Crystal Palace

Crystal Palace: Kieran Maguire discusses club’s wage structure

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Image for Crystal Palace: Kieran Maguire discusses club’s wage structure

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has given his views on Crystal Palace and their wage structure in previous years.

The club recently released their financial accounts (as per The Athletic) for the 2019/20 season, and it showed that the club operated at a loss of £61.1m, obviously impacted by the lack of fans in the ground for the latter part of that season.

The Eagles certainly had an ageing, bloated squad during that campaign with many veteran players who would have likely been on very high wages still hanging on through the 2020/21 campaign before finally being allowed to leave this past summer.

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Speaking about the issue on The Price of Football, Maguire analysed the situation and dissected just how much the club were paying when it came to wages before comparing them to other clubs in the Premier League:

“Looking at these numbers, the average wage paid at Palace, based on my calculations, was just shy of £57k a week, and that’s more than Villa, Bournemouth, certainly more than us at Brighton, Burnley, Norwich. Palace were probably punching above their weight in terms of wages.”

TIF Thoughts on Kieran Maguire’s comments about Crystal Palace’s wage structure…

Will Patrick Vieira still be Crystal Palace's manager at the end of the season?

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No

‘Punching above their weight’ is a good phrase to use, because if a club is paying such high prices when it comes to wages, they should probably have been performing better than just meandering around the Premier League like they have done in previous seasons.

Given the number of departures that the club went through this summer, they will have gotten rid of a large amount of that high wage figure, with former player Darren Ambrose claiming on TalkSport that it was roughly £500,000-£600,000 a week that the club were able to shift, which should help them massively as they go through a major rebuild.

Hopefully, they will be able to spend those wages more wisely and get better value out of them in the future, otherwise they just risk repeating the same mistakes again by wasting money rather than using it in a way to help drive the club forward.

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Freelance sports journalist & broadcaster.