I used information from Football Manager 2014 to talk about the real world. Am I crazy?

Since posting a blog entry in which I used salary numbers from FM 2014 to discuss the Southampton Salary Cap situation I have received a number of criticisms.  Some were fairly simplistic merely suggesting that because I had used information from a video game in my analysis, it was completely invalid.  To that criticism I simply reply, haughtily, that FM 2014 is a computer game, not a video game.

More seriously, there are obvious problems with using the salary information from FM in an analysis of Southampton’s financial situation.  I thought I was pretty clear that I knew the numbers were not accurate and that I was just using them because they were accessible and could illustrate the point I was trying to make about how the BPL salary cap works and how the effects of the salary cap could explain some of what was going on this summer.

Interestingly, the biggest flaw in how I used the numbers was not pointed out by anyone, but I realized it sometime on Monday.  I used FM base pay numbers.  However, those are not really the true salaries paid to players even in FM.  WATCH OUT THE REST OF THIS BLOG CONTAINS ARITHMETIC.

Take for example Morgan Schneiderlin.  According to FM 2014, he made 1.8 million pounds a year. However, he also has a 5,250 pound appearance fee clause.  Since he made 33 league appearances that year, that added 173,250 pounds to his salary cap cost.

Adam Lallana made 2.3 million but had a 6750 pound appearance fee and a 4500 goal bonus.   With 38 appearances and 9 goals that added 297,000 pounds to his salary cap cost.

Artur Boruc made 1.8 million but has a 5000 pound clean sheet bonus, a 5000 pound appearance fee, and a 3500 pound international cap bonus. He had 29 appearances, six international caps, and 15 clean sheets which added 538,000 pounds to his cap cost.

As you can probably imagine, computing this information for the whole team would be quite a nuisance.  (And I have ignored the unused substitute fees because that would be even more of a pain to calculate.)  I don’t think that making all these detailed calculations will add much to my analysis but I will simply increase the base salary number by 15 percent when I use FM as a source in the future.

Another valid criticism I have received relates to my assumption that we were at the 52 million salary cap last season.  I based this upon reasonable extrapolation from the 47 million wage spend in 2012-2013.  However, that wage spend included all wages—not just the player wages that are relevant to salary cap issues.  I should have realized that.  Sorry.

In an interview shortly after the financial results were published this past spring, Gareth Rogers said that total salary was 65% of turnover but player salaries were only 40 to 50 percent of turnover.  I am somewhat puzzled by the lack of precision here but I will assume that 50 percent is the correct figure.  This means that the 47 million in salary spend last year was only approximately 36 million for player salary cap purposes.  On the surface it seems unlikely that we increased that to 52 million in 2013-2014.  This doesn’t change the validity of my analysis of the effect of a player trading profit—it just may mean that one was not actually necessary this year.

To come up with better numbers for 2012-2013 to use to compare to the official numbers,   I loaded up FM 2013 and added up the base salaries of all Southampton players.  I excluded the lower paid players because I was lazy.  I will simply assume 1 million pounds for them as a group.  The total was 36.925 million pounds.  This number is almost exactly right on target which made me suspicious until I remembered that I had said I would increase this number by 15 percent.  Good.  Error and unreliability is back.  In any case, increase by 15 percent and we get  42.5 million pounds (rounded off a bit).  This number is a bit high but it assumed that we paid the full salary of out on loan players and that they could earn their full appearance bonuses. I doubt either is true.

Next, I returned to FM 2014 to get numbers for 2013-2014.  They totaled up to 40.125 after I added in the one million for the lower paid players.  After adding 15%, the total was 46 million.  This would mean that we were well below last year’s salary cap—especially if this number is 5 million high like the number for 2012-2013.

I was skeptical about the lowness of this year’s total but I checked my work and it appears right.  Of course, FM 2014 could be less accurate than FM 2013, but there is no reason to make that assumption.

This year we got also rid of Guly, Fox, Barnard, and Forte which creates another 3 million in cap space.

While my numbers are, obviously, not precise, these calculations indicate that we have somewhere between 13 and 18 million pounds of unused salary cap space this year. This certainly sounds like a lot and might indicate that conclusions in my earlier blogs were wrong, at least to some degree. But does it change the ultimate conclusion?

I will discuss that in my next post.  (This is not a trick question, by the way, I haven’t calculated the answer yet.)  Luckily, this cliffhanger will give everyone the maximum chance to attack me.