Sell Bundia and Bailey; recoup £25-30m and the job's a good 'un.
We can only really do that if (a) someone’s willing to pay those fees for them and (b) they’re also willing & able to pay their wages
Think you can see from the situation with say Asensio at PSG, or Manchester United’s increasingly long list of players they no longer want, or us with Dendoncker that this isn’t as trivial as it seems.
My guess is:
- we’re going to have to take the hit with Dendoncker. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay him anything like we have been. Best to cut ties at the most favourable terms for us and let him look for somewhere on a free, where he’ll be willing/able to take a significant pay cut.
- Buendia I’m starting to feel might be similar. He’s not good enough for anyone to splash a serious wedge of both wages & transfer fees on, and the best we’re going to get is for him to be loaned out so he’s at least off the wage bill.
- Bailey is one where we might get a bit of a fee for as he’s genuinely… he can be good. Though I’d worry that if we don’t get rid this summer, and he doesn’t start to look amazing for us again, he’ll slip in to the Buendia category of basically not being good enough to justify what he’d cost someone.
This is kind of why I’m less bothered about us selling Barrenechea or even JJ. It’s not a case at the moment where we can pick & choose who to flog on, I think we’re just going to have to accept that literally every player has a price at the moment.
Not that I want us to sell him. I love a homegrown player - it’s what I’d dreamt about as a kid and I love seeing people live out my dreams. But I think there’s an inevitability about it with the rules as they are - mistakes in the transfer market are heavily punished with the financial rules as they are, and there’s only a very select group of clubs that can afford to ignore those (the scab 6 basically)
