monkeybarry
Jack Jull
Which is fair enough. Football is a fickle business and you can have your career destroyed through no fault of your own - bad management, wrong timing, bad tackle etc.When my father was representing professional footballers (admittedly a few years ago now). The very first question they would ask was 'How much money am I being offered?'. The second question would be 'which are the clubs who are offering the most money'?'. My Dad would often try to steer them to a club that would probably be better for their development in the long term, where perhaps the path to the first team was clearer or the management and coaching structure was more stable, but very, very rarely did the player turn down money and prestige.
The thing that you have to respect is that most young footballers have big egos. Their egos generally cause them to opt for the transfer to the biggest club interested as this gives them extra bragging rights. Typically there would only be three reasons why they may not do this:
1. The biggest club are not the one offering the biggest salary (this is a reasonably rare occurrence and often only happens when a club has had a money influx from a wealthy benefactor - i.e. when Emirates Marketing Project got taken over)
2. The player feels tied to a specific location (young players from the South can be hesitant to move up North and vice-versa)
3. The bigger clubs do not put as much into the transfer (i.e. the manager doesn't bother to speak to them) whereas the smaller club goes on the charm offensive and has the manager heavily involved in conversations with the player, their parents, etc, etc.
I would say that we could have a chance with a player like Sessegnon due to reasons 2 and 3 above.
Bale almost suffered two of those!
A balance of competitive wages and opportunity to develop and play should attract the right profile of winner for us.