What’s happened with Hannibal at Man Utd? He was on loan last year at Birmingham, he’d be a decent player to have in midfield if we could get him.
I wouldn't be talking about Stoke as a shining example of managing FFP headroom. They've been ****ed for years. And don't Brum still have a year of parachute money?
Birmingham haven’t been in the PL for years , but have the Bellingham money & Jude’s sell on must be a fair wedge.
Played in Man U's 3-1 defeat to Wrexham, no doubt promoting much bed wetting in Kensington. And Kingswood.
Man United are playing him in pre-season ahead of deciding what to do with him, Borussia Dortmund allegedly willing to pay €15m for him.
Stoke get round their FFP issues by effectively having the owner write off hundreds of millions, they’ve already sold pretty much everything they own (ground/ training ground etc) to Bet365 and converted tens of millions from debt to equity, but they’re running out of options.
Writing off the debt has no bearing on FFP. While they sold their ground and also wrote off highly valued player contracts during the grace period of COVID, they 'should' have been much more heavily restricted this summer, so I wouldn't expect them to be spending too much going forward.
The £5m is what Newcastle were quoting, nobody was willing to pay it and once everyone but Leeds had pulled out, they had to take what they could get. It’s a great deal, though it still comes with a £30k a week wage.
If we were able to get Darlow for under 2m all up then I'm a bit surprised we didn't do it, or weren't able to. How cheap did we think he was going to be?
I don’t understand how Simons was a great acquisition syd He barely played He might have potential but so what It was a loan who did nothing
I said decent not great, I think he's one for the future who's clearly shown enough to be offered a deal, that makes it worthwhile picking someone up that late.
I'm aware, but whether we're paying Newcastle or Darlow himself, the package is still under 2m and is more than reasonable. Hell, if we'd been quoted 2m as a transfer fee ignoring wages I'd have thought that was reasonable for him. Didn't we pay 3.5m for Sinik (no clue what he's on as a wage)? If we signed Darlow to a 4-year deal, it'd take until the end of the third year for his wages + fee to have cost us as much as Sinik's fee alone.
