That's the Way to Do It.

Bristol City: Mark Ashton hails Peter Odemwingie deal as a good way to do transfer business.
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MARK Ashton says the deal to sign Peter Odemwingie is a perfect example of how Bristol City wish to conduct their transfer business in the future.
City's chief operating officer worked together with head coach Lee Johnson to lure the 34-year-old Nigeria World Cup star, who completed his loan switch to Ashton Gate from Premier League Stoke earlier this month.
The recruitment of such a high-profile player came as a surprise to Robins fans, who had become accustomed to top strikers turning City down during the two previous transfer windows.
Ashton and Johnson did their homework on the former West Bromwich Albion striker and then, crucially, were able to keep their interest secret before moving quickly to close the deal.

Ashton already has one eye trained on recruitment this summer and he considers the Odemwingie transfer to be a blueprint for future deals.
He said: "You have to do your homework first and, before we ever spoke to Peter, Lee and I spoke to people who had worked with him, played football with him and been associated with him. We did as much as we could to find out about the person who is Peter Odemwingie. Once we'd done that, we moved on to the deal itself and everything became quite smooth."
There was perfect alignment between those City officials involved in the deal, from majority shareholder Steve Lansdown right down to the head coach, a factor Ashton described as "crucial." He added: "We needed to do a deal with Stoke and we then needed to explain the opportunity to Peter and sell the club to him. The deal was very simple to do.
"Lee spoke to the football department at Stoke and I dealt with the chief executive and the agent. It was all very clean and simple, hence why it caught everybody out. It was so clean and direct that we were able to get it done without it leaking out.
"We moved very quickly, we spoke to Stoke, we spoke to Peter and by the middle of the next day, he was in and travelling down to London to join up with the other players before the game at Fulham."

City have been in the market for a Premier League-quality forward since before the start of the season and Ashton suggested Odemwingie as a possible target when he first arrived at the club in mid-January. But City stopped short of formally declaring their interest, believing that Odemwingie was destined for French club Marseilles.
Ashton said: "When I first arrived and the transfer window was open, Peter's name was one of those I raised. I asked 'should he not be on our list'? The thing back then was, we all thought he was going to Marseilles. That was what all the industry chatter led

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us to believe and that was one of the reasons we did not move in January.
"In the meantime, Steve Lansdown had made it clear he would back anything that was sensible and logical and we had continually said that, if we could find the right player to bolster the squad with the right ability to improve us, we would do it.
"Lee and I had been scouring the market and making phone calls to all sorts of people we knew in the industry and we knew there was only a very small market for what we wanted.
"When Peter Odemwingie did not join Marseilles and came back on our radar, I spoke to the guys at Stoke and at West Brom, who knew him well, and they all spoke very highly of him."
Signing a player who had made only eight appearances all season after recovering from an serious knee operation represented a calculated risk. But it was one Johnson and Ashton were prepared to take.
"Peter has not had a lot of games, but there was no doubting his quality and we felt he would give us something different," said Ashton.
"He is a natural athlete and is extremely talented. He has played the majority of his career at the very highest level, so we thought it was the right thing to do.
"We saw that when he came on at Fulham and made a difference in his own way. He is a proven, quality player, he is different from what we already have, he is a good lad and a positive human being. He has already fitted in well with the boys."

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Bristo...r-Odemwingie/story-28970728-detail/story.html