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Club Focus - Reading - Clearout on the agenda as Royals look to save millions
The end of a long and testing campaign is on the horizon for Reading with the final match of the season against Preston North End at home on Sunday.
With just one game left attentions are beginning to turn to next season, local newspaper the Reading Post reported a board meeting has been called for just days after the Madejski Stadium clash with the Lilywhites. The paper claims discussions on how to cut a further £4m from the budget will be hot on the agenda, with potential transfer activity heavily implicated as a key factor. Whether the multimillion savings will mean just a reduction in spending or whether players will have to be sold is as yet unclear. As with any club, it will be the players that Brian McDermott and director of football Nick Hammond are keenest to hang on to that would also attract the biggest fees on the open market. The obvious names are the same ones that have been discussed in the gossip columns for months now, chiefly top scorer Gylfi Sigurdsson and goalkeeper Adam Federici. Selling the pair would bring in the quoted £4m but money would need to be spent to replace them with players of the required quality. Federici would be easier to find a replacement for, with the promising Ben Hamer on the books, a player who has had decent experience of league football at Brentford. Sigurdsson will be harder to cope without, as players who trouble the 20 goal mark in their breakthrough season are hardly ten a penny at this level.
A more attractive way to trim money off the budget would be to facilitate the departure of fringe players that were originally signed on Premier League wages. Whilst the likes of Marek Matejovsky and Kalifa Cisse will doubtless have had wage reductions in the event of relegation written in to their contracts, it is likely their income is still at healthy levels for Championship players. With both players having played only minor roles under McDermott’s leadership and with the centre of midfield already oversubscribed, it would make sense for both players to be shown the door. Rumours abound that the long-serving Ivar Ingimarsson is set to follow former Royals boss Steve Coppell to his new posting at Bristol City. Losing the Icelandic centre-back would be a sentimental blow after his years of service, but it might be time to accept that his wages could be spent on a player with a longer term future at the club. With several players having made the step up to the first team this season, and more promising prospects on the cusp of establishing themselves, savings can be made on the higher pay levels of senior pros. A year ago, Brendan Rodgers tried to blood too many youth team graduates in one go, but with several now being integrated in to the demands of the second tier, it is a safer strategy to continue with. Experience is still required, as demonstrated by the successful loan spells of Zurab Khizanishvili and, in particular, Andy Griffin, but there are plenty of experienced professionals around the division who will not come with hefty price tags or supersized wages.
Talks are ongoing among Football League clubs with regards to the Premier League’s proposals for the redistribution of the money the top flight pays out to the lower leagues. Chief among the plans is an extension to the current parachute payments, a financial assistance that Reading have benefitted from since their relegation from the big time. Part of the problem for the Royals is that this summer marks their second and final parachute payment, after which they are back to the far more meagre allocation of money that runs only in the thousands, not millions. The necessity for parachute payments for clubs relegated from the top flight demonstrates just how big the gulf is between the divisions, but if clubs that have benefitted from these payments are still struggling to cut costs, how are teams that have never been in the top flight supposed to compete on their tiny budgets? The only way to survive in the Championship without a major struggle for money seems to be to do what West Brom have over the last few years and flit between the divisions, earning the big bucks and then having the payments take some of the blow off of demotion. For a team like Reading, who have been frugally run for many years now, a one-off stint in the Premier League has still left the club out of pocket, but it is preferable to having only ever existed on the budget they will now find themselves subjected to once more. Balancing the books is never popular, but Royals fans will hope they can at least hang on to their star players this summer.
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