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Mike Ashley’s Payment On Results

12 years ago
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Has Mike Ashley found the solution to many a fan’s dream? We can live in hope.

Like all football fans, we would love to see the end of players taking the mick out of Newcastle United and its supporters, so many players over the years signing massive contracts and then basically putting their feet up for three or four years.

Where is the incentive for some players to bust a gut when they are guaranteed riches regardless, or indeed move on when it is clear that they aren’t going to feature in the first team.

As we revealed earlier this week, the impending Sports Direct financial figures were nailed on to produce massive returns for all concerned, including Mike Ashley – read more here.

As well as Mike Ashley in line to get a £24m bonus, SD’s ground breaking scheme is making thousands of staff very happy as well.

For the third year running Ashley’s company has smashed the earnings targets set when they introduced the staff bonus scheme in 2009, meaning thousands of staff are now sitting on shares worth more than £50,000.

The company has just delivered a 12 per cent leap in underlying profits to £235.7m for the year to 29 April.

As Dave Forsey, the Sports Direct chief executive aptly summed up their employee incentive scheme: “I think it has been an absolute game changer since it was introduced”.

It would be very interesting to know what bonus scheme operates at St.James’ Park as Mike Ashley made clear he was intent on reining in the unsustainable basic wages that both the Shepherd/Hall administration had put in place and indeed what Ashley had added to when he arrives at Newcastle.

In this day and age of players earning tens of thousands of pounds a week, you would hope no player now on our books would be putting money as the prime incentive for doing well by the team.

However, if you did find out that the players had received a big bonus for last season’s efforts very few of us would begrudge the players being rewarded for their performances. Now that is ground breaking after the chancers we’ve had to put up with over the years.

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