Signing a player of Le Fees calibre in this league reminds me of when Wolves pulled off a coup and signed Ruben Neves in their promotion winning season back in 2018.
According to some on here Romano is the arch truth speaker. His every tweet is hung on. He says we are covering his wages. Whether we pay them to Roma up front, monthly really is no different to if we paid the same amount to Le Fee dirrctly. That is the cost to the club of Le Fee. Roman has put that in the public domain. If his wages are significantly more than others, then some others may be a bit narked. It may cause soms resentment. Then again it may not. Imagine being part of a project team at work. You have had an absolutely brilliant first half of the project. You are delivering faster and to a higher quality. The mgt team think wow, we might be able to make even more money faster off this than planned. Lets go and bring in another project team member, on a much bigger salary, to try and finish what the existing team have started. Some may think, great, I want success, some others may think what about my reward? Human nature. My last post on this, I am an outlier here and I dont want to rain on the parade. On a football level I will back him 100% and hope he does a brilliant job and becomes a Sunderland legend. I am not against the player, I trust the judgement of others, I just see a few little red flags that may or not be a problem.
That’s just football though tbf mate and we are a step closer to the premier league. I know your opinions and how you aren’t interested in that but every club in the 92 is. If you can sign this calibre of player to help push you even further you do it if you can. We know what we are like with injuries too. The quality in depth is needed. there’s a reason we are seeing so many fans of other clubs raving about this
No probs mate, it is a good debate. As usual I am probably too protective of our young lads. Been forever since I have felt so connected to Sunderland, because we have a core of Sunderland lads in the team.
Le Fee really is a statement signing, whether he plays to his ability or not. CM is so important at any level but I feel it's vital at championship level and now we have teh depth needed to push on I know some people are concerned about minutes for players that are here already but they'll still get valuable minutes between now and the end of the season. A player like Le Fee and Samed for that matter, can help us rotate the team more and means that if our current CMs aren't playing well they can be taken out for a bit. Le fee is so good in tight spaces, with the way he manipulates the ball - Rigg Neil and Jobe will actually learn so much from seeing how he does that up close in training. For me loan signings should only be of players of a high quality, we've seen with Isidor and Mepham the difference they can make - Le Fee should make a difference This also shows how the model works, if we didn't sell Clarke we would have struggled to get Le Fee and probably Mepham as well. I am excited by this signing because it's clear the RLB wanted him, and Le Fee will already know how RLB wants him to play in the system - that's massive as it seems to take a while for RLB to trust players, he's already got that here No matter how Le Fee does, I love this signing - it's a real sign of intent and it will help our team both short and long term imo
Romano is extremely reliable but his language is occasionally lost in translation, plus he's using Twitter and is character limited. His wages being covered by a loan fee is completely different to us agreeing to pay his wages in full. I know it seems a small nuance but it is different. Every player that comes into the club has a transfer fee associated with it, and loan players are no different. We'll be compensating Roma for him coming to us. The example you give is flawed in this scenario. As we aren't bringing in a new team member and paying them significant wages. To use your scenario we're essentially paying an agency for a contractor to come in. His earnings and our employee's earnings are incomparable. His wages are completely covered by the agreement but its not us paying them.
I'm a big believer in young local talent as well and that should always be our focus, I think this signing could actually help our youngsters learn from a really good technical player Neil will still be the heart beat of this team imo
Who cares what we are paying leave it to the money/business men, who know more than most regarding contracts in football all I know is that our club is being run correctly. Lets just concentrate on winning.
Chill out man. As Sunderland supporters we're steeped in a culture of promise, only to result in ultimate failure. Dismiss your little red flags for a while and enjoy these moments....you never know, we could be in the embryo of our finest hour!
Don't think his wages will be bothering the players this year as they know he will be coming to help get us promoted which means next season they will have the chance to enhance their own wages as premiership players, the likes of rigg and Bellingham won't be put off as it's up to them to force their way ahead of better players when they decide they have gone as far as they can with us and if they want to be the best they can also it will help in their experience.