Park Lane James
Andy Sinton
We're not Chelsea - we can;t just go around offering £25+ million for players and pay them astronomical wages.Said who?
Or we don't offer enough £ to attaract a top striker, more like. We got Ade on the cheap, remember.
We're not Chelsea - we can;t just go around offering £25+ million for players and pay them astronomical wages.Said who?
Or we don't offer enough £ to attaract a top striker, more like. We got Ade on the cheap, remember.
We're not Chelsea - we can;t just go around offering £25+ million for players and pay them astronomical wages.
Hang on, didnt we offer 22 million for a certain Portugese MIDFIELDER?
Genuine question, for all of Levy's great business acumen, do people think he knows what he's doing when it comes to the football side of things?
We tried to go big for one player and it wasn't enough. Still not Chelsea level.
It is a good question as when you look at some of our transfers like Vertonghen and Sigurdsson, these were being done while Redknapp was still here but were completed just before or during AVBs reign. Who was behind these deals? Levy obviously knew Redknapp was gone/going but still signed players that apparently Redknapp wanted.
They might not have been suggested by Redknapp. Levy is our DoF if you like and Vertonghen was too good to let go after all the work had been put in to get him here. We only went in for Sig when he turned down Swansea, again good value for money with potential and resale value.
So why not make one big bid for a forward? Porto accepted our offer. It's illogical.
I'm thinking more about the way the clubs conducts itself in the transfer window, the way he went about getting rid of certain managers, and some of his choices as manager.
Moutinho was the one AVB wanted, priority number one if we could get him, so Levy stretched as far as he could. No £20+ million forward will come to us on less than £100k a week. We could have used someone to offer competition to Ade, but not in that price range.
It seems all our number one targets are players that are just about out of our reach and we can't offer them or their clubs enough money to get the deals done early. My questioning in this regard would be more towards our scouting, what players we target.
Players like Mata, Hazard and Oscar were all close to joining, but we were done over by someone with more money. Once the rich clubs have gotten their big deals done we can sneak in and grab what's left basically. Big name players won't move early unless the money is huge.
They must have known he would have high wage demands. If they knew he would ask for a lot of money and wouldn't budge, then why bid for him? We had all day, sorry scratch that, we had months to get the deal done!
I'm not saying we should start spending like Chelsea and Emirates Marketing Project and start paying obscene amounts of money for players, but £22m for Moutinho is an absolute steal!
Agreed, but that doesn't explain why we drag our feet in every window, it's getting old now.
Porto wouldn't budge from £30 million in the end. Since they owe 25% of the fee to another club, £22m would only cover their share.
If we aren't willing to break our record transfer fee (£16m), then we are going to have to accept that 4th is the ceiling. Which makes the criticism of Jol and Redknapp look even more ludicrous!
I can only answer for myself, but I never criticised either for the results. With Jol I was unhappy with some of his tactical decisions and constantly repeated mistakes costing us. With Redknapp there's a long list of minor things that add up in the end.
I'm very aware of our limitations and try not to get carried away. I have no illusions about AVB turning us into title challengers.
I wasn't really referring to you with my post.
I guess it will always come down to wages. If you are offering a club 20m+ for a player, they are surely going to expect to be payed over 100 grand a week which on a 4 year deal will add up to at least another 20m in wages. How do we finance this without guaranteed CL football.
Even Utd with all their debt can afford to buy 29 year old RVP for a total of 50m with wages and transfer fee.
The fact is we would need to have a fantastic youth system or scouting system like Arsenal have had to just about keep in touch with them. The only problem for us is with AVB we have a young manager who I am assuming doesnt have the contacts or experience built up over the years to create this.
I don't think AVB was hired to fix all that on his own, probably Sherwood's job. We have a decent youth setup, but our scouting network could definitely be improved.
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