What was it said by Lando Calrissian, something about a deal getting worse all the time? Honestly, like i said above, **** SR and their multi club bollocks.
I would rather have a good player next year than nothing ever. Let’s spend this slim purse of dollars.
A few million that they clearly did not have or weren’t going to bid. So we don’t lose that at all. Can’t lose what you were never going to get. Instead we get nothing, lose out on being able to potentially sign someone our manager actually wants, pay his wages to be a sub for the year and watch his value drop even further. And then take an even worse deal next summer. That alternative certainly does sound compelling
Well we clearly have lost out. We were clearly happy to sell for (lets say) £18m. The fact that we accepted (I think) £14m and the other player makes up the remaining £4m then yeah, we've lost out on what we were happy to accept in the first place.
But if we aren’t being offered £18m by anyone and the only offers coming in are £14m then what do you do? Keep him when it looks like we need the money to sign anyone else?
Thats not the only alternative and is very negative, so I’ll give an opposite positive alternative. We could have loaned him to a club in Europe where he’d actually play (so not a European giant like Juve). Why not to a club where he speaks the language too. He plays well, his wages are paid, and his value rises so we either sell him for more next summer or recall him to our team in January if Martin gets sacked.
In that scenario (if we are correct about the finances being very tight) we don’t sign any more players this window as well as loaning Charly out
Sounds like we’re probably only going for loans anyway. From the latest Martin interview sounds more like the clubs choice to not spend more than £20m on any player and keep wages low rather than because we are that tight up with PSR.
I think everyone agrees that we would’ve expected more for Alcaraz in the current market. We unfortunately are in a **** negotiating position where we desperately need the money and everyone with any knowledge of Saints realises that he doesn’t fit in with what we are trying to do. The club have tried to make the best of a **** situation (that they have caused themselves with previous windows and by opting for a manager like Martin when we had a talent like Alcaraz who clearly wouldn’t fit in with his style)
How can you know all of this? You’ve made up numbers. This is obvious by the use of “let’s say”. It’s just a bizarre take. And it just comes from this notion that we somehow have a better understanding of the value of a player than the football club. Which we clearly don’t There is simply no way you can say that we “clearly lost out”. As that is not clear at all. This mythical extra few million pounds you are talking about was never there to lose out on. No one was offering it. So we can’t have lost it. I can’t lose out on a job that gives me a 10k a year pay rise if no one is offering me one. And saints can’t lose out on an extra £Xm in transfer fees that aren’t on the table. By all accounts we have not turned down a larger fee in favour of a loan player. As I’ve noted before - I think people are getting confused with rumours that SR turned down a 7+2m offer for Onuachu and the next offer was apparently 7m + two loan players. And the determination some have to hate SR and the multi club model makes people assume this deal is like that when there is no evidence of it. Not least because doesn’t seem to have been the Onuachu offer anyway (yet)
Well of course I've made those numbers up, I'm not part of the negotiating tables, they're just placeholder finances to get my point across, so not sure why you even have to be so pedantic to be honest. The fact is; Goztepe have got a player on loan as a result of one of our players going to a new club, and you think that has no relation to the fee we got for Charly. What a massive coincidence if that's the case. In fact, you know what, let's just agree to disagree on this, we're just going to go round in circles not convincing anyone.
The idea that we wouldn’t hire a manager target because of one player who was only good enough to attract two offers this summer is quite frankly utterly ludicrous. I’m sorry but this is an absurd post. If we were talking about a manager who would refuse to play prime Matt Le Tissier then you might have a point. But we really really aren’t. “A talent like Alcaraz” - so talented that his best European offer was an insulting loan offer from Lazio with an even lower purchase fee that really indicated how talented they thought he was If we have truly been robbed here then surely a much higher profile side would have taken a punt at the price we sold him for. But they didn’t. And if this was due to his representatives briefing about him wanting to be in South America then that’s an even bigger issue
In your scenario of loaning Alcaraz out we would’ve got a loan fee and (for the sake of argument) all his wages paid. He won’t be on much as he was a 20 year old coming from Argentina. We will have to pay loan fees as well for whoever we do bring in, and someone like Ramsdale is on £100k a week (probably underestimated). We would be looking at £4m or so just for his wages, before you talk about loan fee which was rumoured at £6m, even if we got them to halve that you’re still looking at £7m for a Ramsdale loan So yeah if there was loan interest in Alcaraz it was a route we could’ve gone down, I just think it would’ve left us with too little in the bank to do much/anything significant in the remaining couple of days.
I was saying that if you are looking for the reasons why we have potentially been backed into a corner with Alcaraz’s fee then those are some of the reasons. Not that we shouldn’t have appointed Martin to accommodate Alcaraz. As much as it may appear that people who negotiate football transfers are stupid I’m sure they could all see that they could get Alcaraz cheaper due to the situation. If he was even just playing every week the fee would presumably have been more as he would’ve been an important player for us. He wasn’t, clearly deemed expendable by us so that drives down his fee, and as you say if he was keen on a move back to South America then that limits the options even further You were saying how crazy some of the other fees have been this window. Someone like Carvalho as an example went for roughly double Alcaraz. Has Carvalho shown more in his career to date? Yes, but I’d argue not double the fee more
Is SR running them badly is difficult to say they took on an extremely badly run club. Relegation was assured before they took them over. Between Goztepe and Valenciennes they are the the more interesting club. I had hoped some of our under performing francophone players such as Mara and tall Paul had been loaned to them last season.
This is fair. I hyper focused on part of the post. My bad Liverpool seem to have some kind of crazy transfer magic. I’ve mentioned before that Arsenal and Man U can’t seem to sell their players for good fees for love nor money. But Liverpool and City have no issues. And I don’t know why. My only guess is Carvalho has a bit more versatility and shown to be more adapted to the English game I can’t help but think if there really is a thing about him only wanting to go to South America that really throttled the fee down and left us without a choice. But maybe because that would be the most satisfying answer as it would have meant our hands were sort of tied The big reason alcaraz didn’t work is that we didn’t have a top quality player who could play as lone striker. Because I don’t think he would ever have been able to work in a two striker system. He’d have needed to play behind a really effective operator with some wingers either side in a 4-2-3-1. And we didn’t have that really I guess maybe another manager uses him as one of the three instead of Aribo or Smallbone in the championship. But in the premier league you need a more solid double pivot and someone to hold the ball up as well to allow for a maverick type player. Can and do many clubs our size carry someone like that at the moment ?
I expect that’s too big a drop for them to accept. Don’t they have a relatively nice stadium which was one of the reasons SR bought them?
I don't think he wanted to leave at all. It was more, if the club want him out then the only place he would go is back home. When asked by the echo reporter if he was leaving his response was "it is up to him" and nods towards Martin. His girlfriend has also posted a leaving post on Instagram with a crying face. Seems stupid but you aren't doing that if you it is your decision to leave. It appears to me the club need money to reinvest and he is the most valuable asset that wont be playing regularly, so is essentially being forced out. Whether that is the right call, only time will tell.
