Graham Gautier
No surprise, really, to see WWFC owner Steve Hayes tell Gary Waddock and the rest of the world that “We have to go up next year. Gary knows it and everyone knows it.” Here we go again; if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the tedious, repetitive, pressure cooker environment of the oh-my-God-we-must-win-every-game-or-my-head-comes-off League of Shit and J-C loths otherwise known as League 2.
I get the impression that Steve Hayes really hates League 2. That he hates the northern towns (I think Rotherham was singled out as being particularly upsetting at one meeting I attended), and the grimy clubs that dare to take points from Wycombe Wanderers. He hates that it took us five years to get out of there and are now straight back in there. Most of us agree with him on that one. But most of all Steve Hayes seems to hate the fact that most clubs in League 2 only bring a few hundred fans to our 2000 capacity away end. And understandably, this will mean a lower playing budget for Gary Waddock to bring a Reading 2006 style 106 point championship win in season 2010/11.
Not low enough, of course. The budget should be slashed, or butchered, or slaughtered, or whatever other words holding down shift and F7 will offer me. For any kind of long term security, the football club has to stop borrowing money from Steve Hayes. It has to find a sustainable level of football for what it can genuinely afford. There are repeated statements made that such budget bludgeoning would result in definite relegation, but that kind of thing is misleading at best. There are only two relegation spots in League 2 for a start and there are generally two or three sides that fall apart spectacularly each season down there. Peter Taylor was given a “decent budget” and bought badly, so can’t we learn that “decent” money doesn’t always buy you 17th in League 1. Our worst player last season was most probably our best paid. I’m struggling to remember the last time we paid a large transfer fee for a player truly successful in Wanderers colours. Dagenham & Redbridge could possibly leapfrog Wycombe with a side put together with nothing but the odd friendship payment to non-league clubs. There may be many Wycombe fans who portray such financial frugality as suicidal, but can they produce examples of other similar sized clubs where slightly above medium level spending has produced glorious success?
Because that’s what we have – just above average investment in the playing side. Hayes once promised that no-one would be paid over £1500 a week at Wycombe. Talking to footballers around that time, they didn’t consider that particularly attractive and even now, with fiscal fuck ups perforating English football at every turn, they still don’t. As ridiculous as that seems, quality League 1 level players expected, and mostly still expect, more money than that as their weekly wage. There are Ryman League sides paying £700 a week and more to players, all accumulating massive debt and risking their long term futures. The situation gets worse as you move up the pyramid, but it is what we appear to seek to emulate. Can we afford to pay attractive wages to get the players we need? Looking at the balance sheets, you’d have to say no. Should we be looking at more realistic wage demands, as well as producing more of our own players and then taking risks on them in the first team? If the Youth Team costs £150k to run, shouldn’t we be getting more for our money?
Most of us know at least one business minded Blues fan that has turned and asked the question: “If we’re going to create such massive debts, let’s do it properly and throw proper money at top players, and remove some of the doubt. Let’s buy ourselves something great to enjoy”. I’m certainly no advocate of this school of thought, but you can see the reasoning. At the moment, our half-way house of mid-level budgets is no more likely to succeed than a Bargain Booze style structure filled with non-leaguers and youth team wannabees.
At the moment we have the worst of both worlds – not enough investment to create a competitive side in League 1, but enough to increase levels of debt that make a sustainable long-term future, with or without Wasps, seem less and less likely.
Steve Hayes has made enormous investment in this club, in time, effort and money, and loans. No-one with half a brain hasn’t been grateful at some point for this. But it has to stop. If Hayes genuinely has the best interests of the football club at heart, he has to pull the plug, slowly and with care and over time – but he has to pull the plug.
It won’t happen and this article is utterly pointless, other than to create a URL to link to when the football fans demand big money signings arguments are trotted out. Steve Hayes has a vision for the future of the club which involves a new stadium, shared with Wasps, and contains a slightly lower budget (albeit one that will still leave around £1 million extra debt to Steve Hayes on the balance sheet) for next season for our manager to guarantee automatic promotion to the Land of Milk and Honey of League 1 with. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
And if Gary Waddock takes Wycombe to 10th by the end of October 2010, I think he’ll probably get the sack.
