West Ham appear to be stuck in a 206/17 summer transfer window time warp
It seems that whenever we read that the Hammers have made a bid for a striker they have made an opening offer of 25 million euros or less.
We know that is the figure been put on Kelechi Iheanacho and the same would have been required for Olivier Giroud. The same fee was attached to Anthony Modeste and Cedric Bakambu.
Javier Hernandez is a different kettle of fish having a £13 million release clause but one can only hope that if the bidding does go beyond €25 million the Hammers will be ready to join in.
The €25m euros figure of course brings back bad memories of last summer when David Sullivan, in an ill-fated press interview, claimed we wanted a 20 goal £25 million striker.
Now I would be okay with €25 million was I sure that it was merely an opening offer and that we were negotiating from there.
But so far we have seen no sign that’s the case as demonstrated by Modeste and Bakumba from whom we are told we have moved on given the prices attached to them.
These are always anxious times for the fans and with a guaranteed £62 million in the transfer kitty more action is required.
After all not every striker in the world can be valued at the same figure.
Probably because £35/40/50 million players wont come to us.But thats understandble because we arnt a big fish.West Brom spent £15 million on Jay Rodriguez we as a team are not on some different plain too them.Some need to wake up and smell the coffee.
I agree with that up to a point and if you made that argument a couple of years ago most people, me included would have been happy with a Jay Rodriguez or an Andre Grey. The problem is we were all promised that the move to the LS would take us to another level, Andre Grey certainly isn’t that. If you’re promised a luxury holiday in Barbados by a travel agent and you instead end up with a caravan in Skegness you’re going to feel a bit let down.
I suppose they have started bidding at €25 mil for a higher priced player, hoping to fall somewhere between. So it could still be that they went back in for Modeste or Bakambu. They would never say never.
Trouble with these “start low” negotiation tactics is it misunderstands the situation.
Most clubs with good strikers have no need or desire to sell those players unless the player has indicated unhappiness as Payet did.
In that situation it’s a sellers market, so there is no such thing as “meet half way”, but instead it’s a case of pay the quoted price or go forth and multiply.
Until or owners grasp this fact will be stuck at “our valuation” of players without appreciating that our valuation is meaningless.
We should be identifying the players we really want and will fit what we want to do with the side, and then pull out the stops to get them.
For some reason this seems to complicated for our powers that be to grasp.
spot on.
Sick of hearing “value for money”, this is the premier league not a supermarket.
I’d rather we put out all the stops for one player we know will improve the squad then a couple of maybes but “good value for money”
We were never gonna morph into a top 6 side over night. People keep on about the promises made by the board but that is the boards ultimate aim.As it should be. Any body expecting instant delivery on those aspirations is truly deluded. They never put a time scale on it did they? A bit of patience is required. COYI X
If we don’t sign any new players we still have a very good squad, we definitely do need a striker but our problem last season wasn’t scoring goals it was conceding them and often due to very poor defending as a team which we began to improve upon as the season moved on, we also struggled in games against the top six other than the spuds, if we do sign another top quality creative midfielder, left winger and argueably goalkeeper then wait until January for a striker who is top quality and desperate for playing time then we might get the quality we need to compete for those 5th – 7th places, the other thing we were weak on especially in the first 6 months was the condition of the players so hopefully we will address that this season and have a better than last season COYI !