I hope you are right. I am sure i read the sell on posted by somone on here. To much to look through to find it.
If that's right I'd be happy. Bought for £12M and sold for almost £30M. We'll miss him but that's good business imo. I don't understand the flak given to Huw on this Holding out for an extra few million may well have led to the deal collapsing and us getting stuck with an unhappy player who knows we buggered it up. It's not as if the two sides were far apart. Nice knowing you Wilf. Good luck!
Not to mention that we don't need a replacement asap as Gomis would have filled the squad and fans with confidence with his performance yesterday. £16 million profit is a good deal not to mention that other players might look to us in the future as the stepping stone between their current clubs and league winning sides i.e. Bony to Man City, Michu to Napoli, Joe to Liverpool, Gylfi to Spurs, Ben to Spurs and Sinclair to Man City. We are able to offer players the springboard to showcase their talents to the bigger clubs.
£28m is a fantastic deal and about right, I dont think we could have squeezed another penny out of man city due to their circumstances and jinx and the board have made the right choice in the end rather than man city having to call the deal off for the sake of a couple of million. good luck to Bony for the future and thanks for everything. We can now move forward and continue our progress and will probably end up in the same positions with another striker who we will make into a household name....
So are we no longer a challenger but just an incubator; a servant to the ambitions of other clubs. Are we so craven for cash that we forget the lessons of recent seasons. Did we somehow steal the Soton secret recipe and think we can replicate them. Some clubs in some leagues are economically bound to be talent factories. In fact their very survival is dependent on the trade in players. This includes highly recognized and successful clubs like Boca Juniors. I was not aware that we are so constrained. I find the loss of a player like Bony to be very disappointing and see challenges ahead. Gomis has not demonstrated, yet, to being anything close to the prolific Bony at scoring and others are not exactly inspiring confidence that the void shall be filled. We just lost a player, but for whom, 2014 would not have been such a good year. Subtract his goals from our goal difference and line it up against the goal difference of last season's league table and you will see where we would have ended up. And, do tne same for this season so far, Cash is a high, not a fix.
Yankee haven't we been doing this already this season and in seasons gone by. In taking other so called big sides youngsters and making them in to Pl players at our expense for example both Caulker and Carroll. it has never made any sense that we have now shown Spurs that we have made Carroll a better player for them, but i suppose that is where we are at. At Least with Bony we have made some cash and hopefully It will be reinvested in the squad in part. Personally I am with you and would much rathr he would stay. The pull of the top 4 is far to great.
We have to accept that the majority of players will move on so its the timing that is important and getting a new contract in place before the move. Re loan players at the end of the loan the chances of keeping them are slim so we have to accept that we may get some who will add value during the period and that there others who will add little or no value
TLF - we didn't give value away with Caulker and Carroll we did / are actually benefiting by having players on the field contributing value above and beyond what we could otherwise field from our own squad for a fraction of what it would cost to acquire them or alternative senior players of equivalent quality. Economically it's a no-brainer although I understand you're apprehension over it. The only way we do not benefit when they are playing for us is in their brand rights - e.g. I presume we haven't printed shirts with their names on for sale through the Swans shop because we don't have the rights to do that. The "loan" is the conceptual stumbling block for most people. But think of it this way - if we had a player on our books with a year left on his contract we would be amortizing down is acquisition cost (original transfer fee), paying wages (probably much higher wages for a senior player), with the risk of losing him at the end of the season (Bosman) having dumped development resources into the player while he was here. With a young loanee of high quality, the acquisition costs are minimal, the wages are lower (compare to senior of similar quality), and we lose him at the end of the season anyway, or better yet have already negotiated a right to acquire or make the first offer. It's a pretty good deal anyway you look at it. In addition, we get the opportunity to try before we buy for minimal cost and therefore we minimize the risk of a bad acquisition. Imagine if we'd done that before getting Shelvey or sick-note Beattie or others.
I understand Yankee Jack's feelings because it is sad we can never keep our best players but I think we ought to realise now that this will always happen. League 1 and 2 players get bought by Championship Clubs (or even higher in the case of Grimes recently) whilst Prem clubs often buy talent from the league below. 'Smaller' teams in the Prem like Saints and Swans take talent from lower or foreign leagues and if they're a hit with us they inevitably get bought by the 'big boys'. Even they aren't immune, with super-clubs like Real and Barca on the prowl (Sterling is an example who is a Real target). It's a free market and there's always a bigger fish.
That maybe true, buy when we want to, or should I say when Huw wants to, then we can keep a player, and Bodde was evidence of this when the Rams tried their very best under Jewell to get him when they had that terrible season in the Premier league, and they failed as Huw kept moving the goal posts, and upping the price, anyway it's down to the actual situation at the time for us in my view, we were never going to sell Bodde, and clearly the situation is different with Bony, as there are currently replacements to be had in the market. Who would have thought that after Vorm's first season we would be selling him for an upgrade a few months later? the fact is it's all down to the prevailing market options at the time, I don't think we are by nature a selling club, but it would be stupid to turn down the Bony deals when ready made replacements are available, of course if there was no replacement available then I'm sure Huw would never sell until we had the right conditions, it's all about timing also...........
Actually I think also that due to clubs like ourselves and Southampton keeping a very good football house, that we may be attracting a closer look from the bigger clubs, but the answer would be to develop and grow in size over time, which I'm sure is why the club are looking at new boardroom members from the USA, not saying that that is the answer though.........
A challenger to what? We can't win the league and we won't finish top 4 due to the financial muscle of the top 6-7 clubs we cannot compete with them each season and as we are one of the smallest clubs in the league in terms of financial revenue created (excluding tv monies etc) then we need to develop players and sell them on a la Bony and Allen. However, once we get a stadium with 35,000 fans each week then that's a different proposition. Bony is world class, and deserves to be at a top 4 club. It was inevitable he would leave.
As a challenger, I would remind you that in our first season in the "Prem" under Toshack we lead the league for most of the season - we were undone in the end by injuries and a small squad. In other words, nothing is impossible given the right group of players and a sprinkle of injury luck here and there. On the "points lost from a winning position" - halve our record in that metric and we gain 8 points, which puts us squarely above United in the top 4. We're a lot closer than most people think, and under the banner of every dog has its day, a Bony could make a big difference. Players that are playing well and delivering quality game after game deserve to be with a club in the top 4 ..... which is not the same thing as a "top 4" club based on how I think you are meaning the term.
The extra 13,000 fans (and I doubt, even if we stay in the Prem for many years, we would get an extra13,000 every week) would generate about £6,175,000 per season. A tidy sum, but certainly not enough for grand ambition. Our ambition should be top 8 and, if possible, European football as that will offer players the incentive to choose Swansea over other teams which will, in turn lead to an improved squad.
Buy top 4 I mean those with the financial muscle. No matter how good our players become, there'll always be sharks waiting to bite our players off us and others. The sad reality is that these big clubs don't develop players anymore, as they arrogantly wait for the likes of us and Southampton et al to develop the players knowing full well that every player has their price.
