The papers are full today of our "new" signing being paraded on the pitch before last nights game and the figures being stated range from £13m-£16m but in reality how much did he cost us?
Firstly let me say that this is only my take on the matter, not any form of insider knowledge, so the numbers will be "ball park" from information available but they'll be close.
Firstly last season we sold Jermaine, Noe Pamarot, Sean Davies, Pedro Mendes and Younes Kaboul to Pompey. Pamarot, Mendes & Davies were combined together as a lump sum value of £7.5m, Defoe was £9m and Kaboul was an "undisclosed fee" rumoured to be about £3.5m. This made an estimated total of £20m we were owed by Pompey.
As most people know teams don't just pass each other wads of cash any more and usually spread the payments out over stages, generally acknowledged as one third up front, a third after a year and the final third 18months/2 years down the line.
So for arguements sake Pompey owed us the final payment of c£7m.
Next thing to bear in mind is that Levy is not a stupid man when it comes to business. The only reason Defoe was sold was that he was entering his last year of his contract and refusing to sign a new one so rather than getting stung the way we did with our ex-captain "who should not be named" for fear of legal action we accepted Pompey's bid which many of us said at the time was too low. But Levy knew that given games Defoe would score goals and it'd be likely he'd be sold for a profit by Portsmouth so he added in a "sell on clause" into the deal.
This is a common occurance in football these days, especially with young and talented players, and rumours are that Defoe had a £4m sell on clause. So we'd receive £4m back should Pompey sell Defoe.
So if we take the mid range and accept we agreed a fee with Portsmouth of £15m then that would immediately become £11m when we got our sell on cash back, take off the £7m outstanding and that drops the cash paid to £4m.
So we've basically paid Portsmouth £4m to give our striker a years worth of first team football.
When we loan players out to lower league clubs to "get match experience" we generally pick up 50% of the wage costs and when he left us Defoe was on £35k a week = £1.8m a year. If we'd sent him there on loan we'd still have paid, rounded up, £1m in wages.
So in an optomists eyes, ignoring the accountancy realism we paid Pompey the sum total of £3m to give JD a years worth of matches.
A bargain in my book!!!