much like black friday, post thanksgiving, wal-mart rushing, it looks like this january will contain one of the biggest sales of the past few years. man city, in face of the UEFA Financial Fair Play rules is set to offload a ton of players at huge discounted rates. 5 happy bonus star points for anyone who gets the reference in the title of this post.
soccernet actually has a decent article on this (i know! soccernet with a moderately decent article about soccer!!!).
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=844076&sec=transfers&cc=3888
the article lists the following players as the most likely to leave:
“ESPNsoccernet has been informed that Adebayor is on £170,000 a week, with Bridge earning £90,000, Lescott £75,000, Santa Cruz and Jo both on £70,000 and Wright-Phillips on £65,000.”
and they project that man city could pay a large chunk (50%) of each of those salaries just to get them off the books.
do any of these guys interest us?
to me, the most intriguing might be Lescott, if we’re not feeling good about a solid presence at CB. or Jo different type of option up front, particularly if Fabiano is sold. wright-phillips could serve as a replacement if we sell navas, but we already have plenty of fast dribbling mediocre service wingers.
anyone who actually watches the premiership have any thoughts on these guys?
as always, it would depend on the actual offer city would make, and most likely also on the offer we receive for anyone leaving sevilla.
in monchi we trust.
“amaaaaaaziiiiiing graaaaaaaace….”
i’ll take my happy bonus star points now please.
HAHA i’m going to be thinking about that scene all day now.
“and….scene.”
“would you like to try that a little…simpler, maybe?”
“…no.”
EDIT: seriously, though, i can’t see us being super interested in buying any of these players just based on their wage alone. even if man c paid half the wage in a loan deal, they’d still be absurd prices to pay for people who in some cases haven’t seen the field in weeks/months. but if some of these players are able to understand that the paychecks they’ve been getting will never happen again (doubtful), i might change my mind a bit.
hahahahahaha. who made the original post? i’ll add:
lindsay: “they’re having a FIRE SALE??”
/arrested-development-fire-sale
haha
i wrote it.
yeah, nothing to be too excited about really. seeing those actual salaries is pretty shocking. what the hell were they thinking? great seeing them come back down to earth and have to swallow those losses.
i think im still annoyed we never went after van der vaart.
5 happy bonus star points for everyone!
Funniest show ever. Lescott is the only player who might interest me (well, Adebayor, if City would pay 75%
).
whether or not we’re interested in any of these players, though, i do think it’s worth discussing to what extent we feel sevilla ought to be involved in this emerging market. as more and more billionaires decide they’d like to have a soccer team plaything (or just as real madrid buys more and more players they can’t possibly play), the opportunity for this kind of player will likely continue to present itself.
there are a lot of dangers in picking up some of these players–often their diva:skill ratio is dangerously high, they’re usually not as young as we like to buy our players, and often even the bargain-basement prices would fall near or above our biggest purchases ever. however, if a player fits a need we have, is interested in coming to a smaller team (or at least sees a move from man c’s bench to sevilla’s starting lineup as at least an equal trade), and has a proven record…well, the right purchase could be a missing ingredient in moving us to a new level. so i’ll definitely be interested in developments both here and in RM’s annual sale, and wherever else poor team planning leads to this kind of bargain.
also i am SUPER pumped that we’re all AD fans here (theo? did this show make it to britain ever? if not you really HAVE to see it!). let the inside jokes and comparisons to characters, plot twists, etc commence!
AD=American Dad right? If it is then I’ve seen it. Sorry about the lack of contact-had a really busy few weeks
AD=Arrested Development. Canceled after 3 seasons, although supposedly a movie is coming as well. Definitely worth acquiring in one form or another.
I think that we should always be exploring fire sales and the like…you’ll never know unless you inquire. My guess is that most of these players will be out of our price range and not over willing to take much of a pay cut after being overpaid at their current club…I realize that the current club will assume much of the wage, but I also think the Citys and Reals of the world will be looking to recoup as much of their loss as possible by moving the player to whichever side can assume the most of the wage bill. Finding that player who might be both useful and willing to take a lesser wage in order to fit into our payroll would be difficult but is the sort of creative squad building we need to engage in consistently, at least until the TV contracts are sorted; then we can just buy whomever we please.
FAIR TV CONTRACTS NOW!
the ones that feel like they got away are van der vaart and drenthe. both could have helped this team at very reasonable prices and would likely have considered playing for us.