There was actually a whole lot more after that bit I posted: Mr Mogi Bayat – he is under investigation as party of Operation Zero in Belgium, Stades Rennes have talked about what’s going on with that, we seem to be the only English club who seem to be dealing with him since about 2018. What is his connection? Why have we previously been connected with him? And again, just referring to Ben [Manga], he talked a few weeks ago about the difference between agent-based recruiting and scouting-based recruiting, based on the fact that sometimes you need to be sure you’re getting what the team needs rather than what the agent wishes to sell. What’s your position on Mr Mogi Bayat? Obviously we do see him there, he is a contentious figure, we are a small club but we have values. I think we find that one difficult to reconcile. Can you help us do that? GP: “In general, we know we need to work with agents. Agents have become an important part of our everyday business. We have agents who want to bring players out even if you want to keep them. Of course need to be connected with agents that will help us. We have no particular preference of any agent. We just look for the guy who will bring us at good value. The agent at the end is not the one who is out on the pitch. “We have more interest in the player than the agent. The agent will make a deal happen based on his strengths, his interests and his ability to influence a player. Mr Mogi is just one of the agents that we use. He has been developing his ability in France and Belgium. He has not been suspended in his ability to work, so I don’t want to get involved in his personal situation. Until someone is proved guilty, I understand….” He's innocent until proven guilty? GP: “That’s right. So I think that we have focussed more on does a particular agent – and we’re not agent based – but we do like to establish good contact with certain agents because we know that we have an advantage. “With some agents we don’t have a good relationship because maybe we don’t share the same philosophy. That’s the kind of environment we are working in. It’s challenging and so you do establish relationships, but it’s not a particular interest in working with one agent. It’s all player based.” It’s so important we get this communication and transparency, because otherwise we look at things like Vakoun Bayo signing for Charleroi on loan on July 1 for €1.5m and on July 2 us signing him for €5.8m. The managing director I think at Charleroi is Mr Mehdi Bayat, Mogi’s brother. He was formerly I believe the managing director and has operated in those facilities because it was his uncle’s club at one point. All of this without explanation leaves a vacuum that rumour and suspicion can fill. Could you take us through that particular transfer – and I appreciate you had the same route through for Dodi Lukebakio which was an extremely successful, kind of profitable thing for us. But can you help us understand that? GP: “It is, again, just a player transaction. And we had some successful transactions. We actually missed on a very good one, Victor Osimhen. They had Osimhen and they offered him to us, and we didn’t take him. “Because we have relationships with certain agents we will be offered certain players. And that’s the way you will see it working. And again our evaluation, other than with the player, if the player is good enough we don’t care who the agent is. We just try to get the player at the best possible conditions. We expect the agent to help us in that. That is where he can help. “We shouldn’t give too much importance. Why would I put the club money into a deal that I don’t see as beneficial for the club? What interest do I have with any other club being linked to Mr Mogi? “All the agents are the same. I evaluate them on are they bringing added value to the club or not. Everything else really doesn’t matter.” What about the difference of the €4.3m from one day to the next? GP: “We just evaluate the player at the moment we sign him. If there is a value that we consider is right, therefore we do it. Just as you remember before, another deal with Lukebakio. It was quite the opposite way. We sold him for £20m. That’s football.” SD: “The bottom line is that because of the relationship with an agent means you get a player. They believed Bayo was going to be a top player for them. So the bottom line is Charleroi had an option to buy him and make him their player on a five-year contract. It’s not like buying a car and that’s what it’s worth. He’s their player at that point. He’s scored all the goals and they’ve exercised the option so he’s their player. At that point they could demand €20m, €40m, €50m. He’s their player.” So they’ve flipped him in property terms? SD: “Effectively. But without the relationship you wouldn’t have got the player. You wouldn’t have got the player or the ability to sign him. Now the player – it’s down to the technical department if he’s good enough. But you simply wouldn’t have access if it wasn’t for that relationship. “It’s the same with many, many agents. I wanted the technical department to sign the winger that went to Everton for a million, forget his name, brilliant player . . . Demarai Gray. Everton got Demarai Gray for a million because they had the unique relationship with the agent. It was impossible to get that deal and it’s why he went to Everton. “This is football and it is all about relationships, and you get players you wouldn’t get if you didn’t have that relationship. Equally we miss out on players, like Gray, because we didn’t have the relationship with the agent.” GP: “I also think that in this case, the representation really is not correct. Because look backwards to a similar deal, we had on loan at Udinese, Udogie, with an option to buy. After one year playing for us on loan we exercised the option to buy, for a value I think of €2m. The following day we sold him to Tottenham for €25m. How do you explain that? It’s the same as in this case, you got to look at the value of the player at the moment you do the transaction. If someone is smart enough to get a player on loan with an option to buy and then execute the option, and then re-sell the player…well they have done a good job. “But when you look at the player when they signed him [on loan] one year before what was his valuation? One year before Udinese was able to identify the potential talent and nobody else decided to sign him under those conditions. “It’s happened more than once before, and that is the business of football.” You talk about the media creating a story around Kamara, something that in your eyes wasn’t a thing to be discussed or as big was as meant. As a fan, we’re not into the detail of that negotiation, we see the optics in the media and make our own assumptions. Dare I say some of the distrust we feel as fans comes from this silence, there isn’t the transparency. We’ve talked a lot about philosophy and vision. What are we practically going to do to have that better connection with fans or to allow us to build that backing so we don’t end up in this situation again? SD: “The Kamara thing is a really good point. There are certain things that we can’t discuss and we were genuinely trying to be open and explain, and that openness and explanation has caused the problem. Certain journalists said ‘ooh, he’s gone to Udinese, are the EFL going to investigate that?’ “We would have been best just saying nothing, let the transfer occur, say nothing. There are certain things we can’t talk about, and when we do in a genuine attempt to be open and honest it comes and bites us. “But to answer, we had the Covid situation which really brought a halt to everybody. I think we need to restart these kinds of meetings, I said we’ll do At Your Place every two months, which I like because you can get around and speak far more informally. “We’ll always have communication through the website which has to be sanitised. We have the relationship with the Watford Observer where we can be a little more open. And we need to do more of these, and we need to do At Your Place. “And we need to win some games. Win games and life becomes a lot more pleasant, and people are more prepared to listen. In the 11 years we’ve been here, this is not where we want to be. We want to be back, being successful, playing entertaining football, and we want to be open and we want to communicate. “It’s an accusation which I think has more weight when things aren’t going well. We’re defensive – but we’re not. I’ve always wanted to be honest and open, I’ve always wanted to do fans forums, I’ve always done the At Your Places. There are certain things we can’t talk about but I’ll restart the forums, I’ll restart the At Your Places and we go from there.” This is all about starting, or restarting, that validation so that we get to hear, we get some understanding and hopefully we create some empathy in understanding both ways, and hopefully it is two-way communication. I’m intrigued about the comment you made that all agents are the same. We seem to have funnelled an awful lot of business through Mr Bayat, and it’s been reported that when his UK company was established there was a member of our parent company board that actually set that company up, and retained a financial interest in it for several months afterwards. How is that not a conflict on interests? GP: “Again I think we got the facts wrong. When Mr Bayat arrived in the UK he used the same company of accountant that we were using as a common service. That is really the only connection. We introduced him because he arrived in the country, we introduced him to our accountant and he started working with them. That was the only connection. We never had any participation or any connection with any property with Mr Mogi, or any company.” But that accountant did sit at the time on the board of directors, that’s according to Companies House. SD: “It’s very common for accountants to set up shell companies. He set up the shell company with himself as the director, waiting for the nominations from Bayat as to who will be the directors and owners of the company. When those nominations were given, he then stepped off. It’s quite normal in setting up a shell company. This is what the accountants in companies do, and then they’re replaced and that was that. He had no operating role. As soon as Bayat nominated who was on there, he was replaced. It’s just not where the media were taking it.” If the dates are unclear on Companies House I’d say he’s not a very good accountant. SD: “Listen, I’m not going to get involved in what Bayat and a former accountant are doing. All I know is that everybody is happy is that that’s what occurred. There is no issue for Watford Football Club. What Bayat or a former accountant do is of no consequence of this football club.”
To be honest I've only seen the little bit posted on here so not sure what did upset him the most. It's just that I don't think it is right to get Bayat to do this kind of work when he apparently doesn't work for Watford Football Club
Yep, all round great guy who we don’t favour more than any other agent, and the fact that a director of our business was is a director of his business is totally normal practice.
Thanks. Yes I don't see any issue with what was asked and the responses given. What would have been useful is if he had been pinned on is whether Bayat has any other role for the club other than the recruitement of new players and how he was remunerated. It doesn't look like that was specifically asked.
If only the attendees had the foresight to predict your posts on this thread, then perhaps they could have asked Gino to read out whatever the exact wording is that you'd deem an acceptable definition of a lie.
None of those things you listed are potentially legally dubious or incriminatory activities though lol. But revealing for example that the full nature of his relationship is he helps transfer Pozzo's money to Luxembourg and he takes a cut, as well as providing some other football admin services for his fee, might be. And where is this photo of him wearing the club badge btw?
I think it depends what his role is. "Being employed" I think is a bit of a red herring as some prefer to be self-employed. If out of the blue Bayat contacted Troost then I agree with you. If he is contracted as a consultant with the club and handles finding clubs for those deemed excess to requirements I think that's fine. As I say my fellow director is a consultant not employee for tax and historic reasons and acts in the exact same way as had he been on the payroll.
TBF i think it would have been fairly obvious at the time from the transcript that he had avoided answering that part of the question.
I think all in attendance and reading the transcript were very clear on what Mr. Gino was saying and what he meant by it. It's only you, apparently, who doesn't think he was clear.
Let's get back on track. I quite like tahini and baba ganoush but they're not my favourites. I prefer tzatziki and houmous. Last night I air fried some breaded chicken thigh fillets. They were delicious.
Duxbury was definitely misleading here. The documents on Companies House show unequivocally that this "accountant" wasn't just anybody, he was a director of Hornets Investment Limited, the club's parent company. And he retained shares in Bayat's company for some time after Bayat was formally listed as the owner alongside his wife, whilst we were doing a lot of business with him. Not surprising really, Duxbury was found to have acted with 'deceit and dishonesty' over the Tevez affair at West Ham where he misled Premier League officials investigating it. So he's hardly going to think twice about being economical with the truth in a fans' forum.
1/Houmous 10/10 2/Baba ganoush 9/10 3/ Gino 2012-2019 8.5/10 4/Tahini 7/10 5/Tzatziki 6/10 6/Air fryers 5/10 7/Gino 2019-2024 3/10
Oooh. Tough. Baby Yoda is cute, but the Mandalorian is a boring load of twaddle. I'm going with the Russian folk witch here.
She flies around in a pestle and lives in a house on chicken legs and yet she's not got a huge range of merchandise.
Sabra Baba Ganoush is great. Really disappointing when we can't get thru sainsburys and have to make do with tzatziki in its place in pittas for lunch at the weekend. Greek food is the best food in the world. Genuinely. My love of Mousaka was mentioned in the best man speech at my wedding and a greek salad with olives tomato and loads of feta is bloody marvellous. In fact I have to go and have lunch right now....
I cant see your original post so might be wrong but isnt this a false equivalency though? He's still a director of the company your involved in. A position of leadership within the organisation even if the day role is more consultational. He isnt a 3rd party recruitment firm that your company uses fairly frequently and have taken it upon themselves to inform one of your employees that you've taken a decision to move them on.
