I guess it is the beauty of a loan signing . We have looked at him , he is good but not worth spending £35 million in that department becasue we are well stocked. Lets allocate that money elsewhere
Yeah, this. We've looked at him, he hasn't done enough to justify spaffing £35m on. Maybe if Liverpool had put a more sane playing clause in he might've had more chance to play himself in to form as it were. But the 10 game clause meant he needed to hit the ground running, and he hasn't done that. Shit happens, I don't think it's our fault that there's a daft clause in there as I can't see us having petitioned for it. This one is on Liverpool's mad negotiation tactics IMO.
Their aim was to sell him to someone last summer.
We wanted to sign him but our restrictions stopped us from signing him permanently when they wanted us to, so they structured the deal to suit our accounting requirements.
This isn't their "mad negotiation tactics", this is closer to us welching on the deal as everyone involved understood it.
Which doesn't matter, we've (as things stand) taken advantage of that fact, so good on us.
But if there is any "blame" to hand out, it's on us, not them.
Assuming:
- There's a 10 game clause
- We wanted the deal this way to avoid spending the money in 2025
- UEFA consider the cost incurred as soon as the clause is triggered
If all of that is true as expected then the biggest problem is the number of games. By restricting it to 10 we couldn't have used him much more than we have even if he was brilliant and we are 100% behind a permanent transfer. As soon as that was agreed there was always a risk he was going to end up forgotten because we will have played 26 games by the time we could trigger the clause so he was, at best, available for about 40%. 20 or even 25 games would've been a much more sensible number for everyone involved.
Undoubtedly. Clearly none of the three parties involved thought through the implications of their clever plan and how it would actually work in practice.
But ultimately, the end result is next time we want to do something clever the other club is going to tell us where to get off.
I remember back in the early Lerner years it was a source of (possibly misplaced) pride on here how we went about things "the right way" and how it was claimed that clubs wanted to deal with us because of we didn't mess them around. This is the opposite of that.
edit - obviously not to the extent that they won't sell us players. But it's not hard to pick up a reputation.
