You're missing my point. I'm not saying he's a £25m player. I'm not saying Levy and AVB will sign him.
What I am saying is if we sign him for £25m I will not consider him "overpriced" because the fact we have spent that shows he is one of AVB / Levy's top choices and if they are willing to spend that to get the player they consider perfect for our club and that is one of their top choices then he is not overpriced. If you can't spend £25m on your top target who can you?
Where as alot of people here are saying I hope we don't sign him for £25m
Basically - If we do sign him for £25m he must be someone AVB and Levy consider the perfect man for the job and the right sigining to take us to the next level, that alone justifies that pricetag.
The trouble with your logic here is that you are saying that the worth of a player is defined purely on how much of a priority he is to the buying club. You're therefore happy to ignore factors like, well, everything else (off the top of my head this list would include the ability of the player, the experience of the player, the current market, the contract of the player, the position the player plays...etc etc). To me a player can still be over-priced even if he is the priority signing for the buying club.
Imagine we had already bought a couple of strikers or whatever. Levy, Baldini, AVB etc sit down and realise that now the priority signing is (say) back-up/competition for BAE. Would ANY price be justified if they paid it to land their number one target for reserve left-back?!
We paid 12m for Berbatov. After negotiating hard (and after he had had two excellent seasons in the EPL coming on the back of five very good years in a highly competitive league and plenty of international caps/goals) he was then sold for 30m. And Berbatov showed class and ability in abundance besides the goals (has Benteke? - genuine question).
25m for Benteke is over-priced. It's not surprising that Villa have set such a high price but it is definitely way too much. There are loads and loads of very, very good strikers who get bought for way less than that every year.