Terrible time to be conducting business, to be fair. I'm normally a massive critic on these things, but nobody's doing much at all right now. There's been something like four permanent signings in the Premier League in this window. The squad is already overflowing with players and we're ****ed on the HG thing. Hopefully things will settle down with the coronavirus by the summer and we can get back to something approaching normality.
...or we could just use Tanganga and Cirkin until the summer...or Mourinho could take a leaf out of Poch's book and play Sonny at left back... Mourinho's getting sacked sooner rather than later. I can't cheer the idea of bringing in more dross, who will sit next to Gedson and Vinicius on the bench, that we have to move on in the summer, with the shelves fully stocked already.
I know...if we let him leave to bring in some washed up alternatives that Mourinho won't play, it'll be ****ing lunacy. He won't start Vinicius...why would he pick Clyne...or the others? We might as well play Sanchez there and save the wages and signing on fee for the deadbeat alternatives.
Also, how is it that we’re so **** at getting rid of dead wood? Window after window. I just don’t get it. Is it really that Levy simply demands too much and out prices other clubs? So he just loans then out and therefore doesn’t have to pay the wages? That can’t be the case, surely?
As I said in the match thread (and probably a couple of dozen times already) it's the economics Phil Jones is on £110k a week, so if he was to move to Burley (for the sake of argument) he'd have to give up £60-70k a week to move, and he does Danny Rose is on £60k a week, so if he was to move to West Brom (as they were linked) he'd have to give up £20-30k a week to move, and they don't Nathaniel Clyne is on £20k per week, so if he was to drop down into the Championship, he'd have to give up £10k a week to move, and he likely would Even though in real terms he'd be giving up significantly less of his wages to move than Jones would, it's also worth his while to sit on that extra £20k for as long as possible - while in comparison, Jones has already feathered his nest with his wages so even though he's giving up significantly more a week, he's also made significantly more, while on the other hand Clyne has made significantly less but if he wants to keep playing he accepts he will have to take a pay cut If a club like Southampton or Newcastle came in for Danny Rose, the odds are that he would accept the move even if he'd likely have to give up 1/3 of his wages to make it happen - but once you start looking further down the table, or abroad to the second tier of Europe such as Turkey or Greece, not only are you having to accept a wage cut but also that you're spent as a top tier player
Could be worse, Massimo Luongo's loan to Ipswich gave him PTSD from having to work with Mick McCarthy
I think various factors can come into play. 1 - Some players know they won't leave Spurs for a better team or better money so they stick around. 2 - The club (as in Levy or manager(s)) for some bizarre reason isn't actively trying to sell some of them because they weirdly rate them (Dier, Toby getting new deals, Lucas/ Lamela/ Winks etc always featuring in social media posts and OS articles as if fans are desperate to hear about them). 3 - Demands of the club for certain players are likely putting off potential suitors as I don't think we're willing to accept losses, even though keeping some of these players only results in their values further plummeting.
It also has to be said a lack of interest in some cases At the higher end, we were expecting offers for both Toby and Eriksen at various times and (hopefully...) planned to invest on what we made, yet not a single offer manifested, hence we triggered the option in Toby's contract (and still no interest a year later, when he had a release clause of around £25m) or why Eriksen ended up drifting off to Inter last January. At the lower end, there's simply no interest, with Nkoudou the obvious example and frankly it was a miracle he wound up at Besiktas There's also occasions where players torpedo moves, such as Wanyama to Brugges a couple of years ago, precisely for the financial reasons I laid out a few posts back
yeah, makes total sense. This is also probably why our deadline day just seems to consist of sorting out new loans away from the club for our youngsters and not much else.
There was a bid from Roma for Toby but we rejected it as it was less than the release clause. Hindsight says we were silly doing so. Was around £17m IIRC, not amazing but would've stopped us giving someone past it a massive new contract not long afterwards. We don't really have too many Nkoudou's on the books now though, a lot of our deadwood are semi-established players and many with international experience. I just don't think we're actively trying to sell them for some bizarre reason. So many have long overstayed their use by date.
The lack of interest in Toby and Eriksen were both situations literally no-one saw coming, and indirectly a major cause behind Poch's Chapter 2 becoming impossible to pull off quickly enough. He likely went into that post-CL final window expecting a windfall circa £90m higher than he ended up getting. That's the sort of package that could've funded Fernandes or Dybala plus wages. We've gone from expecting £90m to taking £20m for Eriksen but then wasting half of that on Toby's new contract over 3 years.
I’m sure we’re open to selling them but why would they leave? The likes of Lucas, Lamela, Sissoko, Aurier all seem quite settled, are unlikely to get clubs they’d want to go to offering them wages they’d want to take. Forcing a player out, or just sticking them in the reserves to rot like we have with Rose, doesn’t help us get the wages off the bill and we can’t realistically afford to pay the wages of two players for a squad spot when one of them isn’t playing. The players know this too. They’re slightly too good to just be binned off and replaced with youth players, but not good enough to get the move they’d take at this time in their careers.
What a boring transfer deadline day. Liverpool paying £2M for a Preston defender is big news - a sign of the times.