You can't get more obvious than this!..."we have no intention to sell" And " the offer that was made was below our valuation" so, it's not an auction, then!... http://www1.skysports.com/football/...re-about-Internacional-striker-Leandro-Damiao
It seems to me that Internacional believe that Damiao will make the Brazilian squad for the World Cup and that a good tournament would increase his value dramatically. It makes sense for them to keep him now and look to sell him next season, as it's unlikely that his value will drop much, even if he doesn't have a great campaign.
An undisclosed fee. It's rumoured to have been as low as £1m in order to insert the 50% sell-on clause. There was also some suggestion that Villarreal were working with Mallorca to screw us on the payment. Tomas Pina made the same move (M to V) at the same time and the bulk of the fee was going to be shifted to him, so that newly relegated Mallorca could keep most of it. Don't know if that has happened, though. Monaco did something similar with Porto.
You do wonder: if we had a young Iniesta, would he be playing at Swindon this year? Dos Santos has had a brilliant international career already. Just being the high scorer on the Olympic gold medal winning team is a greater accomplishment than anything an English player has done in the last half century.
http://www1.skysports.com/football/news/11095/8815713/? He also may well not be talking to us, but we can hope. Yeah yeah yeah, I know we need a striker... But still! IMO we're still desperate for more creativity.
Even if we sold Gio for £1m to Mallorca, getting the £3.5M from the Villareal deal isn't a bad overall bit of business considering it was for a player that made what, 15-20 appearances for us over 4 years? We only bought him for about £7m-ish I think so not a horrendous loss. I saw someone mention Chadli earlier (sorry forgot who it was), I also saw a few tweets on Twitter the other day about him "supposedly" being at Hotspur Way. I've only seen him twice, ironically against us in the Champions League where a scored a decent freekick, looked pretty decent from what I saw too but 2 games isn't really enough to judge. I read that he's got a touch of Moroccan in him and a good mate of mine is half Irish, half Moroccan and therefore any player with a touch of Irish/ Moroccan in them, he'll know all about. He praised him highly and said he'd suit us really well, keen eye for goal and good dribbling ability and can play either flank which is also bonus.
I believe that The Fail is saying pretty much the same thing. Benteke, apparently, would prefer to come to us as he doesn't believe he will be first choice at Chavski. The £25 mil is not negotiable, they are saying also.
Whan the talk of spending millions on a striker pops up, I am always reminded of Bent. I see more millions are due to be wasted on Bent yet again, more money must have been spent on this average player than on Lionel Messi and for sure more than has been spent on Bale. Emperors New Clothes are always there in football.
I have to agree with you, it's too much for a player with only 1 season in the Premiership. It could, of course, prove to be cheap if he isn't a one season wonder. But £25mil is too much of a risk.
If the club get a feeling that the likes of Benteke/ Soldado/ Da-meow are just too much, I'd rather we focus on more viable targets. Players like Cisse, Ba, Lisandro Lopez, Bafetimbi Gomis are worth trying to get or maybe even take a punt on Philip Hosiner (SP?) of Austria Wien, I know it's a very inferior league but he got like 30 odd goals in as many games I think last season and is still only 23. If our main targets cannot be got I'd rather end up with one of them than nothing at all come the end of the window.
The journo is a complete tosser totally contradicting himself. In one paragraph he says Villa are insisting on an ALL cash only deal, then goes on to say if Chelsea get involved they can offer Lukaku! 25mill for a dozen good PL games...lunacy. Lerner is just as much a nob to deal with as Levy, so there's a good start! I cannot see the Yank budging from what he's said, he dug his heels in over G.Barry to Liverpool, a decision that financially backfired losing Barry to City a year later for 6mill less!
I'd only be happy with a £20m-£25m deal for Benteke if about £11m/ £12m of that is performance related, which is highly doubtful. A £20m-25m straight fee is just too much for a guy with season behind him.
