The next financial report should look interesting: the most conservative estimate is that we've had a negative net spend of £30m over the past four years, while last summer our ins and outs led to ~£4m annual reduction in wages. As far as I'm aware there's been no restructuring of loan repayments, so - and please educate me if I'm being naive - it seems like money should be pooling somewhere. Right?
Since the summer window, where we received (again a conservative estimate) ~£12m more than we spent, we've sold Jelavic for (I'll stick to the lowest of the reported fees for outgoings, highest for incomings) £5.5m and cut another ~£1.5m from our wage expenditure. We've added McGeady for a nominal fee (let's say £1m, which is a bit more than some reliable sources say) on a salary we can safely assume is comparable to Jelavic's, and Traore for an unknown loan fee and salary (but, as reported, it looks from Monaco's financials that he's salaried at 1.5m p/a, so lets just assume we're paying the full amount). Let's be a little silly and say we payed Monaco £1m for loaning Traore, which we definitely didn't.
Forgetting the Arteta/Yakubu/Rodwell/Lescott/Kitbag/Chang/Old Mother Kenwright money, we're left right now with a surplus of £15m in transfer fees and overall wage expenditure of around £3m less than 12 months ago. Oh, and that's without considering the biggest media deal in sport history that every other club in the league has spent against. I mean, even Norwich.
A few weeks ago Martinez was explicit in his desire to replace Gibson and Kone. A little later he decided that the squad had real depth and implied that perhaps replacements were not necessary. He added McGeady, a player with a few months on his deal, after saying it wouldn't happen in January. He replaced Jelavic with a loan, poached from under the noses of another club. He's gone public in an attempt to shift Heitinga and his £60k p/w. In separate conversations last night he said that he both would and wouldn't be looking to replace Lukaku, who, along with Oviedo, may be out for the remainder of the season. Upshot: he's either playing a very cunning game or, more likely, the board/chairman/chief exec are not communicating a consistent message.
Martinez will look a little foolish if we don't get anyone in before this window closes, and, while an inevitable win over Villa on Saturday will dilute the vitriol, we'll almost certainly have to do the same bewildered basic maths in the summer.
So, what's the solution?
sickening reading