If you believe Butterfield’s wife (and there’s no reason not to), it was stated he was offered slightly over minimum wage. That’s £20,820 a year. Let’s be generous and say he was offered £30k a year, a 65% reduction would have meant he was on roughly £86k a year. We signed him in the NL, where the average salary is (according to a quick Google) between £1 – £1.5k a week. So he was on £1.65k a week, a little over the average wage for a NL footballer.
That doesn’t scream paying way over the odds to me, especially for a player of his quality…he was signed under Swann long after the purse strings were tightly sealed.
