Exactly this. We are trying to negotiate deals professionally and with due financial prudence. If we just lobbed whatever amount was asked at every seller we encountered, we'd become a laughing stock with people trying to take the piss non-stop. Doing business would become almost impossible in the long run.
The fact is this summer we have had the misfortune to come up against two clubs, who for historical reasons, in the case of Liverpool, and moral reasons, in the case of Wolfsburg (the German media and Bundesliga in general is packed with people who view us with disdain - a club that has only existed since 2009 and which vulgarly prevents grand old gentlemen of the game like the rags, the Arse and Candlepool from taking their rightful place at the Chimps League trough), have a vested interest in portraying us as grubby, nouveau-riche spendaholics. We are in the process of relieving both of those clubs of their best players, and they will want to extort every last cent they can from us, to afford them the moral high ground, to enable their fans to snicker about how much money they've screwed out of us, to indirectly ramp up the pressure on the game's governing bodies (via the press) for something to be 'done' about our ridiculous spending, and so on and so on, and there are people on here seemingly content to facilitate that by demanding we just pay whatever's asked and ranting at our supposed incompetence when we (quite rightly) don't.
Txixi has the misfortune to have to try and negotiate with these cnuts, and I can only imagine that it's a very difficult task. A little more support and a little less sniping wouldn't go amiss.
