Why does Darren Bent cost £18 Million?

I think Bent is good goal scorer, with a proven record. But i don't think he's worth £18 million quid. Thats not an insult, i'm just old school and think that's a lot of money. (I don't think Chris Smalling is worth £7 million either, that is an insult ... to man utd ^_^, thanks Sir Alex we really like Dembele) It's a good question don't you think. I'm no accountant, but lets try and work this out. I'm always amazed at how a football clubs legal people arrive at these figures.and have felt that while they are crazy there has to be some kind of reasoning and logic to them.

It is slightly hard to do this as few things are actually official, but as Rafa says lets work with the facts (that are mostly rumours).

Darren Bent is rumoured to earn £50k a per week, and had 2 years left on his contract at sunderland.

That means that his contract excluding any bonuses or commercial rights is worth about £2.6 million a year or £5.2 million. I believe this should be his 'book value', and the value that would stated on Sunderlands accounts.

Next Darren's move to Sunderland from Tottenham cost £16 million, with a cash component of £10 and the additional £6 million to be paid in various (i assume) performance related bonuses. Now i would guess that a club like sunderland structured the majority of these payments to be done over a period of time, being that Bent only left a year and half ago, they probably haven't paid this total sum yet.

Lastly as reported, a cause in the deal with Tottenham, was that Sunderland had to pay them 10% of his next transfer fee, something they would also need to take into consideration when negotiating with Aston Villa.

So lets do some basic addition with the numbers above

£5.2m (contract)
£10m (purchase price from spurs)
£15.2m

Now lets say that Sunderland have a policy of trying to maintain a profit margin of around 10% margin on player sales, that puts us in a range of £16.72 million.

Now we are missing one thing, Spurs cut. Thats 10% right?

10% of 16.72 million is £1.72 million

Which i assume sunderland passes on to Villa, so we get £18.39 million. If if they can't legally do this £16.72 still isn't far off the headline £18 million figure that we see in the press.

In fact depending on how much sunderland and already paid tottenham in bonus related payments, they might not have even made a profit. Also i dont know if Darren's 50k p/w wage is before or after tax, because if it is after tax, the value of his contract to the club is effectively doubled. due to the 50% tax rate.

Not accurate, not throughly researched, but certainly interesting.

Next, how the hell did they work out 'CR7' was worth north of £70million?

If you got any insight for me please share either on twitter @veritech or in the comments.

The iPod Touch is awesome

Yes,i finally gave in and got my first iPod. First i must say, that although i still hate iPhones, when it comes it MP3 players this thing is awesome.

Messenging devices need keyboards.

For all intends and purposes this thing is basically a netbook/net tablet.

China (and my dissertation!) is only days away. All i'm lacking now is the camera. 

** UPDATE **
Never edited a blog post in my life, but there is first time for everything, and this perfectly illustrates my point.

This post was short for a reason. I wrote it on a ipod touch. I hate typing on touch screens, i like keyboards. Why you ask? Tactile feedback! A simple beep is great, but imagine, if you could actually press a key, and feel the response from it! Wouldn't that be awesome! RIMM thought the same thing, and created the Storm, sadly RIMM should have stolen a page from Palm, and took a handful of Apple engineers to create the UI. Cause the Storm sucks badly (plus no Wifi what year did you think it was!)

Virtual keyboards not only provide no tactile feedback, but they also take up screen real estate. Granted that in most situations you only need it for a couple of seconds to put in a web address or to send a tweet. If you are from the long form generation, and can see past the reality distortion field (no physical keyboard eliminates the need for multiple skus!! ), you will know that keyboards are just better. Thats why i'm clinging to my e61 with a death grip, it's huge, ugly, but it messages like no other (well until palm pre time!).