Transfer Rumours Summer 2025 Transfer Thread…

I don't know.
As others have guessed at, it could be:
- cultural
- genuinely believing City and Villa had an understanding that meant payment could be delayed
- believing the ongoing correspondence & dialogue with Villa (and the EFL for that matter) would stand up
- pushing boundaries, not paying until there was no choice
- not having the right people in the right roles under him to ensure the rules are clearly understood and that all this stuff is handled fully in line with the rules
- not having money in the right place at the right time within his 'empire'
- etc.
In practice, quite possibly, a combination I would think.
What I do know though is that, more important than the words spoken, the actual actions and reality in the months before, and the week's since are not those of a man who has run out of money, a club that is about to go bust, an owner who is trying to palm the club off, who has lost interest, etc.
Looking at today's line up, there's no way Hughes and Panda would be starting if the club were trying to off load. The club are clearly trying to resist. Other players on that team sheet also would either have gone by now, or would never have been brought in on the wages & hidden expenses (not meaning dodgy) we'll be paying for them were the various accusations true.
I don't, and have never, pretended that the EFL situation is anything other than a **** up that the owner has to ultimately carry the can for. And I'm not daft enough (as is nobody else on here if they are honest) to know that there's still a chance Hughes or Panda could still end up leaving this window if the offer is too good to resist for either the club or the player.
Hopefully we can now just enjoy the game?

 

I feel like I've addressed this multiple times and you keep referring back to it. So I'll say this all again because basing a gotcha on a false premise is just ****.

1. Owner lost all interest - Acun himself admitted he hadn't put 100% into City last season due to his responsibilities at Fenerbahce. Those are his words. Tan left, not because of some dodgy ****, but for the same reason Murat Ulker withdrew his funding pretty sharpish - they didn't think Acun was taking it seriously and didn't see a mutual way forward. Acun wanted big signings and automatic promotion with a "sod the cost" attitude, while Tan understood it would be a process and wanted the club to be frugal enough to remain sustainable (which once Ulker had gone, suddenly became very difficult with the wages we had that season we finished just outside the playoffs).

2. The club is heavily in debt. Yes, the money is owed to Acun Medya (not Acun himself, that's important for reasons I'll state in a moment) but it's still tens of millions our club owes to somebody else. Even if he was to sell (which we'll come to), he isn't getting £60-80m for the club because we don't have assets worth that much - even if you use Transfermarkt's squad valuation (which I'm loathe to do because it doesn't reflect a player's value at all), our players apparently only come to a total value of just over £51m. We don't own our ground, our training facilities are crap and we don't have any home grown youth prospects like KLP, Greaves or Bowen coming through that are going to suddenly skyrocket in value. We still owe money on several transfers which, hopefully, we're paying on time after the fiasco this Summer. 22 players left the club this Summer. That's ****ing mental. Alright some were fringe players like Amrabat and Burns, there's the whole thing with Zambrano and Puerta, but seriously, our turnover of playing staff is appallingly high. We have a monkey on our backs about not giving players enough time, but our owner is worse for it - off the top of my head, we bought Mehlem (£2m), Omur (£4m), Kamara (£4m), Sinik (£4m), Burstow (£2m), Racciopi (£2m), Giles (£4m) and Woods (£2m) and all of them ended up going out on loan instead of playing first team football for us. That's £26m we spent on giving players to other clubs for free across the last three seasons. It's not just insane, it's borderline criminal how much money we've pissed away on indecisiveness and short-termism. And don't forget, as well as those transfer fees, we also heavily subsidised their wages while they were at their clubs. With the exception of Giles, who is now back in the first team, what the hell are we playing at?!

2a. Had we gone down, yes, we almost certainly would have gone into administration. The players have relegation clauses in their contracts, sure, but even at a hypothetical 20% we would still have a chunk of players on more than £20k a week in League One, lower attendances and much lower income from things like TV and sponsorship. Acun Medya makes a decent amount of money, but it still needs to operate as a business, it's not as though every penny it makes goes to the running of our football club. They also have shareholders and the like to pay who aren't linked to our club and I imagine they see City as a drain on their potential income. I don't know what it costs to host shows like Survivor and whatever Turkiye's equivalent of The Voice is, but it can't be cheap. If push came to shove, do you think Acun would tank the company, media empire and reputation that he built up for half his adult life for a football club in East Yorkshire? No, me neither. Us going into administration would mean he would have to take a whack, but he'd be guaranteed money back as a debtor. We have this image of Acun being a smiling, happy, uncle like figure that would never shaft anybody, but nobody worth what he is gets to that point without being ruthless and savvy in business (which makes what happened all the more annoying, presumably he has people in his company that do his finances for him).

3. Fire sale - so, I don't really get what you mean by this. A lot of the players from last season are still here. If you're claiming that we're not selling off assets with value, then what do you call selling Macca, Jones, Alzate and Mehlem? Yeah ok, we've got Hughes for now, with Egan as his first choice partner. But two of our four first team centre halves are free transfers and Egan arrived for what I was told was somewhere around the £200k mark. We need the money to pay the wages of the players we have here now. As much as I dislike the EFL as an institution, they wouldn't be involved if everything was rosy and above board. They're here because we got in the ****, tried to get away with it and then gave a really crap excuse. The concern about our finances that they have is actually a separate issue from the transfer malarkey, they weren't aware of cash flow problems or financial difficulties until Villa went to the EFL and complained. So it's not so much a fire sale as a common sense sale. We need players in order to play football, obviously, but we also don't have the luxury of turning down bids for players that match our valuation.

4. Club being sold - some of us were made aware around Easter time that Acun was considering selling up. Parties had approached him, but that's as much as we know. Names were tossed about as they usually are, but there wouldn't be people approaching him if it wasn't for sale. There's a tiny chance you might get one group asking about interest, but not several all in the space of a few weeks. The universe isn't that lazy, pal. Now, that might have changed when Acun left Fenerbahce and as we've seen, we haven't been sold. Nobody ever claimed (at least as far as I've seen on here) that we had been sold or that the process of selling had even started.

5.Relegation nailed on - just pissing in the wind. Nobody can know how the season will go - last year we bought three potentially too-good-for-the-Championship players and they ALL got ACL injuries. You can't prepare for events like that happening, nor can you predict how a manager's style will impact the squad (in our case, very badly). Last season was a cocktail of **** ups that culminated in a poor season. At the start of Summer, people could have been forgiven for not assuming this season would be any different and given how the season has started behind the scenes, I think you can park any "holier than thou" stances when we're three games in and you're trying to use hindsight as a means to prove your point.

I get it. We've been **** on badly by previous owners and as nice as it is to have somebody with good intentions and what comes across as ambition, you can't abandon common sense and reason in the face of evidence. Okay, if you want to ignore the ITK folks that's up to you, nobody who posts insider information or stuff they get told demands to be believed or cares if they aren't. But given everything I've just said, how the hell can you not blame people for being realistic? Most of the media were putting us in the bottom three - I don't think you'll find anybody who genuinely wants that to be the case, nor will you find anybody who wouldn't want to prove those pundits wrong. You keep rehashing the same points as if it's a stick to beat people with, but who or what exactly are you addressing? It's almost like you want people to say the things you've said because that's what you think happened. Except it didn't. Some people were aware of the issues a while back, said it at the time and it's turned out to be true. You seem to struggle with accepting that. Which is fine, I guess, but it doesn't change the reality of the situation, which is that we are walking on very thin ice and there's a world of **** waiting underneath if it breaks.

 

Can I just say, fair play for a reasoned response.
I don't agree but if I explain why it will just be repetition and so we continue to go round in circles.
Just wanted to acknowledge a good response. Thanks.

 

Sure thing.

 

He keeps making these straw man arguments as a ‘gotcha’.

Just before Derby last season, I think it was, you and Howden both said that several players were told during the March international break to find new clubs because the club needed to sell them. The names you both mentioned are all the ones who have been sold this summer i.e. Jones, McLoughlin, Alzate etc. Not fringe players either. I think we all expected the likes of Simons and Mehlem would go but Jones, McLoughlin and Alzate were pretty much forced out because the club needed cash.

Regarding Acun selling the club, I heard as far back as last summer shortly after he sacked Rosenior that he was looking to sell the club. Howden heard the same. None of us said for definite that the club was being sold; we just passed along rumours we heard. If one poster in particular finds those rumours offensive or bullshit or fuelling a ‘negative agenda’, then he is more than welcome and able to put us all on ignore so he doesn’t see it.

 

Macca was forced out for £100k?

Don’t buy it. Think he just wanted a fresh start elsewhere and I think he needed it.

 

Away from the back and forth, are we presuming that Hadziahmetovic is still on now Kamara is gone?

Also has anyone, ITK or otherwise, heard an update on Laalaoui?

 

It was £500K. As we now know, due to our cash flow problems, £500K can cover certain expenses until more serious money comes in from TV rights. The club sold Alzate for a lot less than what the club valued him at just to have money in the bank as our cash flow problems were that desperate.

 

Macca's one of those players who isn't fully appreciated until he's gone and over the course of the season, it'll cost us more to replace him than to keep him.

FWIW, I didn't think we sold Alzate for massively undervalue. Good player, a little hit and miss but supposedly on big wages and that's going to reduce the number of clubs that can afford him. I thought we'd get £2m/2.5m + add-ons but considering our financial position it wasn't horrendous.

 

I had a primary school teacher (Miss Handley) who used to say "the way to hell is paved with good intentions". Acun means well, I know, doesnt mean it will turn out well.

 

I don’t even think he means well.

 

Nice to see.

 

Now you're just been ridiculous.

 

Why?

 

To be fair, he obviously is spending to try and get the club to get promoted and deliver success and attacking football. It's not vicious managed decline like under Ehab.

He's just mismanaged it and wasted a lot of money, I know there's various grades of how badly people think so, but to say he's ruining the club intentionally seems a little rash?

 

I didn’t say he’s intentionally ruining the club. I just said that I don’t think he means well.

 

Thanks for the information.

It clears up a lot for me and why this is happening. The amount we’ve spent on players is crazy and to be fair last year he rectified it a little bit. We had bad luck with injuries as you say. I think the transfer ban is a blessing. However if we lose Pandur or Hughes that could be massive.