Quote:
Originally Posted by mw828
good write-up tchaz
what do you think about rondon coming in? seems good (go read bjorn's high praise in the "300 players" thread if you haven't already), but surely means berahino is offski right? everyone on our end seems convinced he is as good as signed for us. that said, i expect him to start tomorrow
Starting at the bottom: I think it's close to 100% Berahino starts tomorrow (unless he has a genuine injury - not a 'ghana be transfered' injury). [Eg. he played all preseason.]
I posted about the Berahino agent situation in the transfer thread. If I was him I
would want to multiply my take home pay by 4 or 5 or whatever Spurs will pay .. but it is possible that waiting until October will allow him to make a better deal for himself and not lose money paying agents he doesn't like. (Otoh - he may well not be bright enough to understand that if it's true.)
Overall, one has to understand that our chairman (Jeremy Peace) has leveraged a minimal investment in the club (probably less than ~£1m 10 years ago) into owning 90% of the club and is, seemingly pretty committed to cashing in to the tune of ~£150m. It seems as if this summer he had a fish on the line but the Chinese stock market dip meant that they weren't able to pay the asking price.
So from the point of view of JP the crucial thing is (presumably) to stay in the top division until he can cash out. Secondly, whilst he (and we) are there/here, until a sale is secured money shouldn't be frittered away.
.... tl;dr
(imo one can deduce) Berahino will be £25m+ and only sold (assuming that someone in WBA recognises the importance of his role in us staying up this coming year) once an equivalent is signed.
I'm a mahoosive nit, but it seems like a huge risk to swap Saido for Rondon (the +/- value of the transfers is almost neither here nor there imo). But it may be that there is no other way if we won't pay Saido a similar amount of wages to what those of the transfer offers amount to. It's an interesting example for BAIDS's idea that in the BTVDITYW everyone will now be rich enough to actually do things like this.
fwiw: I don't think that WBA paying "£15m" for a striker necessarily means we have to sell someone for more to balance the books - but I may be wrong. Last summer we paid "£10m" for Ideye without a single makeweight.
Re this, it's also worth noting that our last two striker buys from the former Soviet Union have been Odemwingie and Ideye - neither unproblematic.
And as I said in the transfer thread - perhaps misguidedly - Rondon would seem much more like a Richard Garlick (our now-sacked, post-Dan Ashworth sporting and technical director) buy than a Tony Pulis one. So it's not very clear what is really going on. I would have been less surprised by Peter Crouch for £7m tbh.
However I agree that if we start to stockpile centre-forwards then we may be in the business of trading some of that pile.
On my third hand (iirc), I would enjoy seeing if Kane and Berahino can make something golden, and as a WBA fan I absolutely wouldn't begrudge Berahino going to Spurs and doing that .. since I don't see any glorious upside for him staying with us.
Last edited by tchaz; 08-09-2015 at 09:26 PM.