Seen this on Twitter, seems like it's from Ben Mee's Dad, though you can never be 100% sure but on going negotiations regarding his contract apparently.

https://twitter.com/mee_25/status/10040 ... 54242?s=21" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's Ben's brother

Well if it's definitely his relative then that's good.

He'd be crazy to leave IMO. He won't get a better gig. More money maybe, but football wise, I can only see sideways at best, backwards more likely. No top 6 club will want him.

Not sure I understood anything that was written!

Ben will be off..and rightly so....the club will have offered what they think he's worth..he knows where the door is.

All that shows is there's a stand off, if there's a stand off, it's 99.9% certain it's about the money side of things.
The fact he says "might drag on a bit, has to be right for player and the club shows they maybe quite some distance a part.
The reported 80k a week he supposedly wants, may not be too far wide of the mark.

Shame really

I think it is bad news. Hopefully the club have a deadline at which point it is not resolved he will reluctantly be moved on. We cannot allow his contract to run out. It is no good being in August when Ben will have all the cards.

If Ben wants 80k a week he’ll be off.
Sad if it’s all about money thought him more intelligent than that.
As I’ve said Everton might be a good destination for him but the instant pressure put on players at the top clubs is very different from anything experienced here.
Ben has the qualities to do well at a top 6 club but like Trevor Steven he might experience an unsettling period.
Hope he decides to stay here because he is the rock on which our defence is based but when it comes to wages this club has to be savvy and keep within its means, both present and future.

As much as I like Ben Mee the club should always come first. There are plenty of disaster clubsbe where the players have held clubs to ransom.

Let's not forget he is under contract until the END of next season, we still have 12 months to negotiate, if his form continues great for us.

Don't forget we have to pay Man City a huge chunk (40%?) of any fee received so it may be just as easy to let him go next year.

JohnMac wrote:Let's not forget he is under contract until the END of next season, we still have 12 months to negotiate, if his form continues great for us.

Don't forget we have to pay Man City a huge chunk (40%?) of any fee received so it may be just as easy to let him go next year.

We cannot afford to negotiate for the next 12 months as his value diminishes with time (60% of a potential £30m fee this summer still equates to £18m)

Club need to take a firm stance and make him available rather than be held to ransom on wage demands that are seen to be excessive (if true)

JohnMac wrote:Don't forget we have to pay Man City a huge chunk (40%?) of any fee received so it may be just as easy to let him go next year.

If that is true we should keep him. Another good season could see us able to give him a substantial rise next year. I would still be making him a vastly improved offer now.

You wouldn’t think any club would pay 80k a week , but the lines of West Ham would I suppose, hope we don’t

Bizarrely enough, bloke on holiday saw Kid No 1 "Mee 6" shirt and says he lives across from Ben Mees Mum and Dad and knows them well.

Sadly he knew absolutely nothing about the contract situation though!

Damo wrote:That's Ben's brother

I thought this was Ben’s Brother.
https://youtu.be/HuBBCiC6uEQ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

All this talk of Ben Mee and yet no news on Hendrick and Sam both of whom are OOC in 2019 along with Ben Mee and letting Jeff run down his contract will have cost us more money than letting Ben do the same given the money we paid to get him here (was it £7million?)

This all looks like Ben Mee knows what somebody else is prepared to offer him in wages obviously via his agent. Ben seems prepared to still negotiate with Burnley because if they were miles apart the agent would be encouraging a bid from the interested party by now. I think that’s pretty much how these things work nowadays.

Is it just me or is anyone else getting fed up of the way money is running (or ruining) football these days. I've just got to the point that I'm past caring with the sums of money and wages being talked about.

Ben Mee is my favourite Burnley player and I think he epitomises everything about SD and the club but I have got to the point of thinking, okay I'd love him to stay but if he goes for more money then so be it, we'll just replace him with someone who wants to play for us.

Firthy wrote:we'll just replace him with someone who wants to play for us.

But we won’t. We’ll replace him with somebody who is happy with what we’ll pay him.

piston broke wrote:But we won’t. We’ll replace him with somebody who is happy with what we’ll pay him.

But better than a player who isn't happy with what we' are paying. I know it can be a short career in football but the amounts we are talking about these days are obscene and nearly all Premier League players are made for life after a couple of seasons. In a lot of cases it's greed over career IMO.

Didn’t Ben recently say the £80,000 a week was a load of rubbish?

He’ll just want assurances, a pay rise of some sort. Contracts usually take quite a while to sort out etc. It may all just be down to the length of the contract. Who knows?!

Is there not a good chance that he's just on holiday at the moment?

It’s probably just his agent getting him the best rate he can.In other words doing his job.
All players are just ships in the night but our ship will keep moving forward.

I don't think we should start throwing around £80k contracts but it's interesting to compare that versus replacing him. £80k a week for 3 years is £12.5m. If we allow Ben to leave how much would it cost us to replace him? I expect it'll be a lot more than £12.5m once all transfer fees, agents fees, signing on fees and wages are agreed!

Firthy wrote:Is it just me or is anyone else getting fed up of the way money is running (or ruining) football these days. I've just got to the point that I'm past caring with the sums of money and wages being talked about.

Ben Mee is my favourite Burnley player and I think he epitomises everything about SD and the club but I have got to the point of thinking, okay I'd love him to stay but if he goes for more money then so be it, we'll just replace him with someone who wants to play for us.

Money has always been in the game. It's just that firstly there's more of it about, and secondly we've got some for the moment.

Ben Mee owes the club nothing. At his age he has to look at his own circumstances first - no-one else will.

Dyched wrote:Didn’t Ben recently say the £80,000 a week was a load of rubbish?

He put this on his Instagram a while back

jlup1980 wrote:I don't think we should start throwing around £80k contracts but it's interesting to compare that versus replacing him. £80k a week for 3 years is £12.5m. If we allow Ben to leave how much would it cost us to replace him? I expect it'll be a lot more than £12.5m once all transfer fees, agents fees, signing on fees and wages are agreed!

On the other hand

If Mee goes this summer we could get say £30m for him, plus saving the potential £12.5m in wages

£42.5m could get us a decent replacement on a 3 year deal

If he does go, I blame the 7 dwarfs chant!

Personally don’t think he is asking for £80k a week.
If we did sell him then we may be looking for a fee of nearer to £20m with only 12 months left on his contract.

What will £20m get us in this market ? Forest wanted that for a centre back who has never kicked a ball in the Premier League and did not have an outstanding season in the Championship.

If Mee is wanting somewhere in the region of £60k a week then we should pay it - as that would probably only be around £20k more a week than what we would have to pay a new player costing £20m with no guarantees they would be as good.

I’m sure the club will do the right thing but I doubt anyone wants him to leave

TVC15 wrote:Personally don’t think he is asking for £80k a week.
If we did sell him then we may be looking for a fee of nearer to £20m with only 12 months left on his contract.

What will £20m get us in this market ? Forest wanted that for a centre back who has never kicked a ball in the Premier League and did not have an outstanding season in the Championship.

If Mee is wanting somewhere in the region of £60k a week then we should pay it - as that would probably only be around £20k more a week than what we would have to pay a new player costing £20m with no guarantees they would be as good.

I’m sure the club will do the right thing but I doubt anyone wants him to leave

Not much considering man city have around 50% sell on fee .

Any one wanting us to pay 80k a week to Mee, or even 60k as a basic wage, should have a quick look at the news this week regarding Villa.

Its the salaries they took on in the Premier League that are hobbling them now, and it is compounded by FFP (which in our case would mean the transition from PL wage structure to FFP compliant Championship wage structure would be pretty brutal if we aren't clear). Sure, we'd try to get relegation release clauses into contracts, but for all we know, that is in itself one of the issues at hand here.

There's a danger in over speculating here based on limited information. The facts are that negotiations are clearly taking longer than would be ideal, so there must be a delta between what we want to spend and what he wants. But the other facts here are there are lots of good reasons why the club need to stick to a very clear wage structure, and not be tempted to push the envelope for any one player, because once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it won't go back in.

Does a sell on fee stay with a player indefinitely?

The club is already paying one employee £60k a week.

It’s ok saying let’s not be the next Villa or whoever but our financial position is a million miles away from Villa. Look at their net spend compared to ours. Look at the wages they are paying for the likes of Terry and Snodgrass. Then look at their revenue in the last 2 years compared to ours. You would struggle to see 2 more polarised set of financial figures than ours and Villas.

80k a week for Ben Mee!

Been a great servant but he knows where the door is

TVC15 wrote:The club is already paying one employee £60k a week.

It’s ok saying let’s not be the next Villa or whoever but our financial position is a million miles away from Villa. Look at their net spend compared to ours. Look at the wages they are paying for the likes of Terry and Snodgrass. Then look at their revenue in the last 2 years compared to ours. You would struggle to see 2 more polarised set of financial figures than ours and Villas.

If that's anyone other than Dyche then we are fools.

TVC15 wrote:The club is already paying one employee £60k a week.

I don't think that's accurate, I don't think any of our current squad can command 60k a week.

The big players were all signed in our first premier league season, and of the ones brought in since, I doubt any are above even half that.

Edit - if you're talking about Mr Dyche, then he deserves it and IMO should be top earner

It is Dyche and it was £75k a week, wasn’t it?

Dyche is the highest earner at the club, and rightly so.

It is Dyche - and it may be more than £60k a week actually. And yes he does deserve it.

I do think we will have a couple of players on upwards of £50k though - Lennon, possibly Defour and Brady.

I am not saying we should pay Ben Mee £80k a week but firstly I don’t think he has asked for that - but if he has then as long as we included relegation clauses (which by all accounts we do) then it is a salary that we can afford to pay with our current financial position. I don’t think we would pay this though as I suspect between £50k and possibly £60k is our internal cap.

Dyche's pay rise was quoted - if I remember rightly - at £3 million a year - which equates to just shy of £58k a week

Paper talk saying Newcastle want £45m for the uncapped Lascelles.
Anywhere near that figure puts the value of Ben Mee and Tarks up dramatically.

Only rumour, but I heard we were prepared to offer Jay Rod around £50k last summer but were blasted out of the water by WBA

I dread to think we are paying that sort of money to Lennon

I assume we had a similar bonus scheme in operation this year to the last, which brought in an extra circa £750k to guys who had played most of the games in the season

That in itself equates to around an extra £15k per week on top of basic plus do we operate additional win bonus etc ?

I get annoyed that little of the cash the club has piled up has been spent on fans facilities.

So I can only imagine how Ben feels if he has played a big part in our success yet financially lags behind (speculation).

He won’t have made a load through transfers, unlike others in our squad. He won’t have been one of our higher earners. He is thus unlikely to be set up for life (to support half a dozen people for 80 years for example).

I thus think he has every right to negotiate hard, knowing a transfer would give him a signing on fee and a good wage as a contingency option.

Being in the last year of your contract has a big impact on the value though.
Lascelles will be in a much longer contact than Mee. Tarks value will be around same as Lascelles and at current silly prices about £40m seems right

Diesel wrote:Does a sell on fee stay with a player indefinitely?

Only until they are sold.

jojomk1 wrote:Only rumour, but I heard we were prepared to offer Jay Rod around £50k last summer but were blasted out of the water by WBA

I dread to think we are paying that sort of money to Lennon

I assume we had a similar bonus scheme in operation this year to the last, which brought in an extra circa £750k to guys who had played most of the games in the season

That in itself equates to around an extra £15k per week on top of basic plus do we operate additional win bonus etc ?

Our wage bill now will be upwards of £80m.
Lennon was brought in on a free - so I would guess he is on a decent wack.
With the players we are bringing in now I would be amazed if we are not at between £45k and £50k a week as an internal ceiling.

This is before the club knew it was going to get an extra £20m from finishing 7th.

As the clubs financial position gets stronger than clearly SD wants to bring in a better calibre of player.

We are still a long long way from betting the ranch territory and everything suggests we will continue to be prudent. However our current definition of prudent would have been regarded as crazy betting the ranch levels of spend and wages only 2 years ago !!

TVC15 wrote:Our wage bill now will be upwards of £80m.
Lennon was brought in on a free - so I would guess he is on a decent wack.
With the players we are bringing in now I would be amazed if we are not at between £45k and £50k a week as an internal ceiling.

This is before the club knew it was going to get an extra £20m from finishing 7th.

As the clubs financial position gets stronger than clearly SD wants to bring in a better calibre of player.

We are still a long long way from betting the ranch territory and everything suggests we will continue to be prudent. However our current definition of prudent would have been regarded as crazy betting the ranch levels of spend and wages only 2 years ago !!

Lennon wasnt on a free

Reecey1987 wrote:Lennon wasnt on a free

It was reported as undisclosed and also as a nominal fee.
Allardyce wanted rid.
Point is that we could afford to pay him a higher wage because of the fee.