City will v likely need to pay a world record fee for a defender, if they don’t it won’t happen. He seems to be the number one target and City want him no matter who goes, so let’s hope they pay and get this done.
I just can’t see us paying it, we don't work that way at all. I sadly feel this is one of those drawn out deals that’ll fail to get done and someone else will swoop in and just pay the fee they want. I get the principle of the club, I genuinely do but I sometimes feel we need to just get the player we want rather than stringing it out,
Rice is the perfect example (I wasn’t convinced about him to be honest and stated it many tInes) we offered £80m + £10m, so we valued him at £80m but were willing to extend that by another £10m if we achieved certain goals that guaranteed us a financial return. If he was who we really wanted though we could of still valued him at £80m and paid it, but increased the £10m to £20m and strung it out over a longer period which in turn would of meant financial rewards for us having achieved the triggers that require us to pay it.
It made zero sense to walk away over a figure that could have been justifiable long term.
The media can spin it how they like but the initial fee before bonuses is our valuation, the rest is a sweetener based on us succeeding and whoever the player is doing so too.
What did we win this season? £295m? lets hypothetically say we win £400m over the next two seasons under Pep and let’s take Rice as an example again, that’s £20m over those 2 seasons extra in payments we’d have to pay out of the £400m return.
It was a no brainier, we had nothing to lose as the extra bonus payments were only payable had we hit our goals and collected further trophies.
Anyway back to Gvardiol, I think he’d be an outstanding addition but I suspect he needs to a) publicly declare his ambition to sign for us, b) City need to go in hard with a genuine and realistic offer, and c) we need to wrap this up in days not weeks.
