In fairness, he hasn't really been spot on. He's changed his tune three for four times. I mean yesterday he was literally talking about Lavia in London celebrating with his friends and that he was going to Chelsea. I think this guy is just a shi**er version of Romano. He's being used by someone just as well.
I'm not saying that we are out of the Lavia deal, but are we really going to pay 60m for a player that just a week ago we weren't willing to go above 45 for? That reeks of desperation and while we may be desperate at this point, we shouldn't have had to have been...we could have paid Soton's asking price like 3 weeks ago and we'd have already had the player for 10m less than this supposed bid.
Just doesn't sound right to me.
I think you're quoting the tweet I posted, FL
For sure, there's a lot of people talking out there and not a lot of them seem to know what they are saying. I agree with you that it would be weird for us to pay 60M when a week ago the price was 50M, but then again, the desperation might be a part of it like you said.
I think that the difference this summer is that we've been singing this same tune of ''we couldn't get our target'' for two years in a row now and I think that the club, from top to bottom, understand its a hard sale to do that for a 3rd year in a row especially off the backdrop of last season, so they are looking to get those transfers done. However, what didn't change is our tendency to try and make everything work exactly the way we wanted before sanctioning a transfer (I.E., make sure the player is our top target, get him for the fee we deem acceptable, get the deal structure we want, etc.).
While I am all for this approach to transfers, especially in such a volatile market, I think that this approach does not mix well with desperation and it was a mistake to maintain this philosophy this summer. This is the type of approach that works when you're on top of your game, like we were a few seasons ago. Because when this is the case you can afford to wait, test the other club, raise a bit your bid, bank on the fact that you got CL money, not come across as desperate, etc. Unfortunately we did not do that (the proverbial improve/recruit while you're on top). Going to see Soton, who slapped a 50M price tag on Lavia, when we just lost CL football, sold Fabinho and the state of our midfield was talked about up and down the country last season (I mean everybody knows you're desperate for a total overhaul of your midfield) isn't exactly done from the same position of power that you were in a summer or two ago.
The last thing we needed this summer was to stretch things over a long period of time for a position you got 0 cover in. While we could get technical about when exactly Fabinho departed, I'm of the opinion that he departed the day we heard serious talks of the Saudi club being in for him (same for Hendo). From that moment onward, everybody around you know you have no Fabinho and no Hendo and so its/was in your best interest to get something done almost immediately.
This is not to say that we had to walk around with a blank cheque and just give any team any price they asked for. What we had to do was quickly assess our targets, quickly assess the negotiating positions those clubs we're talking to us from, be ready to either quickly transition from offering what we think is fair to the price they want or quickly move on to our secondary target. Wasn't done, we lingered on one player, panicked and turned around and bid 111M on a player, lingered further for 5 days on that whole saga and here we are back to square one.
Edit: I think also what some people are missing is that Chelsea is also another club that is desperate and Brighton and Soton both know and understood that very well from the very beginning. They both understood that if they held tights for long enough another club would come in and bid even higher than the price tag they had set on those players. The net result is that both clubs seem headed towards and extra 10 to 20 extra million in the bank
