Payroll covers all the people employed by the club, from the players, through the board members, through to the match day tea-lady.
There are two areas to watch. The obvious one is that that the wages just don't get too high. The graph shows that the wages seem to have now settled around the £30m mark. It is important the club ensures they don't get caught paying too much in years when they are in the Champions League. A good comparison is Newcastle who grew their wage bill hugely when they had a good CL run, then never managed to get it under control again.
The second area to keep an eye on is the ratio of the wages to the income. Deloittes who do some in-depth analysis of football finances reckon the target for this ratio should be 50%. This allows the club to cope with the costs of running the business, buying the occasional player, running an youth development system, putting on games, maintaining the ground etc.
A brief discussion of the wages over recent years is here.
The 2009 figures are appalling, and show the huge problem the club have if they don't play in Europe. In 2008 the club made a virtue of saying that the wages were linked to success, and the numbers looked to back that up. As with the Newcastle example mentioned above Rangers clearly have clearly got it wrong.
With no European football the club still had a wage bill of £31m, this is higher than any other year since 2003, and demonstrates that the club pays very high basic pay, and that the bonuses cannot be much away from 10%.
The ratio of wages to turnover is over 77%. Only the madness at Hearts can match that. In comparison Celtic's worst figure in the last ten years is just over 60%.
These figures highlight why the club has been unable to buy players recently as any addition to the wage bill would be so wrong.
An interesting exercise is to try and work out the average wages that the players must be on.
Rangers - Staff and Payroll