chris85mcfc said:
Mister Appointment said:
Yeah if you're James Milner. If you're Manchester City, with a shortage of homegrown players, with a shortage of transfer funds due to FFP, I daresay there's a lot wrong with it.
I wonder what the homegrown premium would be for James Milner if he was under contract and Liverpool/Arsenal wanted him. He's easily a 20 million pound player which is why this entire episode stinks.
That's our own fault mate, not the fault of James Milner
We could have looked at a couple of homegrown players in the last couple of summers, but we've chose to go down another route. I'm sure Milner knows how important he is to the club from a homegrown rule point of view, and he is a 20 million pound player that could go for nothing. But that isn't the fault of the player, if anything its just poor planning from the club
The reason Arsenal got rid of RVP and Nasri was that if they hadn't they would have walked away for nothing, if City even had a sniff that Milner wasn't going to sign then they should have looked to ship him out in the summer, or at least given him a deadline
City offered Milner a new contract last summer and made it clear to him how important he was to us. This comes after he played an integral part in our title run in. Milner quite publicly turned around and said that he didn't even want to look at the contract offer because he didn't feel he'd played enough. Understandable, so this season he has played more league games, more champions league games, and more big games. Why is the disrespectful motherfucker still not signing up? If he had decided last summer he was going to Liverpool why didn't he tell the club that and we'd have sold him to them?
Since he made a big song and dance about how he just wanted to play more games the club have done absolutely the right thing by ensuring he played more games, big and small. The manager has said repeatedly that he's a very important player and has backed this up by playing him regularly.
So now it's not about playing time for Milner but about something else. He can fuck himself if he walks on a free. I agree with Tolmie, send the twat to the stiffs until he either signs up or puts in a transfer request and we get some money for him this January. We should make a point so that the next twat who tries to take liberties as Milner has done knows that City won't stand for it. I realise it's never going to happen just as Tevez was always going to be welcomed back into the fold but we live in hope.
EDIT:
Here's the well informed Guardian piece on his contract from last summer.
In preliminary talks at the end of last season, City suggested that there was a four-year deal on the table and stressed that he was a valued member of the squad. The feeling is that Milner would have put pen to paper if that offer had been made 12 months earlier, when he had featured more frequently in the team, starting half of City’s Premier League games. But City delayed and Milner was not inclined to sign after a season when he was a bit-part player under Pellegrini.
It is understood that neither Milner nor his representatives asked to see what figures City had in mind when they proposed the new contract before the World Cup finals, such is the player’s desire to base his decision purely on football.
Milner will be 29 in January and, although he feels at home at City and loves playing for the club, the bottom line is that he wants to be sure that he spends the next few years of his career on the pitch. City are believed to be sympathetic to Milner’s position.
As things stand, City are not looking to offload him and the player has no intention of angling for a move. There is a queue of clubs ready to take Milner but he wants to have a crack at convincing Pellegrini that he is worth a place in the team. He is due to return to pre-season training on Thursday, after being given an extended break following his time away with England at the World Cup, and it is anticipated that he will hold talks with the manager during the coming weeks to discuss his situation and the new campaign.
At this stage all the indications are that Milner will use the first half of the season to see if he can play his way into the starting XI. If he succeeds in doing so, the midfielder is likely to sign a new contract with City. If nothing changes and opportunities remain limited, he will explore other options and is expected to leave at the end of the season, when he would be a particularly attractive free transfer.
That could've been written by Milner himself such are the lengths gone to to point out how this is just about how much he plays football and not about money.
