Keinan Davis - Villa Talk - VillaTalk Pay £15M. Just shows the state of the current market. Absolute tripe can command that sort of fee. No thanks. That's basically signing a Varela or Langoni from Boca. Where's the value ? I wouldn't pay £15 to sign him. Utter crap. Villa will be lucky to get anything near a million for him to whatever poor club has to take him on. League One ? He'd have a hard time in the National League. Utter rubbish. A striker who cannot score.
Is he our worst ever striker though? Kabba only scored one goal in 25 league appearances and Devon White had an even lower goals per game ratio than Davis and that was while playing in the third tier much of his time with us. And then there's Nathan Ellington who only scored one goal per 10 games and was our most expensive signing at the time although he was more skilled than all of the above and there was some rationale for signing him (just as there was with Gray after Ighalo's goals dried out) given his decent record at Wigan. And his goals per game is still (marginally) better than Bayo's.
Whilst I dislike him, this is a sign of where our standards have gone and what we’ve become used to. Will Hoskins, Joe Garner, Chris Iwelumo, Steve Kabba. Hell even under The Pozzo’s: Acuna, Geijo, Bayo, Manaj, Ranegie, Oulare.
Assume his awful attitude comes into this, though? In which case fair enough. In terms of ability though, he's nowhere near the worst.
I'm sure those who watched us in the early 70s slide could name some far worse strikers than even those. Even the RH Sir Ross Jenkins was initially awful I believe, when he arrived to replace legend Billy Jennings.
Yes I'd add Davis to that list. I've been unfortunate enough to watch Moralee, Devon White, Quinn etc over the years so there have been worse than Davis - but he is amongst the worst I've seen. From a recent regression point of view, I'd have Deeney or Gray over Davis.
I mean, in fairness, other than be foreign and slightly more modern, what did Acuna, Geijo, Oulare, Manaj or Ranegie ever actually do to show they were any more skilled, exciting, or worthwhile than the likes of Iwelumo, Garner et al?
That’s my point, Davis is rubbish and still probably 20th on list of rubbish strikers we’ve had in the last 10 years.
maybe staying down is a blessing in disguise. If we were promoted and had to spend £15m of our limited budget on Davis, we were looking to break Derby's points record.
Fifteen million. I repeat. Imagine what you could buy and then compare this to what we have. That a mediocre player can command that sort of fee. Unbelievable.
I presume the £15m was effectively seen as a promotion bonus to AV. ie "you can loan him for only £x, but if promoted you pay us a lump sum of £y and take him off our hands". I doubt anyone actually assessed his value would be exactly £15m 12 months later. If it had simply been estimated as the then market price, or a special price for us, it would presumably have been an option rather than compulsory.
Yeah exactly, it's just a prime example of a player being worth exactly what a team is prepared to pay for them, rather than some sort of objective appraisal of their actual worth. To do the deal for Davis last summer that was the offer we had to make. I should imagine Villa are very disappointed it hasn't come off, as I reckon they're looking at less than half that now if they want to move him on this summer.
But if he had scored 25 goals and fired us to promotion he would be worth 15mil. If is such a big word
Absolutely. And if we'd won promotion but he had just been a bit part player, it's just a hit we'd have to take, but a small hit in the context of the prize of prem monies.
Tbf it's this line of thinking which gets a lot of clubs in trouble, how many clubs have been in the Prem, earned multi-millions (which quickly gets eaten up by wage bonuses and improving the squad to even be competitive before a ball is even kicked), and then have to keep spending to either stay up or get back up after relegation. How many former Prem clubs are genuinely in a healthy state financially? Norwich I guess?
I don't believe this type of clause would be an issue as at worst we would have just lost a few £m if promoted and saved a few £m if we aren't. The bigger issue is what a small club like ours does to the full squad on promotion. Do we make a serious attempt to stay up, change much of the squad, jettisoning players who'd earnt the promotion and spending vast £ms on players who will then need replacing if we are relegated. Last promotion we had the worst of both worlds. Spent money on players who weren't good enough anyway (King/Kucka/Sissoko/Tufan etc) and weren't committed. We'd have been better just keeping the same squad we came up with.
We royally cocked up didn't we, in isolation, the likes of Kucka could have been decent squad players, and Tufan, Rose and Sissoko were gambles, but aside from arguably Louza (who we overpaid for) and Dennis (who we didn't get that much for in the end) there weren't any signings that summer whose value rose with us. We didn't spend that much, but unlike Burnley, we couldn't recoup much in sales in the summer and rebuild the squad properly
We would’ve been fine just signing Dennis for him to play the Sema role with JP and Sarr in a front three like the previous season, and King as back-up, concentrating our energies into getting a decent centre back or at least shown more faith in Sierralta rather than signing over-the-hill and/or ineffective central midfielders, making a more determined effort to keep hold of Hughes and Chalobah, and retaining Sema in the squad but mainly for keeping spirit and morale positive and keeping even his sub appearances to a minimum. Well, not exactly fine in terms of staying up, but like you said the team spirit having been carried over from the previous season would’ve been a lot better and at worst we’d have started this season in a more positive frame of mind and have had more money to spend thus increasing our chances of promotion.
For any people who play the markets it may be prudent to quickly short glue as there could be an oversupply in the market soon
....and why should we listen to UHU ? Fully expected you to be more of the sellotype rather than loctite. You've scotched that theory.
I refuse to have Alex Geijo slander on this forum. Perfectly serviceable as a 4th choice striker considering his lack of full 90 minutes.
My main memory of him was missing a sitter against Wolves when we went on to concede deep into injury time, so if you want to slag him off, I say crack on
He really is on a par with Devon White. He’s absolutely useless and injury prone. Seems the club believed the hype and signed him based on that alone as they certainly didn’t sign him based on ability. The only positive is he’s only on loan and we can bin him off in a couple of months.