Transfer Rumours Summer 2024

"Wasteful in front of goal" - sign him up, he will fit in perfectly!

 

Who ever could have forseen dealing with West Ham being difficult...

 

Also mentions Spurs being interested as well.

 

TBH to me it's fairly simple. There is an obvious deal to be made with West Ham but we should use the other interest in KWP as leverage. The deals for KWP and Downes should be completely separate, like the deals were for Hojbjerg and KWP several years ago. We buy Downes for 15mill, they buy KWP for 15mill. Everyone is happy.

 

It is quite easy to overthink though.

KWP is a better player than Downes but plays in a less valuable position.

Downes seems surplus to requirements for West Ham but would be a key player for us

KWP looks very likely to be leaving somewhere, and as far as I know West Ham really need a right back

Can see both teams wanting the other player and a few million on top, we are probably more desperate as if we don’t do the deal with West Ham and sell him to say Brighton West Ham might be even more difficult about Downes.

 

I assume the “not straight forward” is a combo of value of deals and whether to combine them or separate them from a PSR standpoint ?

 

But you could also look at it from the pov that KWP is really important to us and we would ideally like to keep him. The only reason we would sell is if the offer was to good to turn down rather than lose for free in a year.

Whereas Downes is surplus to requirements at WH. They are spending big this summer and they actively want to sell Downes to generate revenue.

If we do end up swapping them, either as one deal or two, I expect us to get more for KWP than we would pay for Downes.

 

But KWP only has a year left on his deal whereas Downes has 3. That will impact each player's value.

 

And it is pretty much common knowledge that we have a gentleman's agreement with KWP that he can go.

 

Yeah that is another factor but equally, based on last season, you could say Downes was our most important player so we need to sign him permanently.

As I mentioned a week or so ago it all depends how our scouts view other targets. If it’s Downes is miles above anyone else then we are in a tough negotiating spot (not that West Ham would know that’s how we felt). If we have Identified players who could he alternatives for Downes and are comfortable walking away if we can’t get a specific deal done then so be it.

Same with replacements/keeping KWP

 

Of course yeah. But that is why we are talking about £15m-£20m for KWP. If he had a longer contract it would be double that.

 

Yeah, a lot of factors at play with this one aren't there. Which club can hold their nerve and how long they're willing to wait will play a part too.

 

We can’t afford to wait too long for such a key player to our system. We need a cut off date and move on. It absolutely cannot be an August deal

 

Gomez (youth star) to Brighton looks like it’s happening.

REALLY gutted with that. The amount of wages we have wasted on dross, would have been better spent trying to keep him imo. Looks a future star.

 

Brighton? Surely we can compete with Brighton ffs.

 

At least he's going to another English club so we can compo. If he went abroad we'd get **** all.

 

Well, that's alright then.

Could've got millions for him in a few years time, but least we get some small compensation now.

Honestly, losing all these top talents for an absolute pittance before they've even had a chance to do anything for us is so frustrating.

 

Maybe but the priority has to be here and now. Until the academy system in this country changes this will continue to happen. At the end of the day, these players may not even make it. I don't see the point of getting too annoyed about players who won't be making an impact for 3,4,5 years if at all.

 

I can definitely see that clubs like ours are being actively disincentivised to produce new talent. There needs to be caps on the number of youth players a team can have per age group and how much you are allowed to pay young talent or...

Maybe it is time all youth players went into a national drafting system at age 17 like for American Football? We could disconnect all the academies from clubs and have them as national academies instead. The current system is only working if you are willing to fork out huge sums of money - and that really is not opposite of what academies are for.