West Ham have given up signing French defensive midfielder Valentin Rongier from Nantes according to a report by France Football
The report claims that the French’s club valuation for the 24-year-old of €15m (£13.8m) was just too expensive which caused the Hammers to quickly withdraw from negotiations in view of excessive demands.
Rongier, who is captain of the Ligue 1 club, has been at Nantes his entire career so far and has made 132 appearances for ‘Les Canaris’, scoring 10 goals. He is versatile and can play in defensive, central or attacking midfield.
This report could give supporters hope that the Hammers are still in the market for a young versatile midfielder who can play in the defensive position but the truth is there is a little budget to buy a player of quality this summer.
Historically Manuel Pellegrini has shunned loans and with the manager repeating today he is happy with his squad on the club’s official site today saying he will analyse with the director of football Mario Husillos and Chairman David Sullivan to decide this week what they must work on.
15m is cheap in the current market. If we believe that fee is vastly overpriced then why are we after him in the first place (if we are)? Surely if 15m is far above his value he can’t be very good? 15m for a young experienced player who plays in one of Europe’s top leagues sounds more than reasonable to me. If we can’t afford 15m. Why?
The striker from Belgium we’re linked with Albian Ajeti is supposedly valued at 9m. He scored 1 in 2 last season netting 22 times. At 9m for a 22 year old scoring 1 in 2 in a reasonable league, these are transfers we should be doing in my opinion, the figures are so relatively low, it’s not going to push our low net spend up drastically.
Anything more than 5 quid is too much for us
Not sure if just me, this is the first I heard we were even in for the guy ? Hard to be too disappointed by a rumour imho 😀
Like you, I’d never heard of him until reported here. I am not disappointed if we don’t get him however I would be disappointed if a 15m price tag is the sole reason we don’t buy him. IF we genuinely think he’d improve our squad, I hope that sort of money wouldn’t deter us.