Will go a lot towards it.
We are not going to be barred from playing the Champions League so this debate is pretty irrelevant.
It WILL NOT go a lot towards it.
Here are some facts for you, basic players not on the highest wages at Liverpool got a 15-20% bump in wage for champs league, you don't think Toure has that in his contract, get us into the champs league and you get a big pay bump, unfortunately a 20% bump on a 200-250k a week salary, is over the average wage of the rest of the league just as a pay rise, now factor that in by the entire squad.
The old numbers were based off almost 2 year old numbers, wages have increased most likely in the region of 30-40mil since then, with yearly pay rises, bonuses for hitting top four/champs league and probably higher wages for being in the champs league and for reaching various stages.
These things all assume a 20mil income from the champions league is the end of it, the actual situation is you get 20mil more income, but wages rise 20mil in bonus's and pay rises, it completely cancels each other out.
Higher income from league position, its half a mil a place up the table, so going from midtable to top nets you 5million more.
You can not and will not get away with a single penny over Barca's shirt deal, thats 25mil Euro's a season, even that would be considered dodgey as quite clearly they are the biggest/best club in the world right now in terms of success, unmatched, and therefore should be deemed a higher value sponsorship than just hit the CL City.
But even 25mil a year, which is only 15mil or so higher than now IIRC is nothing compared to the increase in wages since that report was done.
Yearly incoming from ticket sales, sorry but thats going to go almost nowhere really, but is the most open area for fudging the numbers IMHO. IE they pull in 30mil now, they CAN NOT, unquestionably, raise this to Utd levels of income, they can't. They can pretend they charged everyone an extra £2k per season ticket, and then offer a £2k rebate. Even then it would not be enough.
Seriously, use some common sense, look at Arsenal or Utd's numbers, City are down on commercial, and can not match Arsenal/Utd, the stadium does not have the corporate seating, restaurants, bars, club level seating to match them, they can't match on capacity. The only area they can compete or even surpass those two is shirt sponsorship and even then they can only match Barca, you're talking over UTd maybe 7-8mil a year gain, with a 70mil shortfall in stadium income, and a absolute best case scenario for City, 50mil shortfall in commercial income...... but with 40-50mil extra outgoing in wages.
It will not happen, the owners did not buy the club before financial fair play was introduced, they do not know the final rules of financial fairplay so its impossible they can have worked it all out yet.
Its really very simple maths, match Utd's ticket/stadium/corporate and sponsorship incomings, match them in outgoing wages, be the same.
City will vastly fall short of Utd's incoming and already have vastly higher wage expenditure.
There is one single way to fix that, drop wages of everyone at the club to sustainable levels, with possible incomings of 30-40% less than Utd, that will mean 30-40% lower wages.
