We seem to have a real conundrum on our hands with this "wage policy" our owners/board/manager/transfer committee have put in place as in the real world it's not really viable.
On the one hand we won't/can't compete with other Clubs when it comes to the wages offered to new recruits, so to overcome that we buy young players with potential who won't demand crazy wages at first but have promises in place that this will be reviewed after a couple of years. Yet when those players start to reach the level required to help us compete, we still won't pay them their worth?
As far as I'm aware Studge's new contract took him to £150k pw, our highest paid player and Cou's new contract takes him to £70k pw so around the same as Lallana, Lovren, Henderson, Skrtel and Lucas but still less than Balo and Stevie. Going off that logic is Raheem not worth somewhere in between?
Now I hear the arguments of where will it end, he's only 20, he's still got a lot to learn, he's not done anything yet, pay him, don't pay him and all of them are valid but so are his arguments.
Look at it from his point of view. He came into the first team as a precocious teenager, with bags of raw talent and gradually forced his way into the starting lineup. At 19 he'd become a vital player in a title challenging team, has become a regular full International, starting games in the WC and more recently has been deployed as a striker for a Club who despite spending in excess of £120m on new players and having 5 strikers on the books, he was the go to player to score some goals. Incidentally, for those saying he doesn't score enough, since he was moved to striker he's been scoring at a 1 in 2 ratio or for perspective, the same rate as Studge was scoring at last season.
Of course he's not the finished article, he's 20 for heavens sake but he's not asking for the very top wages that the likes of Messi, or Neymar, or Ronaldo earn, he's not even asking for anything like Studge is on as he knows there's plenty of time to earn that kind of money. If he was determined to get that kind of money he wouldn't be negotiating with us, he'd already be negotiating a move away in the summer.
So back to the conundrum, if we're going to bring in the best young talent there is, on low wages, so we can develop them into top class players, so we can challenge for major honours and win stuff then pay them for being top class players who challenge for major honours and win stuff.
Of course the alternative is we sell him whilst his current deal has some value, replace him with Ibe and start the last 2 years process all over again. I'm sure most on here would be apoplectic if we became a feeder club to those Clubs we should be competing against.
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