09-06-2021, 08:32 AM
(09-06-2021, 03:04 AM)nefremo Wrote: So, we give Romagnoli the 9M he's asking for (5M net is what he's asking for according to most reports, some even say 5.5M but we'll take the less of the two....+ tax of 45% in Italy) for four years = 36M committed to pay him over the life of his contract. Guaranteed!! Please don't forget Raiola's fees, which are guaranteed to be several million. But lef's leave that out for now.
So you yourself said a sale is never guaranteed and agreed with that. So if he's worth 20M like you said and that's not at all guaranteed, how does it make sense to renew him at that salary JUST so that we don't lose him for free??? Keep in mind...whoever EVEN THINKS about paying that 20M transfer fee will also have to agree to pay his fat 5M net salary.
All of a sudden things get complicated, right? You now seriously risk paying your 3rd choice CB 5M net for the next 4 years (or 36M in total like I mentioned earlier)...and you can not get rid of him. No necessarily because he's shit. But because the teams interested can't and won't pay that.
And lastly, don't forget the domino effect of what the actual starters in the defensive department will start demanding if you all of a sudden hand out a 5M salary to your 3rd CB.
This is a step that we NEED to get to (paying 5M salaries to 3rd CB)...but we're not there yet. Not with our revenue. Not in the current situation. Maybe in a few years.
I do agree that Romagnoli has a role to play. I'm loving the fact that Romagnoli is our 3rd CB. It's great. And if paying 5M net to our 3rd CB is in line with our budget...then by all means. Do it! I'm just not so sure. Really not sure about that. We are in the CL for the 1st time in 7 years! We are not even breaking 200M in revenue. I'm afraid that handing out contracts like these will kill us, if we let's say miss the CL next year. I'm not so sure it's the responsible thing to do. 5M for Romagnoli, 6/7/8M for Kessie. On and on we go, JUST so that we don't lose them for free. In the meantime, no matter what, we are stuck with the fat guaranteed contracts.
I'm not saying I'm right. I'd hate to lose players for free knowing that maybe, maybe they can fetch a transfer fee. All I'm saying is that I'm understanding of the management's decisions and way if handling this. It's not THAT simple as people make it to be.
Well, I never said it was simple, but that's what management gets paid to do. And frankly speaking, they have themselves to blame for the situation they are in right now.
I loved the math you listed, it really illustrated the point. So let's also do a little math. Let's say we let Roma go for free, how much would we need to sign his back up? If we spend 15m on transfer fee, and 3m on salary, which aren't exorbitant amount to spend on a CB in the open market, that would equal to roughly 36M over 4 years, the exact amount Roma would've cost us if we sign him to his extension. So the idea that we are "saving money" isn't actually isn't saving us a single dime. And then we have to hope the 15m man is good enough to even play here, which is no sure thing either. Most decent quality CB go for much more than that.
Truth be told, at this point, we are in between a rock and a hard place. There is no good way to get out of this situation any more. I am not a Romanogli fan by any means, but to me, extending him even at that large sum still seems like the less risky and sensible financial decision to make. Because signing his backup most likely won't be cheap as the paragraph above illustrated. Same thing for Kessie. The best thing we could've done was to negotiate these extensions last year and get rid of them when it became obvious that we wouldn't be able to agree on the numbers. But of course we decided to sit on our hands and not work on it at the time.