This gets spouted every single season so I don't buy that argument, there is ALWAYS a few big teams with a couple of quid to spend in this league, there's nothing new on that front.
I also don't think anyone truly knows where we stand in terms of wage bill, I'd hazard a bet that our wages this season and last are in around the playoff places.
I think they said that this season our budget was around eighth to tenth. Some ITK may come along and scorn me, I’m just repeating what I saw. As someone said above, you want your manager to outperform his budget, but I don’t think you can feel *entitled* to get promoted if that’s where we are in terms of budget.
I think that's about accurate. I have seen that figure said too, no idea the accuracy, but when you look at other teams in the league that spent big:
Ipswich 800k on Chaplin, 800k on Burgess, 800k on Edmundson, 500k on Harper, more fees paid for Burns, Fraser, Morsy and Hladky, PLUS wages that'll be in the 10k range for Piggot, Carroll, Evans, Edwards and Aluko
Sunderland fees for two highly rated young full backs, and Pritchard will be on a decent wedge of a wage
Wigan 630k on Kerr and some players on big wages (Wyke, Amos, Bennett)
Bolton all free transfers but Kachunga and John will be on big wages
Wednesday fees for Berahino and Gregory, and Marv, Hunt, Byers and Brown will be on close to 10k wages
Charlton 500k on Kirk, 200k on Lavelle and whatever the Clare fee was (250k?)
Lincoln paid fees for Robson, Eyoma, Bishop and Sorensen that would have added up to a decent wedge of cash
Wycombe paid fees for Vokes and Hanlan, and players like Vokes, Kaikai and Scowen will be on good money, Vokes especially.
Throw in the clubs who probably have a similar if not slightly higher budget than us like
Rotherham,
Pompey,
Doncaster and
MK Dons it shows where we really are in terms of budget for the season - around upper mid table at best. In this world of undisclosed fees its hard to know exactly where everyone stands, but I think this gives a good idea.
In comparison we paid fees for Seddon and McGuane that totalled maybe 500k? And brought in 2 free transfers and two youngsters. Our loan players will be half decent fees, but the same could be said for plenty of the loan players of all the clubs above too (which I haven't even mentioned). And on top of that besides Ipswich (£2.5m) we had the highest incoming fees of any club in League 1 with just over £2m for Atkinson and Clare to help fund our spends. We've got probably our best budget under KR, but League 1 is ridiculous this year and that budget comparatively is probably worse than the last 2 years, and if KR gets us into the playoffs again he's done a ridiculously good job once again.
*
All fees quoted are taken from TransferMarkt*