Like Saintmagic said, my disagreement is with assisting a rival club with the development of a younger player. I appreciate there have been a number of posts on this subject, but I said earlier that it's a case by case basis. For example, I'd take a player on loan who was more of a seasoned pro and an almost guaranteed starter, a la Toby. So if Chelsea were loaning Pedro, then I would say that could be a goer. I'd also loan a talented/inexperienced player from abroad, but I see no value assisting a direct rival with player development
And I went onto say, That I wouldn't want us to loan a player that is only going to be a bench/squad player., That we intend to coach and improve. We won't be bringing in a Loan signing that is going to be a automatic starter.
No I didn't, I said I didn't see the point from Chelsea's perspective of sending him somewhere if he wasn't going to be first choice, which I am not sure he would be guaranteed here. Then I tried to interpret others posts about why they wouldn't want to loan him and interpreted it not as improving a competitor (I don't really see Chelsea as a competitor but thats a different argument) but as blocking our own youngsters progress. Either way I can't really see the move happening as I think there would be other PL teams who would want him on loan who could make guarantees to Chelsea about a lot more playing time than we could.
There is no way we could give guarantees about playing time to anyone....we are not minnows and the manager has to have the freedom to pick who he likes. Not second guessing Chelsea, but we are the wrong club if that is what they expect.
Whilst the model works as you have highlighted they could be more efficient with it (yes I know they have won the league so its not like it is failing). Even by adding in buyback clauses like Barca regularly do would help. Selling Lukaku for £30m at the time seemed high, now it looks like peanuts (obviously the finances in football have changed aswell) but if they had a buyback clause inserted for say £50m then they would now have Lukaku back in their squad if they wanted. They sold Salah for £12.5m and less than 2 years later he moves for triple that, De Bruyne they sold for £18m, Romeu £6m, Thorgan Hazard £7m, Cuadrado £20m. All these looked alright at the time but as the players start to realise the potential that got them to Chelsea in the first place Chelsea start to look pretty **** at selling players.
I'd take Messi on a 12 month loan if he's on offer. I'd only take someone who is better than what we have and would pretty much be a starter for us on loan. We've got plenty of youngsters of our own to develop. Buy them fine, but not loan with no option.
This reminded.me of Only fools with Uncle Albert talking about his ex wife. The first time I saw her she looked like Ginger Rogers. The last time I saw her she looked more like Fred Astaire
From the era of the Screen Goddess... please log in to view this image Humphrey Bogart's real life wife (and the reason I always wanted to be him)
