One of the first tasks Norwich City's new sporting director Stuart Webber had to carry out when joining the club in April 2017 was deciding which players to release. Webber decided to let seven players leave at the end of their contracts, these were John Ruddy, Sebastian Bassong, Ryan Bennett, Kyle Lafferty, Youssouf Mulumbu, Steven Whittaker and Michael Turner. Nearly £20m was then raised by the sales of Graham Dorrans, Johnny Howson and Jacob Murphy.

The Canaries received £40,915,922 in parachute payments following their relegation from the Premier League in 2015/16 and will be entitled to one more payment for the 2017/18 season. Therefore Webber had to balance the books following City's disappointing campaign last season under Alex Neil who it is rumoured received around £2m in compensation.

It was reported that Kyle Lafferty was earning £35,000 a week when he was hardly kicking a ball for the Canaries and £8.5m attacking midfielder Steven Naismith is apparently on £50,000 a week. Despite his high salary of nearly £3m a year the Scottish international seems keen to stay at Carrow Road and impress new coach Daniel Farke.

Obviously Webber would have been looking to release some of the club's high earners and replace them with players on lower salaries such as Angus Gunn on loan from Manchester City to replace Ruddy and Harrison Reed, also on loan from Southampton to seemingly replace Mulumbu who played only 18 league games for Norwich in 2 years.

I was browsing through google recently and came across this revealing article from April 2016 on the "Home Of The Page 3 Girl", the Daily Star's website with "Every Norwich player's weekly wages revealed" according to Football Manager 2016. I don't know how they got their information or how accurate it is but fan's favourite Ivo Pinto apparently earns just £13,500 a week or around £750,000 a year. That's scandalous when you compare his salary to Tony Andreu who has hardly made an impression since he followed Alex Neil from Hamilton in February 2015. Andreu hasn't been allocated a squad number by Daniel Farke and is likely to leave Carrow Road in the foreseeable future. According to Wikipedia Andreu's playing style has been compared to Cesc Fabregas! Did the Frenchman write that or was it his mum?!

Another one of Neil's disastrous signings, the injury prone England 1 cap Matt Jarvis is earning £30,000 a week, more than Johnny Howson was getting. No wonder the Yorkshireman left the club! If you take into consideration all the players Webber has released based on their wages (although Michael Turner isn't mentioned in this slideshow) the club has made a saving of nearly £11m for just 6 players!

Site Contents © www.norwichcityheaven.co.uk