him. Warnock needs financial backing.

Ken Bates and Peter Lorimer have been vocal enough on supposed overspending. There certainly are plenty of high-profile signings who failed to get a place in Grayson’s plans and remained on the wage book. Andy O’Brien from the Premiership, Alex Bruce a proven Championship defender, Billy Paynter supposed to replace Jermaine Beckford after impressing in League One, Mikael Forssell a former Chelsea forward.

Darren O’Dea, Adam Smith and Andros Townsend all see their contracts expire at the end of the season. Without passing judgement, when the club stops paying their wages it will give Warnock some freedom to spend on players of his own choosing. Meanwhile Michael Brown (who has performed under Warnock’s leadership at Sheffield United and was named in the Championship team of the year in 2002-3) and Mika Vayrynen give Warnock the freedom to release or retain for another season, and Lloyd Sam and Mikael Forssell see their contracts expire along with highly rated youngster Aidy White.

But we need more than a few players ending their contracts. The mystery surrounding the club has led some (including me) to briefly consider that we really are struggling to stay afloat. This isn’t the case. We made £12.5million profit on player purchases and sales since Simon Grayson came, by my reckoning. Of this, £7million has gone into stadium redevelopment. That leaves £5.5million. A worryingly high figure to go missing on top of significantly higher attendences than average at top-five Premiership prices.

Tracing this cash is possible through the Ipswich programme notes. The following paragraph has already been published in a previous article:

‘”Where’s the money gone?” is the latest chant from the vociferous few. Well, I’ll tell them. Simon Grayson’s player budget was £9.5M for the year. As I write we have so far committed £11.722M, over budget by nearly 23%. It’s a bad business practice but a demonstration how we have backed the manager and continue to do so.’

We’ve already used stats from The Swiss Ramble on wage expenditure in 2009/10. These statistics would place Leeds’ self-reported £9.5million budget 18th in Championship spending, our revised £12.5million would put us 14th in expenditure (the same as 2009/10 when we gained promotion from League One). Certainly Bates didn’t under-fund Grayson at League One level. Over the past few years players’ contracts signed in boom time have ended and players find it harder to get work as lads like Parnaby and Forssell show. It’s not helped Simon Grayson move on players he didn’t want. Despite that, Bates’ assertion that we’re one of the highest spenders in the division seems laughable. A drop of £4million in average wage expenditure over two years – roughly £3,000 per week per player – would make that the case; such a hefty drop is unlikely.

The next statement in the programme notes was by far the most important and changes the entire scenario for the future. It’s one that I and most others missed:

“With the exception of the museum, that completes the rebuilding, refurbishment, and improvements of Elland Road with approximately £20M having been spent on the clapped out, decaying stadium that I inherited.”

Even if we take this spending to have begun seven years ago at an even pace – when Leeds was fighting for it’s life – the budgets would have taken a £2.85million hit per season. By Ken Bates’ own mouth, his stadium projects have taken away at least a massive £55,000 per-week-per-season that could have been invested into the team. Balance that with roughly £12.5million profit from player sales, and we were still taking away £20,000 per-week-per-season from normal income. These are rough figures. We’re much more likely to have spent more on developments over the past couple of years; James McClean has been rewarded with a new contract recently by Martin O’Neill at Premiership Sunderland said to be worth £10,000-£15,000 per week.

We could pay a lot more towards wages than we have done. We could have afforded to keep our players. I’m not going to debate whether spending on the Stadium is wise. But either way what matters is that Bates has told us “that completes the rebuilding, refurbishment, and improvements”. We know for a fact, using Bates’ figures, that if he refrains from non-football development over the next couple of years, we easily have the ability to back the proven promotion-specialist Neil Warnock in making some quality key signings this summer should we fail in our promotion push this year. If Warnock is not offered adequate backing then I’m sure we will know about it. We do have the money to succeed. MOT!