To summarise what i said in another thread mate, asuming we sell Stones, and one other for roughly a 5-6m trading profit (mCCarthy for 11-12m would achieve that as would cleverley for 5-6m for example)
and factoring in players released and the sales above and new contracts in the 100-140k pw mark for Barkley, Lukaku, and increases for other first team players of about 150k across the board (say Deulofue, Mori etc, then we'd be able to raise wages this coming season by about 1.2-1.3m per week
thats been the stated aim of bridging the gap to the teams above and the ambition of the owner.
That would allow 3 additions on 50k pw, 3 on 100k pw, 2 on 150k pw, and 3 on 200k pw. There is absolute no chance on earth we are adding 10 players to the squad, so why exactly are we selling stonjes to allow such an increase in wages - esepcially given the situation we are not offering anything close to 200k pw and likely not offering 150k pw
Doing it another way around, we could add 5 players on 50k pw (the likes of gueye etc) and 10 players on 100k pw, honestly the math doesnt add up on this at all and it's setting alarm bells ringing for me anyway
Any of Carvalho, Witsel, Koulibaly etc that we REALLY wanted to buy we could have had here by now if we had paid a figure in wages for them that would far far exceed anything they could expect any other club with interest to offer them, the fact is we havent done that, we have instead trieds to get them for a minor amount more in wgaes than they cpould earn if they held out for another increased profile team and thats basically us trtying to make a statement without taking any form of control in the situation and with us fully aware that we may end up missing out on any or all the targets by that strategy.