Played 36 times this season, which is incredible. Fair play to him. No injuries. Even if he only manages 25, that’s a decent amount for a freebie.
Fair enough. But he's now 40. Big ask for him to play that many games in a league as physical as the Championship.
Agreed. Was more just pointing out the achievement in itself. Incredible for a 40 year old to be playing Prem football so regularly. Hats off to him.
I can't stand the guy. He's one of the biggest diving, feining injury, tossers in the Premier League.
Shame it’s from the least reliable source there is. And regardless - outside of our price range with premier league competition we don’t seem to sign players who have been linked elsewhere anyway
He’s mainly a striker I think, rather than a winger. So yeah with our striker options can’t see us spending that sort of money on an 18 year old I’m expecting us to be receiving £100m+ in sales by the end of the window so spending £20m on a player isn’t completely out of the realms of possibility, risky though.
Even given our usual transfer strategy a fee that high for a player so young seems unlikely. Even half that seems like a risk but he’s under contract until 2029
I dunno we have spent large (for us) sums on young players previously, and this is claiming that Lens want £18m so they may be negotiated down to £15m say. 18 is obviously very young even for us, but we spent £10m or so on Lavia, Bazunu, Mara off the top of my head who were teenagers at the time, admittedly we were in the PL so arguably a different time with the finances. If this guy is seen by the club as the next big thing and he’s willing to join at a reasonable price then PL or not shouldn’t really impact our decision I think. Only argument against it is if signing him means no money for anyone else and we want to strengthen elsewhere for a strong push to go straight back up. Doesn’t feel like even at £18m that should leave us potless for any other signings, not to mention we probably don’t need too many more to have a strong squad and might be able to get some loans to fill the holes anyway.
Agree that I think if 'the system' identifies someone as crazy high potential then SR would pay up for it as it fits the investment model. The more likely barrier is that once you get to £15m+ there are usually much better teams than us interested in those individuals.
