08-17-2022, 02:39 AM
(08-17-2022, 02:30 AM)honsano Wrote: Ok this stuff is a bit of revisionist history. Players in their final year of their contract demand less. Also when you sell a player, you automatically inflate the price of your purchase as the selling club knows you have money.
Romagnoli: decent in 2019-2020, fair to poor with Pioli style man marking in 2020-2021. He was poor 2021-2022 and lost his spot to Kalulu. He was on high wages too. He was going to have to take a salary cut and I don’t think most teams would pay it to facilitate a transfer knowing that. It makes sense of him going to Lazio.
Hakan: poor 2019-2020. The likelihood of us getting decent transfer was poor. 2020-2021 he did better with Pioli but not great. We did offer a fair salary (would be one of the highest paid in the squad) and he declined. Ultimately when we could sell him 20’, we would have gotten a pittance.
Kessie: 2019-2020 he was fair but only because he improved vastly the second half of the season. So do you renew after 1/2 a season of good form on significantly elevated wages or see if he is consistent. We did the latter and that is reasonable. He did well in 2020-2021 and we offered an extension. He delayed and ultimately in 2021-2022 his form dipped. The only chance to realistically sell was summer 21’ at that point again low return..
Let’s then look at what happened. Kessie, Romagnoli and Hakan helped us to a CL qualification x2 and a Scudetto (Hakan by virtue of being a chump). Most importantly, They allowed players like Tonali, Kalulu, Tomori space to grow and get into the starting lineup. There is no guarantee that selling Hakan for 15mil in the summer 20’ or Kessie for 20 mil in the summer of 21’ would have really allowed us to buy a player that could get us a Scudetto. Based on the results of what happened with this team so far, it is hard to argue these were the wrong decisions. You can’t just look at money in money out.
100% this too.
Romagnoli would have gotten as peanuts. from memory the only offer for Hakan was 12/13m I though from Turkey and he had no interest in going there.
Kessie screwed us but he did help us with the title win. even though I don't rate him that highly, and don't think he was key to us winning, there's no doubt he helped. We had Spurs after him in the summer and he chose to reject them in favour of a free transfer to Barcelona. The only chance we had was sell him start of the season but he made a public promise he was sticking around and would sign. how are management to know he was full of shit