MASSIMO Maccarone is being touted round Italy's answer to Watford, Sheffield United and Boro and can go on a free this month - if he is willing to take a wage cut. If not, then the £8.15m record signing, will be released in the summer after four year of earning £20,000 a week.
Ugo Ehiogu, an £8m man when he arrived, is looking for a club now too - again his 20k plus income is the stumbling block - or he too will be released come June. And £2.5m midfield misfit Fabio Rochemback is hoping for a financial equation that bridges the wage gap to take him back to Sporting, probably on a free. Meanwhile the club are playing footsie with £4.5m hitman Mark Viduka over a new deal with the clock ticking down on his exit of nothing is agreed.
That is £23m worth of investment - plus the wages that have been thrown at them - walking away with no financial return and with a punative knock-on cost for replacements. And people are worried about Boro's record when it comes to buying players?
Buying players is the easy bit. Pile enough cash on the table and their eyes will roll up three cherries and they will come; Boro demonstrated that as they bought top earners like Ravanelli, Boksic and Karembeu. But when was the last time the club showed they could play the other side of the game shrewdly and sold a player at a tidy profit?
In the early years of Robbo there was a substantial quick return on the big investments, although admittedly the club had their arms twisted on most. Juninho arrived for £4.25m and bailed out to Atletico after relegation for £12.3m, Nick Barmby came in for £5.25m and out for a £1m profit just over a year later, shifting serial victim Paul Merson made a £1m surplus and escape clause specialist Christian Ziege made £3m plus High Court costs while the club broke even on both £7m Ravanelli and £4.5m Emerson. Given the three cup finals and a few years of unprecedented drama and glamour that spending produced it was not a bad return.
But Steve McClaren's reign saw an average outlay of £10m a season on transfers... and how much came back in that time? You will struggle to name a major out-going transfer. Cut-price deals and players released, usually with sizeable pay-offs, or contracts running out.
In that spell we have been in negative equity. In recent years almost all the major investment in team strengthening has eventaully been written off. Last summer, free-transfers Hasselbaink and Doriva were released along with Frank Queudrue going to Fulham for an undisclosed fee while Szilard Nemeth and Joseph Job also were let go after spells out on loan. That batch wasn't as costly as this summer's will be in terms but they still represent a significant level of depreciation and they still needed replacing, albeit on the cheap.
And of the current squad how many would make a profit? We could maybe get our money back on Yakubu with a fair wind but who else that was bought in is worth serious cash? Robert Huth has yet to prove he is a £6m man, Boateng would be hard to shift given his age and form, Pogotetz only really looks assured alongside Woodgate so unless we can interest Real Madrid he is an unknown quantity and who would buy Viduka given he is free in the summer.
Even the kids, refreshing and potential laden though they are, are hard to put a price on. Would Stuart Parnaby, Lee Cattermole or James Morrison instantly command a first team place in any other Premiership team? Who realistically would buy them just yet? Stewart Downing is the only sure-fire instant profit in the team - but is the player they can least afford to lose.
That is pretty poor really. All that investment and we can't cash in our chips. We must assume that either the players weren't as good as their initial price tag suggested, in which case the judgement of scouts and managers and negotiating skills of the clubchiefs are open to criticism, or that the club are not shifting players on at the optimum moment to make a profit which again raises serious questions over the way the club plays the market.
Clearly the club are aware of this financially damaging trend. It has contributed to the thrifty climate that has Keith Lamb warning that Teesside will get the club it can afford, underpins the widely publicised need for Gareth Southgate to shift players off the wage bill before he can buy, says something about the reported new turn to players of potential in the lower leagues and, in the long term maybe more significantly, the emphasis placed on the academy.
Once it was derogatory to be labelled as "a selling club" but that is the only healthy state for a club the size of Boro. Not panic driven closing down sales of the sort we saw at Ayresome under Amer but targeted sales at the optimum point in a players career and with sole aim being the generate the cash to reinvest and improve the team.
Buying big name players at overly inflated prices and then paying other teams to take them away in the last year of their deal is financial suicide and the only alternatives are to have a more astute grassroots scouting network to find better, younger and cheaper players then selling them on for a profit, or finding your own talent and nurturing it through to the first team.
That will be the next big leap forward for Boro, when the kids coming through are not stop-gaps in the first team but are the subject of specualtion that they are poised for big money moves. When Boro start selling again - at a profit - it will be a healthy sign of progress.
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