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It won’t be the first time supporters at Swansea City and Cardiff City have spent transfer deadline day casting envious glances at rivals.

The Bluebirds will have seen promotion hopefuls in the Championship spend money like it’s never been spent in the second-tier, all while still getting over the loss of keeper and captain David Marshall.

And those from the Liberty would have had their heart broken a little when former favourite and much-missed striker Wilfried Bony turned up at Stoke. When the inevitable Bony goal from a Joe Allen pass gets shown on highlights packages, there might be enough rueful tears to fill the Tawe.

And in a window of £1bn transfers, not much of it has flowed out of South Wales.

But it was never likely to and it’s surprising that it might come as a surprise to some.

Cardiff City's predicament

Starting with Cardiff, it’s been clear for some time there’s been a cost cutting exercise going on at Cardiff City Stadium.

There are thoughts those cuts could be getting deeper still, with Paul Trollope said to be well aware of the restraints in front of him when he was signed up to replace Russell Slade this summer.

And it’s needed, even looking at the accounts on a basic level; which, given as the last available figures are from the 2014/15 season, is all you can do.

But from those it is clear to see that the numbers were close to not adding up, even then.

Those accounts, made public in February this year, were headlined as the first profit posted of the Vincent Tan era and represented significant steps in the right direction to a sounder financial footing. They were helped considerably by Tan’s move to reduce the debt, confirmed in the accounts that were signed off just before a framework of further debt reduction – so the club can be debt free by 2021 – was laid out by the club’s owner.

In other words, something many fans have called for under the Malaysian’s ownership was beginning to take place.

But need for tightening of the belts was laid out in the income column. The drop out of the Premier League into the Championship saw revenue fall by 52% to £40.2m. Of that latter figure, around £25m of it came from parachute payments – the payments to relegated clubs from the Premier League that are aimed to smooth the transition back into the Football League.

It is known that the payment for this season is down to £10m, with the same guaranteed for next season before it finishes completely. In other words, £15m less than in those accounts.

What it means is that if Cardiff have not improved any other revenue streams then their income could be down to around £25m a year.

Now, we can’t be sure whether new sponsorship or kit deals haven’t been boosted or that merchandise sales aren’t on the way back up – especially after the return to blue – but we know that attendances have fallen.

And there has not been the big sales to make it any easier. When Cardiff were relegated, they made a £9.7m profit from player sales from the likes of Steven Caulker and Gary Medel. Since then, it has roughly been a case of breaking even.

Again, in the days of undisclosed deals, it’s tough to be accurate, but educated estimates and factoring in loan fees suggests Cardiff have more or less spent what they’ve earned.

Which is necessary.

Again, if we take the last accounts, then wages were around the £30m mark, taking up around 75% of the club’s income.

If income has dropped, the wage bill has to drop accordingly for the club not to rack up more debt.

Granted, some of the recruitment can be questioned over recent seasons, but it is why some big-earners – Kenwyne Jones a case in point – have had to be removed from the wage bill.

Having to pay up contracts in the case of several will have cost, but it least makes room in the salary costs. It is something Slade had to oversee, and it can be assumed that it is the same for Trollope.

And having been burned by Financial Fair Play last season – although that was somewhat harshly tied into Tan’s debt restructuring – Cardiff know more than most that they cannot afford to fall out of line.

The Swansea City situation

(Image: Huw Evans Picture Agency)

Financial Fair Play comes into play with Swansea too.

While there will be many wondering where they money is from the new moneymen in the Liberty boardroom, they too are ignoring the cost control rules in place in the top-flight.

Updated rules state that wage bills can’t increase by more than £7m a season, unless the club can show they have increased their revenue by the same amount.

Crucially, that does not include the extra television revenue which has seen clubs effectively ‘jump the shark’ when it comes to transfer value this season.

It was outlined when Jason Levien and Steve Kaplan were first revealed to be in talks that they would help the club have greater financial manoeuvrability, but ultimately weren’t going to start running the club in a different way to they have previously.

And FFP rules – with punishments from points deductions and transfer embargoes – mean they can’t even if they did.

It does tempt you to wonder how some clubs are getting around it, though some have managed to match increase in expenditure from player sales or existing huge commercial revenue streams. Again, perhaps it is no surprise that improving Swansea’s source of the latter has been mentioned several times with regards to the boardroom’s newcomers.

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Swansea, as revealed earlier this year, have had to walk a tightrope with wages. Salaries are spiralling in the Premier League but Swansea’s income (at least not before the new broadcast deal) has not matched the same rate of growth; in the 2014/15 accounts wages increased by 12% while turnover – although breaking the £100m barrier for the first time – only went up by 5%.

It is interesting to note that the rules only count if the starting wage bill is above £67m, meaning you can exceed the £7m cap if it was below that figure. In other words, teams promoted from the Championship are able to boost their wage spending by a far bigger amount in their bid to stay in the Premier League, which could explain some of Middlesbrough’s big moves.

Of course, selling Andre Ayew and Ashley Williams for a combined £32m will see plenty wonder why that hasn’t been pumped immediately back in.

The Ayew cash is thought to have been accounted for by the deals for Borja Baston and Fernando Llorente, while there has been a spend of £11m on Alfie Mawson, Mike van der Hoorn and Leroy Fer.

(Image: @SwansOfficial)

But there is a danger of looking at ‘net spend’ (the sum difference between player sales and purchases). Not only does it ignore whether there was good value on either side of the deal, it also ignores a lot of the hidden extras that go on.

For example, net spend will not have accounted for the hike in wages to keep Gylfi Sigurdsson. An easy example is Ayew: his arrival at Swansea will have not gone down as a fee, yet with wages reportedly at £80,000-a-week, the yearly spend on his contract (around £4m a year) will have been in the books that have to be balanced.

Cash flow is not simple either. There is little chance that the money from Ayew and Williams will come in an up front fee, but rather in instalments over an agreed period. In other words, the bank balance doesn’t suddenly go up by £20m once a West Ham owner tweets a picture of the player in claret and blue.

Swansea have to be warned that sometimes risks need to be taken to make sure they stay competitive, but it’s fair to suggest they – like others – will have been taken aback by the explosion in the size of fees this summer.

But it goes to show the misnomer of many celebrating the money on offer from the new broadcast deals. The new sums on offer has simply inflated the market. Like in life, if the wages of every worker goes up, so does the cost of living.

It won’t satisfy all and it doesn’t excuse some of the poor recruitment decisions made by both South Wales clubs in recent times, but there is a case of remembering that you can’t have it both ways.

Many Cardiff fans were keen for the club to find itself in better financial shape, something that seems to be happening.

Likewise, Swansea fans were keen to know that the share-purchase would not change the way the club has been run to jeopardise it financially.

To have both those things and get involved too heavily in silly season just doesn’t work. It’s not an excuse not to spend money, but does explain why there may not have been mega deals this window.

Of course, that won’t make it any easier when Bony scores from an Allen pass or when Marshall pulls off a penalty save for Hull.

But – in the modern world – that’s football.