Yes, I kind of agree there, FLT. Thing is, Celtic may think they can get £14-15M out of a PL club, so it pays to set out the stall, as they say, and obviously, £8M is a quick and dirty way of doing it. I bet we end up paying around £10-12M though.
Virgil is coming, im confident. The moment he started favouriting Saints related tweets was the moment I was convinced.
It's a a sustainable model that, along with the development and retention or profit, of youth players can't lead to growth. Slowly reinvest profits made on players sold (along with owner investment and revenue) in to transfer budget and wage bill attract and keep the bigger players. Just takes time.
Indeed. The big breakthrough comes when the truly significant players are in the middle of their contracts and at the end of the season Saints go and achieve CL qualification. Then we've got them. They can try and leave for more money, but we'll say no, and they won't really want to leave anyway because they've achieved what they fought for. We got bloody close to doing it just a couple of months ago. Europa is a very decent rehearsal stage.
As I've been waiting for the lad to get here for two years, I still need some convincing, so I'd like to see some of these, please.
True, but I was counting Celtic in fish above us in the food chain. I don't believe Saints would sell a player (that we wanted to keep) to a club below us in stature until it suited us either. Especially if there's a chance at least another club would want him too. They undoubtedly know we want him badly, so the power lies with them. They can also afford to not relax any price or condition demands until later in the window too, to see if we will call their bluff or not. Not that I think that's what they're doing - I know they're just waiting to qualify or not for CL. But I reckon we'll buy a decent player fairly late too, whenever we get VVD (or not). All pure guesswork, of course.
Celtic has a big problem in that VVD supposedly wants out rather badly. So that removes much of their leverage. I don't feel too bad for those guys. They always will lose their best players, which stinks. But so will we. OTOH, they are almost guaranteed to win their league every year. And get the CL spot that comes with it. We don't have that. Plus, the fact that they can more or less cruise to victory means it is easy for them to sign up good young players cheap, get them lots of playing time, and then sell them later. So it's pretty simple comparatively to keep the conveyor belt going. They don't have the risk that we do where if we buy the wrong guy, we either can't play and develop them and the deal is a loss, or we play them and lose. It's a strange spot for them to be in. They don't have much risk of ever being worse, but they have very little chance of ever being better.
Good points from both the last two posters, with one small point missing: wages. I don't think (as in genuinely unsure) that Celtic can compete on wages with us - amazing as that sounds given the size of the club. Last year and the year before two players gave up the holy grail of champions league football to join Southampton from Celtic. It comes down to money again.
They are a historic big fish, but we are the newly evolved smaller wealthy fish. Must be something to do with waters we swim in.
Maybe this should all finish now, don't want to tip the scales and upset the non gaggers....they might get green around the gills!
They probably cannot offer the wages that we do. But for younger players-- not the superstarlets, but the kind of players both us and them would like to get as part of our football philosophy-- the hidden gems just moving up from the local club side in some smaller country, I think they are more attractive in that those players will not make the big money until they prove themselves more. And better chances at first team football as well as their larger club reputation plus CL is a good calling card. It's when they get to VVD/Wanyama level that Celtic can't match the wages, so they look for a move and come to us. Then from us to the big clubs. So it's sorta like Celtic gets guys in for 2mil, plays them for 2-3 years, sells them for 12m. We get them from Celtic at 12m, play them and sell for 22m.
