I think I might have made a mistake.

Or: “I plan; the chair­man laughs.”

After spend­ing the first week of June 2012 wield­ing the axe, I star­ted tying up new con­tracts for the play­ers I wanted to keep. The entire team’s con­tracts were due to expire at the end of the month, so I really had no choice in the mat­ter. The trouble was that every­one haggled. Under­stand­ably, no one wanted to stay on the same money or take a pay cut and the net res­ult was that every­one ended up get­ting a small pay rise.

A bit of wage infla­tion shouldn’t have been a prob­lem. My own per­sonal fiscal rules for respons­ible club man­age­ment mean that I set a hard limit of no more than 50% of turnover being spent on wages. Ideally, the wage budget would be below that, but this is foot­ball and the play­ers are argu­ably the most import­ant asset a club has. When I star­ted at FC Hal­i­fax, the wage bill was £209k pa. With the addi­tion of some youth play­ers and the sign­ing of  striker Luke Rodgers, this rose to around £235k. By the end of the year, it emerged that this was close to 60% of the club’s turnover. That this was a Bad Thing was under­lined by the losses of over £100k in the final summary.

With my ‘Night of the Long Knives’ I had reduced the wage bill to a much health­ier £165k per year. With a budget of £200k, I could real­ist­ic­ally sign the remain­ing youth play­ers needed to com­plete the U18 squad and prob­ably three decent exper­i­enced play­ers to com­plete the first team.

Except I couldn’t.

I had nearly fin­ished with the youth set up, when I real­ised that the chair­man had very dif­fer­ent ideas. He pegged the wages budget at £160k and I’d already blown the budget. He was only pre­pared to go any­where near the £200k I needed if I was going to com­mit to win­ning the league in the com­ing sea­son. With the squad as it stood, there was no way I could com­mit to that. I could under­stand his pos­i­tion, of course. The club had made a big loss dur­ing the pre­vi­ous sea­son, and it’s entirely rational to be cau­tious and to try and recoup those losses. Still, it leaves me in a hole.

I look at my play­ing squad and it is sub­stan­tially weaker than it was when I took over the reigns. By my reck­on­ing, only four play­ers are the fin­ished art­icle and good enough to play in the first team week in, week out. The other seven have the poten­tial to be good, even great play­ers at this level, but they are not there yet. Worse, there are some pos­i­tions, not­ably the goal­keeper, where there is no cover at all. This is look­ing very bad indeed.

Part One: Basing­s­toke Blues

Part Two: Hal­i­fax Hope