Not even the slightest bit of arrogance.
I only posted about the situation the club is in at the moment. One can remove, all the association with the premier league, picture it as a club in a foreign league. All the things I said still stand. How does a club, that aspires to get to the top, deal with players wanting to leave?
IF they have a brought in a few new players, based upon building a team, to get more out of the said player, they will often do their best to get him to stay one more season. An agreement for the following summer might be reached.
IF they haven't been able to improve the squad sufficiently, the player has given them good service, they can't convince him that his future is with them, club will often let the player leave. Both parties will agree on a valuation if there is no pre negotiated clause.
Then there is the situation, where the club states, quite adamantly, not for sale or they attempt to price him out of a move. There is no release clause. The player, pathetically, runs back to his homeland.
The first two scenarios are fabulous PR wise. Prospective future signings will look and think that is a good place to go. I believe, if I give my all there, they aren't going to stand in my way IF a future move comes calling. I might also achieve my dreams there.
The third scenario just isn't good for anyone. It doesn't reflect well on either party and it can distract from what the club is trying to achieve. This downing tools business I certainly don't like, as a football supporter, I am far more in favour of a club demanding silly money! I want my players to stay.
I think Real Madrid might be the only club that haven't had this type of scenario. Maybe City? PSG had Mbappe. Barca had R9, Figo and Neymar.
There is no way we can win every way.
The thing is though a certain club has went out of their way to disrupt him. Instead of coming to us, asking what our price is, they have went to pay for tweets social media personalities and his agent to unsettle him thinking they can get him a knockdown rate.
This is a club who we are building a squad to try and compete with. A club who in the past 50 years have bought pretty much every decent player we have had from us by utilising their wealth, and our shitty owners.
We don’t have those issues anymore. We don’t need the money (even from a PSR perspective) and we don’t have an ownership who are happy to cash in instead of compete.
At the end of the day if a player is in talks with us and says ‘What about the Isak situation, that makes me feel uncomfortable’ all we have to do is turn around and say ‘well actually he went and refused to train before there was an bid for him. When a bid did come along it didn’t match the valuation the club has, nor would it match the value that he had himself. The door was always open for him to work with us’. If someone can’t see the logic in that then maybe they aren’t the type of player we would want at the club in anyway.
I’ll be honest, so far this transfer window has been a bit of a disaster for us. However the club hasn’t lacked ambition, we have went for ambitious targets, it’s just that those players have had the option to go to more successfully established teams, and teams who can offer more in wages.
So far at our club, everything has been quite linear since the takeover. There was always going to be a moment where we would have difficult patch, this summer is proving to be it, which is a shame because this is right after a season that has shown that we can consistently qualify for the Champions League, finish at the top end of the table, and let’s not to forget the first trophy since 1969.
As it happens, aside from Trafford, and upfront, we won’t really be scrolling down the list of targets that we had at the start of the summer. Elanga was likely 2nd on the list after Mbeumo, we still have all our known targets at CB available for transfer, and I assume in CM as well. Upfront yeah we have been shafted on that front, but I guess it just means we’ll have to bring in the players that maybe are not quite on people’s radar and ones that clubs are not ready to take a risk on yet. For the love of god keep that Nicolas Jackson away from us.