Hell, Marcus was immense too when he seemingly suddenly broke through, winning player of the season in 14-15. Both Olssons still playing in the Allsvenskan.

Yes, easy to forget just how young COR still is (turning 22 in Oct), especially for a CB, and how much pro football he's already played for his age. Out of unnecessary curiosity, here's the trajectory of recent(ish) Rovers Academy CB grads: COR had a bit of a stunted (and to some extent unfortunate) year, but another year in L1 means he's only sort of behind the trajectories of Lenihan (who was more of a squad player, and still a MF/DF hybrid that year?) and Jack O'Connell (he was only a squad player with Brentford that year before becoming a L1 starter with Sheffield the next year). Otherwise, COR's on track with Carter and ahead of Wharton, Magloire, Anthony O'Connor, and Ryan Edwards (to pick out some less successful examples!) Definitely a crucial year for COR, but I wouldn't write him off just yet. Perhaps he's been 'found out' in training as hopeless at this level, but securing another L1 loan so quickly is still a positive sign. If reports are correct, we picked him off due to a low release clause (£500k?), which seems like a no brainer bet for a CB managing in the lower leagues at 18-19 years old (yes, can debate if that money was better spent on desperate short-term needs at the time...). It's possible the current sports hierarchy isn't as enamoured with him and he's probably on a high wage relative to someone coming straight out of the Academy (so, the bean counters may be keen to get his long-term contract off the books given he's signed until 2028), but presumably Doncaster are covering an ok chunk of his wages this year.

Yes, ultimately lacks the required physicality to hold up at this level and blew hot-and-cold, but you could put together a pretty decent highlights package of JRC being an absolute baller at times. A really entertaining footballer at his peak! eg, loved his 'scoop' vs QPR a couple years ago: https://www.facebook.com/1Rovers/videos/gallagher-2nd-goal-v-qpr/1176723016538746/

another comprehensive KentExile loans thread? hell yeah. Repeating myself, but I'd heard from a Cambridge supporter that he was in a bit of an unlucky situation at a poor L1 side last year (this was compounded by making a few errors early on...), so he may not have gotten a truly fair shake there. Then seemed to manage fine with another half-season in L2 to try to salvage his year. Taking a step back, he's only turning 22 in Oct. Despite last year being a bit of a step back, a CB managing regular L2 minutes at ages 19-21 is pretty promising overall. Getting loaned out so early is rather strange. Taking an optimistic view, this should help him get settled early and its perhaps a good sign that a L1 club is immediately keen to sign him to be a starter, rather than trying to fit him in somewhere in late Aug. But, can also easily imagine Rovers are simply trying to minimise their wage costs for the year, and obviously concerning if VI doesn't even see him as competition to our current CBs (Hyam and Carter are obviously ahead, but he should be 3rdish at the moment with Batth and Sanderson out the door...)

Yup. Rovers' wage bill may have been nominally flat since 2019-20, but just plugging our 2019-20 £25.6m wage bill into the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that's equivalent to £32.7m in today's money, or a ~25% real cut if our wage bill is currently around £25m. Sure, footballers are privileged folk, but their agents will certainly be aware of economy-wide inflation when negotiating new contracts... To be somewhat fair, Championship aggregate wages had been flat/declining for some time due to Covid, plus perhaps a slight regaining of financial sanity by owners, but there was a big jump in 2023-24. Part of that will be due to Luton getting promoted on the cheap (I'd also suspect the rise of immediate parachute club bouncebacks have suppressed the league-wide wage bill), but it'll also reflect the new commercial deal feeding through + general inflation (and keeping the lights on has gotten pricier!) Revenue has been growing too. Obviously rebounding from Covid, but 2022-23 and 2023-24 were mainly due to JDT's Cup runs (which will likely have boosted our player costs too!) and the Championship's league-wide commercial deal improving by a few million.

Swiss Ramble posted a review today of our 2023-24 accounts in his usual highly-digestable way: https://swissramble.substack.com/p/blackburn-rovers-finances-202324 Most of it is behind a paywall, but can do a 7-day free trial to access it. I haven't read it yet myself, but perhaps can share some highlights later (although I doubt it'll say anything we don't already know!)

Quibbling over the fee we should have gotten for Wharton is ultimately beside the point, as much as we can enjoy pedantic arguments about how we'll obviously receive more than £18m in the end, how much 'credit' we can give for add-ons/sell-ons (as we can debate re: Raya's sale), benchmarks like how much Bristol City received for Alex Scott (eg, I've seen it reported as 'up to' £25m), speculating as to how much we would've gotten if we had at the very least waited until the summer and had a proper bidding war, etc etc etc. The main issue is that it was obviously a replay of the Tom Cairney sale: a distressed seller forcing a star player out the door to alleviate immediate cashflow concerns due to our owners suddenly being unable (and unwilling) to properly fund the club despite their (allegedly) massive wealth.* Hell, it's somewhat frustrating how much we did get for Wharton given the Rovers hierachy can simply deflect any critique saying it was a record fee, it reflected the market at the time, hard to say no when PL club comes calling, etc. I can't immediately recall if they've referred to FFP... blah blah blah, it's all bullshit. They'll obviously never publicly admit it was driven by cashflow needs. Some times I wonder if one angle of attack is to mock Venky's for not being able to properly fund their 'play thing'. For all the talk of making the club 'sustainable' etc, fuck that, you're quasi-oligarchs. Why aren't you pissing away your wealth to chase footballing glory, like the other vain owners across English football? --- *Linked to how much of an 'impediment' it is for Venky's to provide a 'guarantee' for every £ they send abroad. As can reportedly be the case for the super rich, a lot of their wealth is tied up in illiquid assets, is needed as collateral for other loans, etc., so regularly scrounging together ~£10m+ to send over isn't necessarily something they're capable of doing at a flick of a switch (probably also reflecting general in-fighting, poor planning, indecision, bureaucracy, etc within the Venky's empire). And whether the money set aside in the guarantee still earns interest or does it just sit there and have its nominal value eaten away by inflation I've generally found it a bit odd that they've consistently relied on that bank overdraft (at 2% plus BOE rate) for day-to-day funding of the club, which hurts Rovers' bottom line relative to just sending over a bunch of cash, but perhaps that reflects competing interests for cash within the Venky's empire. Anyway, I'm straying into a separate (unending) discussion! tldr; I just had some coffee.

On Duru, he did apparently impress at Barrow in L2 before his injury and, for what it's worth, caught the attention of the USA u20s for a few appearances with them too, so I think he had a promising year. But, agreed that he shouldn't be counted on for the Championship just yet. A loan in L1, and a season without injury, should do him well. On Academy 'targets', I'm not adding anything already discussed, but while Academy minutes are certainly a metric of interest, any outright 'target' violates Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law Let alone whether minutes alone can really mean anything when the output of Academy products is so bimodal and heterogeneous, with the likes of Travis, long graduated, logging 3000+ min alone, another 2000+ min from JRC/Buckley, yet probably failed years for both of them, Carter probably would've logged ~3000 if it wasn't for injury... and if you rule them out based on age (but why? Part of the Academy's value is if it churns out a durable asset that means we don't have to deploy our budget for a senior player, even in cases where we don't ultimately profit from a player sale, eg, Nyambe), the minutes dramatically drop to a bit under 300min across Montgomery, Tyjon, and Leonard, where it doesn't make sense to think they should have played more than that due to injuries and Montgomery first needing to show promise on a loan. There's maybe some value in also having Academy players available to fill bench spots as needed, and maybe blood them opportunistically, as injuries crop up, but that can get out of hand (just look at this lineup: https://www.skysports.com/football/sheffield-wednesday-vs-blackburn-rovers/484926), especially when used as an excuse to otherwise not invest in squad depth (yet, surprisingly if you think about it, we were scraping the max roster limit this past year!) Another benchmark - and perhaps in the ballpark of what we can expect to get for Finneran (perhaps more backloaded/add-on given his lack of senior games) - is the Mahoney compensation: https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/16229661.ruling-reveals-fee-rovers-will-receive-connor-mahoney/ Mahoney left in July 2017 and the tribunal fee was published in May 2018. So, would maybe expect a decision around now... £425k up front, plus £100k for every 10 first-team appearances up to 50 apps / £500k, £250k if he was capped by England, and 20% of any sell-on profit. Obviously didn't trigger any of those appearance bonuses, but apparently went to Millwall for £1.1m, so we ultimately got £425k + 20%*(1.1m-.425m)= £560k for Mahoney. If I remember right, this was made public because it did go to a tribunal decision as Bournemouth and Rovers couldn't agree on a deal. Not sure if that's still the case for tribunal-determined fees.

Were you looking at Ipswich's 2023-24 accounts? Interestingly, they explicitly set out their FFP calcs in their accounts, which I've never seen in a club's accounts before. Their headline losses for 2021/22, 2022/23, and 2023/24 were £12.6m, £18.2m, and £39.3m, respectively, so £70.1m total, obviously well above £39m, but, as with all clubs, plenty of costs are netted off for FFP. Over those three years, that includes £4.5m of depreciation (tangible, not player trading), £1.2m of 'related party preference shares' (whatever that's about), £8.7m for 'youth development', £1.2m for community development, £0.8m for women's football, and £2.5m for Covid-related costs. That brings their losses down to £51.2m. But, crucially, they claim £16.3m of 'promotion costs'.* Such bonuses are always excluded from FFP. Excluding those costs brings their 3-year losses down to £34.9m, so they were fine as of 2023-24 (but probably needed to make ~£6m+ of player sales to stay compliant in 2024-25 if they hadn't been promoted). *Oddly, no such costs are claimed for promotion from L1 in 22-23. It would be odd if they had zero bonuses due to that, so you can imagine them arguing to net off further costs if they were at risk of a breach. --- For 'fun', using some of those Ipswich Town figures as rough benchmarks (will assume £4m/y for our Academy costs, which I think is what Swiss Ramble ususally assumes. Ipswich only have a Cat 2 Academy, with costs varying from £1.7-3.8m/y), here's what our 'FFP losses' would've been for 2021-22 to 2023-24. So, yeah, we did lose £29m - the Championship is a financially stupid league - but Venky's probably could've pumped in another ~£25m+ the past few years without breaching FFP.

Yes, agreed that criticising that specific header is a bit harsh! He did make a good run in that instance... Your example is better 🙂 While we can debate Dennis' efforts/decision-making that game, I can't really direct that much venom toward a clearly out of form striker, who, due to our 'unique' circumstances, was supposed to be the guy, yet clearly was in no position to be that this year. Yup. Meant to cap my post that the Dennis loan is ultimately emblematic of our 'penny wise, pound foolish' approach, imposed because Venky's have apparently suddenly decided they can't be bothered with losing £10m+/year anymore (heck, even making a loss at all given we made a £3m profit last year...). Yes, Championship football is an insane money-waster, but if you've seemingly suddenly become aware of that (perhaps partly hastened by an Indian court...), then why are you still owning the club.

Taking a very narrow view, but that was the moment for Dennis to shine. The biggest piece of our 'significant' investment in January, perhaps finally a striker with gamebreaking potential (Ohashi and Gueye have certainly been decent bargain buys, but they're both clearly squad-level, rather than leading, strikers), we need one goal to make the playoffs... And yet clearly off the pace, rusty with the ball, misses an open header ... everything you'd expect of a striker who has played barely 5 minutes since March (with a red card in there to boot!). When he's fit, I'm sure there's a hell of a player in there, but he's not even close to that right now. A clear panic buy at the end of the window, probably cheap compared to if we actually signed a decent striker for several million in the summer, yet also probably quite expensive for a return of zero goals and one assist in ~170min of action (and a loan too, at least Kargbo could turn into a decent investment). Plenty proud of some of the efforts to end the year, but this whole season just leaves a bitter taste.

Or 2017 vibes, up 2-0 early in our must-win game against Brentford, then (ironically!) staring at our phones cheering on Bristol and Ipswich for the rest of the match... That was a friend's GF's first live football game. Still laugh at her post-game review: "It was kind of fun, but then everyone at the end got so sad ☹️" (she's not at all a football fan, despite now being married to a former PL Academy player haha)

I've wondered similarly, but, at least for the last couple years, it's that +26% jump in 2024 that probably matters most. Nobody sheds cost-of-living tears for most footballers, but they're not going to accept real terms pay cuts due to recent inflation in a highly competitive labour market... Would definitely be a factor for non-playing staff costs too. Just taking a simple average, our ~£25m is well-below the 2023-24 is league-wide average of £37m, but that's of course skewed by parachute clubs. I may trial Swiss Ramble's substack to see if he's got a new chart for 2023-24, but we were mid-table in 2022-23, but that's before a 26% average league-wide jump, while we dropped 1.5% to £25.4m (or -2.5% if you exclude the impact of Waggott's deferred pension!). Doing a back-of-the-envelope calc assuming the same distribution of wage budgets excluding us, that alone could have dropped us from 11th in 2022-23 to 21st in 2023-24 (guessing it's less of a drop if I properly tried to account for changes in the wage distribution due to promotions/relegations!). Our 'other' operating costs oddly swing from year-to-year, but they'll have definitely been hit by recent inflation too; electricity bills most pertinently! 2023-24 reports them at £13.2m vs an average of £8.7m for 2019-20 to 2021-22 (which will be skewed down by Covid) What counts as the 'budget' can also get a bit wooly. JDT claimed our 'budget' was cut 20%, yet our wage bill was effectively flat and the number of senior players/management increased from 79 to 80. Perhaps 'other' staff costs increased for some reason... meaning a material cut for players (after factoring in departures, new contracts, escalators, etc), but the elephant in the room is obviously the transfer budget, where we swung from a ~£5m net spend to a ~£20m net profit (ultimately reflecting Venky's ceasing to pump money in). I'd bet JDT was having ridiculous arguments about transfer budget promises being dramatically reversed, while the Rovers hierarchy (disingenously!) pointed to the wage budget being maintained... The Academy can also make it hard to benchmark Rovers' staff costs against other non-parachute payment Championship clubs. For example, we had 211 staff in 2023-24 vs 138 at Preston, largely reflective of us having 71 'Academy football players and management. (Preston's accounts also mention an additional 115 matchday staff (so, not full-time employees), which our accounts don't mention). Now, most of those staff are presumably relatively low-paid (but also need to factor in costs beyond basic salaries!), and apparently grants offset some of those costs (it's not clear to me how those are included in our accounts), but it's definitely a factor. As we're well-aware, directors' salaries are published in the accounts, but it's certainly opaque enough that you can wonder what the 'true' player wage budget is, as well as 'other' staff salaries (including whatever the hell Suhail is on).

Happy for Sonny 🙂

National League North is obviously not a high level, but Montgomery has been a consistent starter across both his loans this year (17 starts with Marine and 6 starts + 1 sub with Chorley) and bagged a couple goals (including that screamer). He's turning 21 at the end of next month, so the thinking may simply be he'll need to show if he's anywhere near first-team level pretty soon. This season has obviously gone off the rails, so perhaps give him a couple sub appearances as the season winds down... O'Grady-Macken and Edmondson are a couple years behind him. https://www.rovers.co.uk/news/2024/february/02/kristi-signs-new-deal/ He's signed through to 2025-26, plus an option. Even if he's only flogged off to a L1/L2 club in the end, that's still a relative success for the Academy (and him!). Small beer, I know...