The Swans are a 'model football club' according to a report in today's Daily Mail that highlights just what you need to compete in the Premier League with our wage bill now standing at an incredible £63m.
The Swans wage bill is comparable with the likes of Everton, Newcastle and Stoke which gives you the idea of where we are trying to compete at the moment but also highlights just how hard it is to break any further up the table.
If you classed the Premier League top six as Chelsea, the two Manchester Clubs, Arsenal, Tottenham and Liverpool then the smallest wage bill from those six is £103m for Spurs, which is more than the Swans overall turnover.
Arsenal have a wage bill of £166.4m, Chelsea £193m, Liverpool £144m, Man City £205m and Man Utd a staggering £215m. However for each of the six clubs their percentage against total income is lower than the Swans who are one of the higher percentages in the Premier League.
The report highlights just how important a stadium expansion is with matchday income just £9.2m compared to say someone like Sunderland at £16m or Aston Villa at £12.8m. Commercially we are also lagging behind many of our Premier League rivals at just £8.8m although this is an increasing figure but we can only dream of the commercial income say of Man Utd at £189.3m, a staggering amount of money.
The TV deal money as we know goes up next season so that gives us more income to play about with but we need to consider matchday revenue as well as commercial if we are to continue our model management.
Of course all of this is a mile away from where we were a few years ago when it was bucket collections to pay player wages and shows the amazing amounts of money dealt with in the Premier League.