Cost Cutting Begins….

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/foot...-watford-unpaid-internship-criticism-26326980

Actually, they may be on to something. I wonder if we can get unpaid interns to take on other part time positions?

CEO?
The Chalobah role?

 

I’m sure there will be a queue of people happy to do it for free, but in this day and age it’s totally unnecessary for the club to not pay them the minimum wage. Depending on their age you’re talking about £20k each max per year.

If it’s a full time unpaid role how are these people supposed to live, and won’t their work suffer anyway if they have to take up part time employment outside of a full time unpaid job just to make ends meet?

Also I don’t know if the Kickstarter programme is still running, but they could at least try to utilise that, although I guess their issue is they need to take applicants via the job centre.

 

Another own goal by the management.

 

A full time job with evening and weekend hours but we won't pay you.

LOL

 

Good old Dux would have had to sign off on this.

 

This is just another hilarious (in the insane sense, not the actually humorous) shining emblem of the ludicrousness of clubs' attitude to money in the modern game.

Our group of 25 players are apparently paid around a collective £30m a year - it doesn't compare, it's in a different universe to a standard job, and fine, we all get how that's come to be the case. But a year's salary for either of those roles advertised, especially at that junior level, would be well below the weekly wage of most, if not all, of our starting XI.

What impact would that have on the club's accounts? Absolutely nothing. Sweet fucck all. And yet; nope, they can't even be bothered to pay that. They can do it for free, instead - they're only students, after all.

 

Someone remind me again what we're paying Gray to sit on QPRs bench?

 

Don't see too much of a problem. Plenty of internships are unpaid. Let's be honest it isn't a field that undergraduate students will be likely to just be able to walk into without relevant experience. It gives them an opportunity to learn and gain experience and observe a football club environment. It will be a temporary arrangement and just classed as additional and alternative studying. When I was a student I did voluntary roles in my own field to gain work experience which helped further down the line.

 

It’s just terrible optics. Like it or not football clubs aren’t like normal businesses, especially when you consider that most are run at a loss. I think it’s more widely accepted that normal businesses are there to make money, and generally speaking no more than 50% of a normal companies turnover goes on wages. For most football clubs it’s way in excess of that and purely on small group of players. You’re talking about no more than £40k max to avoid terrible PR, when you consider how careful the club is with the flow of information, how they get groups like the 1881 onside and people like AL, it really makes very little sense.

 

Absolutely hate stuff like this, and as Chumlax points out, it makes no real difference to club's accounts, so why he d1cks about it?

 

When there is such a huge drive to get more companies to adopt the Living Wage structure, this is another spectacular own goal by the club. Cost of living in sky-rocketing, whatever age you are...student or not. Yet we believe they should be falling over themselves to work full-time, unsociable hours for zero pay? All to be able to say they once worked for a yo-yo basket case football club? Madness.

But we don't think twice about signing Danny Rose on comparatively huge money to sit around doing nothing and generally be unprofessional. This unpaid intern would genuinely be expected to do more work than Danny Rose...just think about that.

 

Exactly. Preying on younger people’s love for the club. They’ve got a whole myriad of people doing marketing for them virtually free of charge so why not go the extra step and do it officially. I’m sure one of the usuals will defend this as they’ve no doubt applied.

But as it’s in the national news, they’ll no doubt apologise on Twitter later and get heavily praised by the social media agents for doing so proving yet again that they are a family club. By actually doing nothing other than withdrawing something that wasn’t there previously.

As I said before, insidious.

 

Do you mean it looks bad?

 

Deary me, how have you got yourself so worked up over a scenario you've invented in your head?

 

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but when Watford offered me a job last season they offered absolute peanuts. Decided to wait and see what my current club were gonna offer me before deciding - they offered 3x what Watford did. Absolute no brainer.

 

Sums up this absolute dumpster fire of a club.

 

Probably explains why we seem unprepared, second-rate and amateur in so many ways.

We're run like some of the US firms in the 00s that thought they could rest on its blue-chip laurels, ignored lower-level but key staff/culture and penny-pinched short-term to long-term detriment, and are now being massive outcompeted.

 

I don’t have the data but would imagine a majority of PL clubs offer unpaid internships for students as part of an undergraduate placement scheme. I benefitted from such a placement when I worked in Parliament and the US Congress as part of a similar program.

The issue is that it narrows down the applicant pool to those who are able to rely on family wealth to get by or can take out additional student loans. But then again attending university is the same thing (I’m sure some on here will remember when the Government used to pay a stipend to support those attending university).

 

If most do it, why is the media interested?

You're right though, these sort of placements are common for undergraduates.

 

If I had to guess it’s because it has just emerged anew and some football influencers have flagged it.

Also it opens up the “but how many managers are they paying compensation to? 10?” can of worms - I’d imagine Ranieri until the end of the season and maybe Munoz (potentially covering any shortfall in salary with Huesca) - which is where the otherwise principled comment breaks down into typical banalities (the club is minimises compensation costs by hiring managers on short-term contracts only).

 

I’d be massively surprised if ‘most’ PL clubs offered FT roles based with the first team that were unpaid.

 

Out of interest, would you by any chance know what the normal going salary is for a Junior Data Analyst?

An ‘internship’ is just a posh way of saying ‘work experience’… Though even at 16 years of age, I was paid for my 4 hours of work experience I did for my local golf club.

Watford cheap skates… If only they didn’t sack off several managers paying out millions in clauses… Can’t even provide paid jobs to the local community. Kunts

 

Around the 18k mark is the entry level salary for most of the backroom jobs in football, sickening considering how much money is in the game.

 

How much do you think we’re currently paying managers in compensation for firing them? The majority of our managers have been fired within 6 months of the end of their short-term contracts and I don’t imagine that Xisco or Nigel Pearson were being particularly well-remunerated in the first place. Javi and Munoz picked up new employment very soon after being fired.

We probably should be paying the interns a wage - though again I and many others benefitted from university placement schemes with an unpaid work component. But I just don’t see how that should be linked to a point about managerial compensation (and again while we have fired a lot of managers I imagine we have paid less compensation to managers than Everton are currently paying Benitez or Spurs Nuno or United OGS or even WBA and Ismael given their base pay, contract length and lack of subsequent employment). Part of the model is that the club hiring jobworths who they can pay a pittance and sack with minimal financial repercussions. It’s not working generally and has contributed to our clear listlessness as a club but it does mean that we’re not on the hook for much compensation.

Hard to tell exactly how many (and it could well be only 5 or 6 and not 11) but I’ve definitely read stories like this before and we’ll read them again.

 

Not saying you're wrong at all - but can you link any? I'd be keen to see them.

 

I don’t think so. It’s just something I’ve seen come up on Twitter previously “can’t believe club X is advertising an unpaid internship” etc. Don’t have links on hand unfortunately. Sorry.

Edit: This is an old link from 2013 but I doubt much has changed: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp....tball-clubs-accused-exploiting-unpaid-interns

The fact is that this is a situation (like with my internships in Parliament) where the supply and interest levels of potential interns far outstrips the number of roles available and as a result an employer can advertise an unpaid role and have dozens of candidates. And I don’t think that dynamic has changed in the decade since the above article was written which is why the entry level pay for analysts is so low too.

 

The club are getting hammered for this on Twitter. And by verified accounts too, not just random fans etc.

Another terrible look. Totally avoidable.

 

Taking advantage of our drooling fan base seems very unethical, but who can really blame a business for taking advantage of simpletons. Especially when you consider the successful applicant will be someone like that Ucko trumpet.

 

Come on. The notion that we don’t wazz millions up the wall paying off managers and entire coaching staff units is a bit far fetched. It’s not just the gaffers that need to be paid off. Even if in some cases the managers have 6 months to go, it adds up pretty quickly when the fool in charge is binning off 3 per season.

 

Well we’re not talking about just one manager are we? Considering we go through several a season, and none of them reach the end of their contracts, even if the amounts for each manager are small it stands to reason the overall sum is likely to be fairly sizeable.

 

£6.8m in 19/20 to pay off Gracia, QSF and Pearson plus their staff