£5m is decent considering he will be going for free. Doesn't matter where he goes as they won't be in competition with us next season anyway.
Fair enough in saying that Downes doesn't have a partner, but he's such a liability. You can see why Russell Martin likes him, he slows the game right down to much, passing back instead of looking forward. and takes too many chances. He should have been sent off in the first half.
Only reason I want to keep him this window now is because he’s still easily one of our best players, even when his heart clearly isn’t in it here anymore. And we still need another 6 points.
And if the club actually did get £10m for him they could also make a truckload of money selling ice to the eskimos
That sounds promising. I think it was under Wilder he had his good spell in the PL last season, so I can see why he'd be keen. Let's hope he finds form with them as £10m would be great business.
I do wonder what they do next season, as in keep the bulk as they are likely good enough to get us up, then learn from lessons and ditch most of them that we know wont step up, or if this is more of a clean break summer, get out players and start again. If we keep Juric, I wonder if it is the former, if we get a new manager i think maybe the latter.
I'm pretty sure that next year we build a team for promotion and if we get it we will (surely they will learn) ditch most of them to keep us up for at least one year. IF we go up.
I assume we continue the clear out this summer. I think we need a smallish squad of 'our' players, topped up by loans, and if we DO go back up we need to be careful about what we do with those loan players. I haven't got the time to go through player by player looking at wages and contract lengths to figure out what to do with all of them but one thing that might be convenient for us is that according to transfermarkt we have a lot of fringe players with contracts up at the end of next season (McCarthy, Fraser, Smallbone, Taylor, Onuachu, Bree, Stewart, ABK, Aribo, plus Stephens I think). If we can't/don't sell them this summer most of them could contribute in the Championship and then, if all goes well and we go back up, we can let them go and free up some wages.
