Re. the transfer fees for Rhodes and Rodriguez being inflated- I know I bang on about it, but transfermarkt throws very good light on the value of these players on a club's balance sheet and the website is "highly respected". Transfermarkt is exactly the sort of valuation adviser that football clubs contract with to check a player's value. They have to run these tests because otherwise the lawyers and the Manager (or whoever deals with transfers) would be liable for negligence if they hugely overpay. Transfermarkt uses the same data as the several different expert valuation companies out there, which includes a massive variety of things like age, injury history, statistics to the more bizarre like valuing their temperament. But as players are assets for companies just as much as a tractor is to a farmer this isn't really surprising.
Basically, the valuation means that a club that wants to buy a player where the other club doesn't want or need to sell, can expect to pay 2-3 times the asset valuation. Sometimes this can rise as high as 4 times the value when bargaining hard. To give you some examples:
- Newcastle didn't want to sell Andy Carroll, so he was valued at £8.8m at sale and sold for £35m, which is just under four times his value
- Millwall apparently rejected three bids for Steve Morison before he was sold for (allegedly) £2.8m. His valuation was £650k so we paid well over four times his value. (This isn't very accurate because we don't have a valuation from his actual transfer date, so he's more likely to have been worth 750-800k after a good Championship season.)
Obviously, we're laughing now because Morison is valued at over £3m whereas Carroll is around £15m, so they've lost big.
But going to Jordan Rhodes, he was valued at 3.1m in January, and will be a bit more now (though this will have taken into account most of his value leap after a great season so it won't be substantial). So Huddersfield could legitimately ask for, and expect, around £9m for him.
http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/en/jordan-rhodes/mwverlaufgraph/spieler_48950.html
Jay Rodriguez was valued at around £1.5m in early February, so Burnley would be looking to get £4.5-5m for him. Any more than about £6m and clubs are paying way over the odds.
http://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/en/jay-rodriguez/mwverlaufgraph/spieler_53360.html
Obviously these figures are big guesses and there are a lot more factors to take into account, but it gives you an idea of what the expert valuations are for Rhodes compared to Rodriguez. Ultimately, I think it's clear that a fee in the region of £8m for Rhodes will be a fair price. Likewise, for Rodriguez, a fair price (given that he is a division higher) will probably be around £5m