If pearson were running out of cash he wouldn't have funded the sneyd transfer fee, the paying off of the likes of arundel or the move to the new training facilities

I suspect he is banking on the first tranche of cash from the new Sky deal which is due in September, but that depends on us still being in Super League.

The fee was paid 6 months ago IIRC, gates are down. Employees leaving are not being replaced. Doesn't quite indicate the club's awash with cash to pay off the current coaching staff and upgrade them all in quality and number. IMO.

Many, possibly all of those players who have been paid off, e.g. Arundel, McDonnell, Miller, will be getting their money by instalments rather than a lump sum.

Even if Pearson was brassic (which I'm sure he isn't) he could always give his mate Peter Wilkinson a call. Recently named 9th richest person in Yorkshire at £360m.

It's one thing wasting your own money on things you find you knew nothing about but wasting someone else's?

It doesn't mean anything really. pearson may think he has things covered with the staff he has

Right, I didn’t reply when I first saw your response because this may include a bit of a rant.

I’m not surprised you’re not sure about either option, neither is appealing. However the scenario given was one of no more money to spend, and the question asked was what options would be available to Pearson in that scenario. If there is no money available to affect change, then the only 2 alternatives are to cut costs (either just to save money, or to reapportion elsewhere), or to cut his losses by selling up and moving on. Neither is pleasant, but it really is as simple as being only those 2 choices. No more money to spend = cut/redistribute spending or sell up/close down. The only possibly third option is to keep things exactly as they are, but with the dwindling crowd factor that is not within Pearson/the club’s control.

On scaling back the squad, players like Lineham and Shaul are not where I’d be looking. Those two should not be amongst our highest earners or significantly more expensive than alternatives. More sensible would be to look at the likes of Sneyd, Pryce, Ellis, Minichiello, and Westerman. All will probably be good earners, and in all honesty only Ellis really comes close to consistently offering us likely value for money compared to what we probably could get to do the same jobs. It’s almost laughable that the big criticism of Gentle was the over-expensive recruitment of overpaid players, yet 3 of those are Radford signings and a 4th was given a long-term contract by him and they probably epitomise the very same problem. We’re forking out money that is arguably unnecessary and almost definitely not delivering it’s value.

This isn’t to say I don’t think any of them are any good. In fact I think they are 5 of our most able players. The issue is that the system/style we play does not significantly benefit from spending so much money on them. The 3 forwards are just used as battering rams. They give everything to do it, but if all we want is big lumps to cart the ball up, we don’t need to be spending international-level money to do it. As for halfbacks, we needn’t (arguably don’t) bother. I really don’t know how many we need to get through before people will finally stop blaming recruitment and the individual players and realise that we play such a dour brand of non-rugby that it actually makes it harder for halfbacks to play. Our ptb is appallingly slow, so they have barely any time and space to work in. Our option runners are practically non-existent, so they are left with choices of a simple and predictable pass to the next man in the line, take on the line solo and most likely get cleaned out, or hoof it. If all we’re going to use a halfback for is as an extra pair of hands in the line and then an up & under to the corner on the last, we could save a lot of money by just picking up a pair from the Championship, like Cas did with Finn, or we actually did with Ellis, but have since seen Cas and Hudds harness better than we could.

Obviously I'm not claiming to know what our players earn, but I think it's a sensible guess that those are 5 of our (if not the exact 5) top earners. Houghton will be the other contender, but as much as he is derided on here, with the current defence-first attitude of our team he's a key figure.

As for selling the club, you will nearly always find a buyer for something, you just might not like how much they’re offering. Your example of before Pearson bought us supports that. The club was up for sale, and there were rumours of the kind of figure Kath Hetherington was demanding when people enquired. IIRC, those demands were dropped because of the tax bills on their way to SL clubs over the image rights/overseas payments, and Pearson moved in when the price was lowered. I’m pretty sure he said as much when he bought the club and talked about the first year losses that could be expected due to those tax payments.

You most likely won’t hear whispers of potential buyers if the club isn’t up for sale. Nobody will buy it at a premium price, but vultures will show interest if/when Pearson actively wants rid because they’ll then have a position to negotiate.

Absolutely spot on. It's like spending a fortune on a Ferrari and giving Maureen Rees £20 to race it for you. Better to buy a Ford Focus and get Ken Block behind the wheel.

Great post. The only bit I'm not sure about is who'd be in the market to buy us when virtually all SL club owners are effectively benefactors. Coach as differentiator is a massive unaddressed issue.