He looks like a good signing player, a physically strong player, reasonably quick as well, and can pass the ball relatively well for a defender. He has most attributes you would want in a defender. Still very young but seems to have the maturity and decent positioning. I would be happy to see this type of signing.
They are asking for 10m euros. We never spent that for a CB even when we were in the premier league starting Mariappa. We'll make an offer for a loan with a £1.5m option and then when they say no we will sign Gary Cahill out of retirement in March.
Reids co-sign, good age, great name. Boy do I want this to happen! Realistically, even if it doesn't, isn't it somewhat promising that we're now at least being linked to a wide range of defenders? If Manga brings the end of the Kabasele & Cathcart era I will truly love him forever and ever.
Its not like we haven't been linked to decent defenders in the past - Robertson, Kim Min Jae, Maguire etc were all linked at former clubs when they were affordable. The issue is that if there is a choice between investing in defence and sending another bung Mogi's way for an Ivorian attacker we don't need, we know what Pozzo will do. We only need to think back to the start of the season when we signed Gaspar over Laird.
I hate to say it but this is not the sort of signing we need at the moment if we want to go up. The lad might be a great footballer but he is too young to come into this club at a key point in the season. We need experienced players who will be able to grab the game by the scruff of the neck, I fear an 18 year old centre back is not where we should be looking at the moment.
This lad is a PL level CB. I’d much rather sign him than sign a loanee/cheap Championship clogger who may get up to speed more quickly (marginally increasing our prospect of promotion) but won’t improve the side next year. Andrew French wrote an interesting article in the Wobby highlighting that like in 14/15 we need Ben Watson and Connolly to come in and get us over the line. But there (particularly when the latter joined in March) we were within touching distance whereas now the autos are pretty far off. If we’re able to sign players of this quality/potential and bed them in this season, that seems ideal to me.
Very promising but he's not PL today. He's only played first team football for PAOK for a year hasn't he at 19 ? And surely with an asking price of €10m he will be too expensive ?
I'm all for experience but if he's as good as early indicators show (never heard of him, never seen him play btw) then I'm all for it. It's a tough position to be in, if we don't go up, we lose Pedro & Sarr for sure. But if we do go up, we still need 8/9 PL level signings to make a fist of it. In an ideal world, a perfect January signing for us right now would tick the following boxes: - Championship experience - Good enough to make the step up so we don't need to replace him again in 6 months - Affordable (but with potential resale value as an added bonus) - Wants to come - Can be registered Who's going to be all of the above? We'll lack somewhere on some signings and in this particular case it's Championship experience.
Why? He’s a full international and has plenty of game time under his belt at a level applicable to ours. Yes he’s not the full deal yet - but he’s better than Kabasele, WTE and Pollock already. The stumbling block is that we would be paying 5m extra now for the improvement he’d make over the next 1-2 years. Right now he’s probably worth about 5-6m…so 10m is a lot. But make no mistake, he’s good enough to be starting for us.
...and knowing our track record of "improving players", he'd be worth 2-3m in 2 years, and then we'd be paying off his contract a further 2 years later after a failed loan spell at CSKA Sofia.
If you're good enough you're old enough. Who cares how old he is, if he's better than the current bunch of trainwrecks we have at centre back then get him in.
You sign with a view to then selling for a much higher fee. Brighton and Brentford are doing it. Are we still going to follow the disaster model we have been ? Or let Ubenga do his thing and bring in young talent.
Like Wilmott, Swedish keeper, plenty of others in recent years ? Hopefully Ubenga can switch us from cheap dross to cheap talent.
FMH another player purchase driven by the club shops need to use up a surplus of vowels in the replica shirt department
I believe Ben Watson was one of the great Watford signings, especially of recent years. The oil that made the midfield run smoothly.
For a couple of years definitely. However again we kept him too long. There was a goal we conceded under Wally when Watson was outpaced by the ref!
I think that's right. He was already about 30 when we signed him, so a couple of years back up in the PL was probably too much, but he was the archetypal 'last piece in the jigsaw' for that promotion team. A shame that we have rarely been able to make such accurately targeted signings in the years since then.
Or the last minute defeat at home to Ipswich when all he had to do was pass the ball back to the keeper yet just fell to the ground.
