My frustration isn’t exactly with our lack of finances compared to Palace - relegation will have been a huge factor there. Had they been able to offer more wages, or the lure of Vieira swayed him then fine. If it had been a “bidding war” and we’d pulled out, then also fine. My annoyance is that £8m is a bargain fee for Olise and apparently we still couldn’t get there. I would’ve liked us to match that release clause and then if he goes elsewhere, fine. We tried. But instead we half-assed it.
I get that it’s not like in FIFA and the structure of payments is nearly as important as the fee, but surely if we’re only offering to pay the fee over a few seasons anyway then we could stretch to more than £5m? It doesn’t put us in the best light.
Maybe we offered £5m as an opening offer, CP offered £8m and we weren't prepared to offer more or knew he'd prefer CP ? We don't know we couldn't get to £8m do we ?
They would have 100% been able to offer more wages than us, so you can stop getting yourself into a tizzy over it now.
Yes, of course. We lowballed, not knowing that it could cost us a signing who appears to be a bargain at 8m and would have been great for us, but still, in Pozzo we trust. They will have an Ashley Fletcher or a Perica to announce just before deadline day to make up for it. They deserve to be constantly forgiven for making the same mistakes over and over again and have earned a perpetual benefit of the doubt.
Nothing wrong in lowballing as an opening offer. If we don't have the cash to pay £10m+ it's still worth lowballing offers for a few players esp given the current markets.
There is something wrong in lowballing when the asking price is good value and when it shows we've shown we've learned nothing from previous experience, by constantly undervaluing our primary targets and ending up with our tertiary or worse ones. I guess it depends on whether your priorities as a fan are for us to have the best team possible, or for us to have saved 2m here and there whilst stocking the squad with a load of gash.
Palace have yet to file their 2020 accounts but in 2019 wages were £120m v ours for same period £86m Plus if most of their squad is out of contract this will include those on "very high" wages so they should be able to offer a good deal to those incoming-also this relegation clause contract we appear to be seeking v others who will not insist-who are those-no one knows but we are quite public about our stance
I'm sure if the difference between "gash" and "best possible team" was £2m here or there, thery'd spend the £2m.
http://sportwitness.co.uk/watford-a...ing-player-wants-to-pursue-career-in-england/ Us, Burnley and Bournemouth all interested. Surprised Burnley are after him and I doubt he would drop to the Championship. €3-4m fee.
Olise was another Toney, we may be skint but it’s utter lunacy not to have tried to have found it somewhere. All the while we’re happy to gamble £2m here or there (or 5 year deals in terms of wages) with about a 1/10 chance of any upside and probably 50/50 of flushing that money down the bog. We’ll easily spend £8m+ collectively on absolute rubbish that won’t reach anywhere near the value Olise will.
I think the latter would have happened anyway. The former, I still have doubts over. I just don’t believe we are in a position to empty the accounts of £8m in one go, over one player, irrespective of potential or his desire to come here. I guess there’s an argument to say that had we acted sooner in the window before Vieira arrived at Palace and they still had no manager, that we could have wrapped the deal up - but the very point that we supposedly bid £5m in instalments and have signed Etebo on loan, Rose, King and Fletcher on free’s and Louza and Dennis on very preferential payment schedules? Surely that tells us all that we were never paying £8m in one go for a player?
Well where did the £5m rumours come from? What is the point of bidding £5m for a player with an £8m release clause?
No he wasn't. Talent wise maybe, but not from the perspective of us having missed out on him. With Toney it was infuriating as surely if we'd gone for him then we could have definitely got him to come here instead of Brentford, but with Olise he'll have always chosen Palace ahead of us, so stop fussing about it.
Because we bid £5m in instalments (very likely spread over a 5yr deal). That’s very different from finding £8m in one go. It’s not that hard to accept surely? Fair to be disappointed - but our other business really does indicate this deal wasn’t possible. We tried to get it done in a similar structure to our other deals we have made (for money) and Reading weren’t having it. Not sure the club can be criticised on this one.
I wasn’t necessarily taking about the circumstances, it’s just that his release clause was ridiculously cheap, so it was an opportunity to acquire a player for a relatively low fee that will almost certainly go up significantly in value.
It would have only been an opportunity if it were possible, which it wouldn't have been, so calm down.
Why would a club accept £5m in instalments for a player with a (very cheap) release clause of £8m though? Especially so early in the window? The reported fee to Palace was £8m which surprise surprise exactly matches his release clause, which doesn’t take columbo to work out we wouldn’t even offer that for him. So it was completely and utterly pointless tyre kicking from Gino yet again. I accept we probably wouldn’t have got him anyway, it would just have been nice if Gino had at least made an attempt to offer what the player was worth, and at least been in the conversation to sign the player.
Because Gino thought he could pull a fast one in a Covid-affected market. It didn’t work. Was it ever going to? No, but he chanced his arm as we regularly do. Can that be criticised? Yes. But the answer to that can’t just be ‘pay the £8m up front then’ - because all the indicators are that we don’t have the power to do that without lessening our ability to add depth elsewhere. I don’t really see the point of your second paragraph as no one has debated the point - Palace can afford to pay £8m in one go as they have not been affected by relegation, have trimmed their wage bill significantly this summer and have wealthy US backers. So no, it doesn’t really take Colombo to work it out. We were in the conversation to sign the player - and that conversation stopped when we couldn’t afford it (and it very likely became clear he would rather move to Palace). Seems pretty obvious really? Whether we like it or not, £8m is still a lot of money to this football club. Whilst we did on occasions, we rarely spent that much on a player in 5 PL seasons. The vast majority of our business was conducted over a lower price point with instalment deals. The past 18 months means we don’t have £8m to empty out of the account on one player, in one transaction. Simple as that.
I think we’d still have £8m to spend on what is an undoubtedly talented player if we didn’t spend £2/3m here and there on mostly crap players. That we don’t have £8m to spend can be partially blamed on covid and relegation, but is also partially due to the clubs transfer policy to date, so it doesn’t make it ok just because we supposedly haven’t got it. We could somehow cobble together £5m which was never in a million years going to be accepted, but not £8m, yet we’ll still buy a load of crap this window totalling a lot more than the additional £3m.
But we didn’t ‘cobble together’ £5m!!! This is the point - we offered it in instalments. And given our tendency to give out 5yr deals, we can safely assume those instalments were offered over that length of time. We are going round in circles - but your argument seems to be ignoring the ‘instalment’ factor and just thinking the jump from £5m to £8m isn’t much so why didn’t we do it? That ‘£2m/3m here and there’ is very likely under instalments as well. So signing 4 players for £2m this summer doesn’t automatically mean we could have afforded £8m in one go for Olise. As those 4 players have probably only cost us £2m-£4m this summer. Where’s the other £4m coming from? Lastly - I agree with the point. I’d rather have quality over quantity. But we cannot escape the fact that we had little depth at the end of the season. There were players on the bench who are never good enough for the PL. Success, Perica, Gray, Navarro, Hungbo, Sanchez, Lazaar….remove those from the depth and we are bang in trouble. So they need replacing. Spending £8m in one go on Olise would have severely limited our ability to do that. It’s hard to swallow, I agree. But it’s no less true because we don’t like it.
Because this post of yours seemed over-the-top and unreasonable, rather than casual: https://wfcforums.com/index.php?threads/mbaye-diagne.58361/page-4#post-3021388 In general you're wasting your time and energy repeatedly fretting over why we didn't sign Olise when he never would have to come to us.
And who would be paying the £8m? Gino? The club? I don’t think we have it. We bid what we could afford.
I’m just sitting on my sofa watching TV, it’s honestly not that taxing for me, but thanks none the less.
No club ever pays a transfer fee (or receives one) up front, where is it officially confirmed that Palace actually have?
They do if it’s a release clause. That’s literally the whole point of them. If we had bid £8m in staged payments, Reading had the power to turn it down - and undoubtedly would have done. Widely known they valued him higher than his release clause after this summer but were bang to rights on the deal he signed last year before his breakthrough season. £8m upfront meant Reading were powerless. It’s a bit of a strawman argument to argue against the above because it’s literal facts. Reading Chronicle says Palace ‘paid his £8m release clause’. David Ornstein on Twitter goes further and says the money was deposited in full by Palace. Not sure how much more you need on this! Olise has also said Vieira was a ‘definitely’ a big pull for him and Steve Parish has said Palace were monitoring him for an ‘extended period of time’. The player simply just was very unlikely to come here for a number of reasons.
