Matty said:
Chippy_boy said:
How very very telling. Cook: "were we looking for the opportunity to joint venture in areas that would take this club on to a different platform"
As I thought. When it came to brass tacks, what we had in mind for our "offer" of £100m was in terms of some cash, some appearance fees, some marketing royalties etc etc. Not "here's £100m cheque".
So basically we bottled it, not Milan. (Rightly or wrongly, I don't want to get drawn into that.) But had we said "Here's a hundred million pound cheque", Kaka would now be ours. I was 100% certain of that prior to yesterday and I remain so now.
You can construe that statement to mean any one of a million different things and you've gone for the one that makes City look cheap and shite. Why exactly?
Why? Because I always doubted the sincerity of an offer of £108m. And why did I do that? Because it's WAY too much money for any one player. When the previous world record fee was less than £50m and the world is entering into (or is in) the biggest recession for 80 years. £50m or £60m would have been a STAGGERING offer. £108m was completely ridiculous.
I always said if the £108m was a no-strings attached offer, then Milan would have to accept it as it is just too good to refuse.
It seems patently obvious to me now that we had other things in mind than "here's the cheque fellas". I believe it was Milan that first started talking about £100m and we probably went along with it on the basis that we could see a way that they could achieve that amount of money from the sale based on various criteria, as I mention above. This is 100% normal in the commercial world Cook comes from. (And which I work in, for what it's worth.)