Yeah, some of it Sarr, some of it the way the club was run. A poor transfer for everyone except Rennes.
Thanks a lot, hope you're well! Any indication of what those add-ons are? Are they achievable, or are they things like 'an extra £2m if we win the Champions League and he wins the Ballon d'Or and another £2m if he plays 500 games'?
Looks like we’ve recouped our money once you factor in the Gueye fine, inflation and cozzy-liv crisis
That deal ended when Sarr spoke to club officials. It was almost a done deal until then. Who knows what was said?
Surprised AF and AL are so quiet on this. Are they both on holiday together? Not heard from them in a while. Apparently it is €13m up front with add ons. Depending what the add ons amount to it could be a very low selling fee. Seems very strange there weren’t a lot of clubs interested at that price, which leads me to think it’s not true.
I agree with your post. I understand that Sarr is not very bright and needs feel wanted. We were just not the right club for him. Our manager exit policy would never have helped him. He has just lost his way and his confidence. Watford are very good at making a good player into an average one. Good luck to him
We stiffed Rennes with the add ons, they were all for Premier League starts and Premier League/FA Cup Quarter Final and onwards goal/assists. In their face, in his four seasons he's been relegated twice and played in the Championship twice, only managed ten PL goals and we never got anywhere near the quarter finals.
The final £4m instalment is due end of August too. I bet Marseille’s first instalment to us is magically very similar.
The €13mil+ bonuses started with the bias marseille media. They are just trying to save face. Personally believe Burnsy with this one. Most reports were stating around €20mil until they started pushing this €13mil+bonuses.
Regardless of how you feel about the signing and how things have gone since, getting 17m + addons for a player who is in the last year of his deal playing for a club in the Championship after being relegated twice and having had successive disappointing seasons is a decent showing. It doesn't change anything that came before, but the fee is well above what almost any of us expected and the club have done well to claw that much back under the circumstances. The big picture absolutely matters, but so do the details.
It’s an engineered situation. It’s like had we kept Sarr for another year then sold him for £2m a week before his contract expired, it would be seen as the club doing well to get anything. But as far as I’m concerned it’s totally the wrong way of looking at it. A smart business guy running the club wouldn’t let this situation happen in the first place. This is how the Sarr transfer should be looked at imo, in its entirety from start to finish. Gino’s decisions put us in a place where we overpaid for a player, held in for too long, then sold when the value was decreasing because of contract length.
The club have been unsuccessfully looking for a buyer for a while now and he wasn't interested in signing a new deal. Not sure exactly what you're expecting here. You can only sell if someone is willing to buy, and up until now no one was. If they were, he'd already be gone. Short of the club performing a reverse-Holebas I'm not sure what else they could have done as far as moving him on goes.
If you show balance in being critical of the deal as a whole I’m sure that is all HB1 is looking for. That’s all his point is - look at it holistically rather than gushing at owners for “good business”.
We had plenty of chances to sell, but we didn’t want to. We didn’t want to make a loss, as it was a vanity project for Gino. But now, because he had no choice he has to sell. His arrogance boxed the club into a corner. He’s not lost money, the club has. The club has lost a lot of money because of Gino Pozzo. After 12 years of his ownership, just look at the squad we now have and the debt he’s saddled the club with.
Main thing is that we use this money to build a better team. Duxbury said "we all know about Sarr. We only want players that want to be here". Presumably this is the obstacle we've been trying to overcome before buying players. If it isn't, then we're ****ed.
It will be used to pay off the loans balance left after the Pedro cash. Nominal sums will be available for new players.
****ed from a star studded promotion chasing squad point of view as opposed to ****ed from an unpayable debt point of view.
