Transfer thread for 2016-17 season

That one genuinely surprised me, as I would have thought he'd be closer to £30k p/w.

 

Well the strangest part here is surely the fact that he moved back to Germany and accepted a wage deal of £26k pw from Hamburg, who happen to be able to easily afford higher wages (they paid VDV over £75k per week), which means either Holtby is mad for accepting the wage cut, or someone at Spurs was mad for offering him a wage increase of 300% to start with. How on earth could an unproven 21 year old command such a package?!

 

Holtby remains for me the most annoying 'loss' as I thought his style of play would have been perfect for a Poch side. We made €3m on the sale to Hamburg but I think he would have been much more valuable as a squad player.
Oh well - either way he certainly wasn't worth the salary quoted!

 

One more PL point, and the Levy 2016-17 transfer window is officially open !!!

 

Maybe it was the very fact that we were paying him so much that hastened his way out of the door.

 

Holtby was just one of those players that didn't work out here despite being a very good footballer (just like Paulinho, Soldado, Kevin Prince Boateng etc). He'd already played for Germany before joining and was coming on the back of his best season to date with Schalke hence why we wanted to do the deal early and get him in January. He had all the ingredients to be able to succeed here but things just didn't work for him for one reason or another, I don't think AVB helped his style because AVB was all about defensive tactics and Holtby was a player with good creative instincts and wanted to get forward, I know it was under Poch that we eventually sold him but I reckon had he joined at the beginning of Poch's reign, he may well still have been a Spurs player because I think he had the right attributes to fit Poch's philosophy, it's just by the time Poch got here I think Holtby had somewhat lost hope on being a regular at the club and so already had his heart set on a move.

As for his wage, I think he was on good money at Schalke, plus as I mentioned, he was a player building a big reputation for himself so was likely going to cost a pretty penny in wages, especially as the initial deal was going to be in the Summer on a free transfer.

 

When we signed him he only had 6 months left on his contract - puts the player in a strong bargaining position.

 

True but that is usually circumvented via a hefty signing-on fee. Committing to huge wages is always a risk because a)You might end up with another Adebayor, and b) the only way from there is upwards and if the player comes to sign a new contract, the wages will be even higher, regardless of what his performances actually warrant (cf. my forthcoming thesis 'Why Liverpool won't be able to shift their deadwood'). The whole thing seems totally un-Levy like.

 

It can't possibly be better to pay a signing on fee instead of higher wages....

 

On the other hand, it does sound rather Baldini-ish - although given Baldini was still at Roma at the time, probably not.

 

It is, for the reasons I've given above. And I would add a third:

c) A signing-on fee is much, much easier to keep discreet than details about wages. It is terrible for the general morale of the camp (something you quite rightly emphasise regularly) to know that an extremely young, underperforming player is being paid astronomical wages. That is why the Holtby situation is so peculiar - Levy has always been very careful to maintain a balanced and fair distribution of cash flow. I don't think we'll be seeing an Adebayor-sized wage mistake again any time soon. The fact that Holtby took a 66% reduction to his wages when he moved back to Germany tells me that he hardly would've kicked up a fuss if we had offered him less.

Putting my tin hat on for a rare moment, my personal belief is that we were so desperate to show some sort of ambition in what was otherwise a disgraceful transfer window, combine with the fact that Holtby was drawing attention from a number of rivals, meant that we, in sheer desperation, made him an offer that he literally couldn't refuse, and there we were with our bargain-boy to save face for another window.

 

A signing on fee is just wages in advance isn't it? That means the wages will have less retention effect. Surely it makes more sense to pay less up front unless it leads to you breaking your wage structure. Players must know by now that running your contract down is in your long term financial interest as it puts the transfer fee in your pocket not the clubs. They must know equally well that it is better for the club to pay higher wages than a signing on fee

 

Not really. I've been searching high and low for more info about signing-on fees since earlier, and unless I'm missing a trick, the distinct lack of anything public confirms what I said above: it is much easier to find out a player's basic wage than it is the signing-on fee, which can be easily hidden somewhere in the contract's small print. Paying ludicrous wages is thus much likelier to lead to disgruntled team-mates than a signing-on fee would.

The closest equivalent I could find (young promising player signing for a big club) was Adnan Janujaz (http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/adnan-januzaj-lands-biggest-signing-on-2472243), whose £5m signing-on fee was the highest ever paid by United to a youngster. Considering the finanicical clout of the club together with the fact that he was already offered a basic wage of £60k per week, I think we can safely say that £5m is an exceptionally high sum. I'd expect Spurs to be far closer to £3m tops. Again, this is a speculation so take it or leave it. But even £5m isn't all that much when you think about it - it's one year of having Adebayor loitering about causing trouble, for example. I'd say it's probably safer paying out a solid signing-on fee, especially when the actual transfer fee is exceptionally low (as it was in the cases of Holtby and Adebayor), and use that as leverage to push the weekly wages down. If you take into account the fact that the average contract is 4-5 years nowadays, if it can be done I'd say it makes more sense financially to offer a noticeably lower wage, combined with a nice signing-on cushion and a promise of a wage hike with a new contract 2-3 years in (again, very common).

That's the central part of paying a youngster a fortune that I don't agree with. If a 21 year old is contracted at £67k per week, the only way is upwards in terms of new contracts; and even if his performances have only been slightly above average (as Holtby's were), you'll end up paying a 24 year old £80k per week when they should really be on £40k.

 

Sorry, but Paulinho was not a very good footballer.

 

Paulinho is a classic example of how moneyball scouting doesn't necessarily work: on paper he looked like a player who could add an extra dimension to our team as he was a consistent goal threat for Corinthians, and one thing our midfield needed at the time was a reliable source of goals to take the pressure off of the forwards (because AVB forgot that passing the bloody ball forwards might be a good tactic...) as well as making us less reliant on Gareth Bale, which was quite helpful as Los Ladrones do Madrid were stepping up their Marca-led tapping-up campaign.

So on paper he looked like the right signing, and a Sandro/Paulinho pivot would take the Premier League by storm, culminating in the pair of them leading Brazil into a World Cup where they did not get utterly destroyed by Germany in the semi final. The problem is that football isn't played on paper.

The obvious problem with Paulinho's stats is that box-to-box midfielders are a rare breed in Brazilian football, which makes it much easier for them to thrive because defenders aren't prepared for somebody running from deep to shoot from the edge of the area - yet that type of player is anything but rare in the Premier League, Bundesliga or Serie A, so defenders are far better conditioned to snuff out that threat.

This is what led to the main issue with Paulinho: the most successful box-to-box midfielders in the Premier League all had something exceptional to their game - Lampard had his long-range shooting, Scholes and Gerrard had their finishing ability, while Kevin Nolan was an effective aerial threat. And that's where Paulinho failed, he wasn't exceptional at anything other than being Brazilian...and he didn;t really have much say in that matter, his parents ****ed there and that's all.

 

Paulinho had the second worst game of football I've ever seen. It was against Stoke, and he looked worse than sunday league.

It would have been the worst, but for michael dawson giving away two penalties in an FA Cup game before getting sent off in about he 8th minute.

Anyway, so far as I'm concerned he (Paulinho) was a total fraud of a footballer. Thank God for Poch, and his revolution.

Pretty sure we bought paulinho after Bale had gone btw.

 

Paulinho arrived in June, just before the Confederations Cup kicked off, Bale left on deadline day.

 

Apparently Paulinho was promised that Bale would stay.

 

He'd still have been **** either way though tbf.