Thank you.
This makes more sense than any other reply, sounds like you maybe saw him as a back up to Cancelo with the possibility of more, which is fair enough. Because surely no player worth less than £50m has any business being in the Man City 1st XI.
My take, fwiw, is that City genuinely thought there was an opportunity to get him for £30-40m, however misguided that might have been in the end, and made that quite publically known. That position then gets entrenched with most City fans agreeing with and defending that valuation, and rejecting paying more. I don't know, but am fairly sure, that if City publically valued him at £50m there wouldn't have been that many posts on here saying he wasn't worth that amount. You don't see many posts on the Chelsea site saying that's overpriced, and they've already got Chilwell. Because it's all monopoly money in the end, 10m, 30m, 50m, 70m, these numbers become meaningless to the likes of you and I.
So an entrenched position on value becomes very hard to walk away from, as offering 30 and paying 50 looks like you're backing down or being taken for a fast one, whereas offering 45 and paying 50 may well have been considered good business. A perception game.
You make a valid point around entrenched positions. However I think you overstate the importance of fan opinion in any of this - certainly as far as City is concerned.
Our board will have made their valuation of the player based on a number of factors (priority bring one of them, as covered), and their reluctance to go above that valuation has seen them walk from a number of deals over the years - much to a large contingent of our fans’ frustration, as you’ve seen for yourself on here over the last couple of days.
Maguire, Sanchez, Fred, Koulibaly and Kounde are just a few names I can think of off the top of my head, but there are more. You can now add Cucurella to that list.
The reality is you’d have to say their valuation has been proven right every time.
It’s this perception that matters to our owners. The perception in the footballing world of being an exceptionally well run club, and not some bunch of mugs you can take the piss out of with outlandish prices.
Whether some of our fans on a message board think Txiki and the Club are ‘an embarrassment’ because they won’t just cough up the extra £10m needed to seal the deal doesn’t play into their thinking in any way. Otherwise they’d change the way they behave - which there’s no sign of them doing.
The entrenched position is nothing to do with fans on message boards and on Twitter - it’s entrenched from the start, and is entirely based on the board’s assessment of value.
Just like Tony Bloom did at your end - and fair play to him.
Although if that fucking idiot journo who does Bloom’s PR for him is anything to go by, I’d expect there’s a bit more fan perception involved in his how he wants his behaviour to be perceived by Brighton fans than Txiki does with ours.
Most of our fans hate Txiki and think he’s shite at his job, yet he carries on exactly the same and doesn’t seem to care remotely about their perception of him!
