Buy Gyokeres for any price?

[Nano]

Solanke was signed when Bournemouth were in the Premier League, a year and a half before the played in the Championship.

Mitrovic was signed permanently when Fulham were promoted to the Premier League.

In both cases they already had the top flight money.

The timing is irrelevant. The pertinent fact is that last season they had strikers that were proven top scorers in this division. Not untested gambles.

 

[TeaCider]

The timing is irrelevant. The pertinent fact is that last season they had strikers that were proven top scorers in this division. Not untested gambles.

The timing is not irrelevant at all.

The post you were replying to specifically excluded clubs that were in the Premier League the season before, and you've then tried to counter it by naming two clubs that signed players for big money whilst in the Premier League.

 

[Chappy112]

You have picked the success stories by just picking the promoted teams. All the teams that didn't get promoted those seasons had strikers that they had bought on a budget that didn't work out necessarily.

As for teams that had spent big money on strikers that worked then last season Fulham and Bournemouth had Mitrovic (£22m) and Solanke (£19m).

People have been saying for days that the key is spending big on proven players, the list proves that very wrong, that’s all I was doing with that list. My argument isn’t that all low priced players work out so I don’t really get your point.

I didn’t include any clubs that were in the Premier League the season previous, you can’t compare them to us, their spending power is on a different stratosphere. Bournemouth bought Solanke while they were a Premier League side. Same with Mitrovic actually, they only loaned him when they were in the Championship.

 

[Chappy112]

The timing is not irrelevant at all.

The post you were replying to specifically excluded clubs that were in the Premier League the season before, and you've then tried to counter it by naming two clubs that signed players for big money whilst in the Premier League.

Yeah I’m not sure why my post was so difficult to understand

It’s like Liverpool getting relegated this season and then claiming the key is spending £90m on Darwin Nunez.

 

[TeaCider]

The only club I can think of off the top of my head that gambled so much without parachute payments was Wolves, they signed half of Portugal, and I expect they'd have been in a lot of bother if they hadn't went up comfortably.

 

[DCI_Gene_Hunt]

If he left Coventry in this window it would be to a Premier league (bottom half) club rather than another Championship club.

 

[Frozen Horse]

It's not like if we punt £15m and it doesn't work out that well get £0 for him, we'd still get half back (at least) and he'd still probably be the best striker we own. At only 24 we can hold onto him for a few seasons and still get money back for him at 27 if we needed to.

I think we'd get 0 for him. You say "half back". Who is going to pay 7m for a championship striker who hasn't delivered for a couple of years? Certainly not a PL club, and the few in the championship with the money to do it will want a better chance of success.

And realistically, if he came for 15m, he'll have a big contract. His agent won't settle for 10k a week if we're prepared to shell out that sort of fee. No one will take that of us.

He'd be Britt part 2: running down his contract and leaving in a free.

 

[Chappy112]

The only club I can think of off the top of my head that gambled so much without parachute payments was Wolves, they signed half of Portugal, and I expect they'd have been in a lot of bother if they hadn't went up comfortably.

And I’m pretty sure they got good deals on those because of Mendes. Not sure they would have went there without him.

 

[Chappy112]

I think we'd get 0 for him. You say "half back". Who is going to pay 7m for a championship striker who hasn't delivered for a couple of years? Certainly not a PL club, and the few in the championship with the money to do it will want a better chance of success.

And realistically, if he came for 15m, he'll have a big contract. His agent won't settle for 10k a week if we're prepared to shell out that sort of fee. No one will take that of us.

He'd be Britt part 2: running down his contract and leaving in a free.

The contract is always the main problem. I’m sure a club would have paid £5m for Britt but they wouldn’t have gone near whatever stupidity we were paying him in wages.

 

[indeedido]

It is this ridiculous notion that we should have got more than £12.5m + £7.5m add ons for Spence and £10m + £2m add ons for Tavernier, yet we shouldn't be willing to spend £12.5m plus £7.5m add ons for the best forward in the league.

The idiocy of lurching to having to commit £20m up front does not require addressing.
There are lots of ways to construct and stage deals before jumping to that.

The fact is our circumstances mean that having made £22.5m profit on 2 players we at least have the choice of how to invest.
If Gibson doesn't invest then he will continue to fund huge losses.
If he invests then he has a real chance this season of letting the PL fund his club.

Nano made the point well. Would we have been happy to swap Spence and Tavernier for Gyokeres?
I most definitely would have been as I think he is that good and Spence would never play for us.
The fact is however that even at £15m we would be much better off.
That is before we look at the FFP aspects, as most posters seem unable to absorb the amortisation concept and equate it to that £22.5m profit made by Boro this season.

 

[Andy_W]

Brentford paid £5m up front for Toney on the back of 4 seasons of consistent goalscoring in League One from a young age.
People weren't saying they'd overpaid because the fee was a good one to pay.

They'd also just made £50m in player sales.

We'd be paying three times that for a player who's had one good season, admittedly at a higher level, having made significantly less money in player sales even with add-ons.
Add to that, we need plenty of other signings too.

I'd absolutely love us to sign Gyokeres, and I'd be all on board if we did, despite my reservations about the cost, but that fee is huge at this level without parachute payments.

Tony was still unproven in the Champo, and had only one year over 16 goals in league 1. Even that year he got 24 for a decent side, is that better or less risk than 17 goals for Coventry/ mid table champo? Also that was £5m to Brentford is not £5m to us, Brentford is in London, the chance of us getting Tony at all was zero. To be honest when I saw that Tony fee, I thought is was quite low, but Peterborough can't really turn that down to a higher league team, when they didn't even make the play offs (in either of Tony's years). Obviously that fee paid off big time, and was ultimately incredible value.

We're likely to have to pay more to other clubs, so they shut the door to the players options elsewhere, as if it's a toss up (in standard) between us and a club in a better area, paying the same fee, then that's likely a fight we won't win.

 

[Andy_W]

The contract is always the main problem. I’m sure a club would have paid £5m for Britt but they wouldn’t have gone near whatever stupidity we were paying him in wages.

Forest wouldn't sell a 1 in 2 striker, who was scoring a goal every 161 minutes first season and every 130 minutes in his second (playing for a team who finished 21st), to a team in the same division, for £5m, when they had paid £5m for him from League 1.

The wouldn't have even picked up the phone for anything less than £12m, and no doubt there will have been other clubs interested, but yes, we probably offered more in wages.

The fee we paid activated a buy out clause, they might not have even sold for 15m, without that clause.

 

[Chappy112]

Forest wouldn't sell a 1 in 2 striker, who was scoring a goal every 161 minutes first season and every 130 minutes in his second (playing for a team who finished 21st), to a team in the same division, for £5m, when they had paid £5m for him from League 1.

The wouldn't have even picked up the phone for anything less than £12m, and no doubt there will have been other clubs interested, but yes, we probably offered more in wages.

The fee we paid activated a buy out clause, they might not have even sold for 15m, without that clause.

I’m on about us trying to sell Britt and why he ran his contract down.

 

[Redwurzel]

If we say paid £15m plus for Gyorkeres and gave him £35k/week and he developed a long term injury and we have put nearly all our eggs in one basket. As we need to spend on midfield too now.

I am happy to spend upto £10m on a striker, but prefer to buy at least 2.

I guess I am a bit of a Moneyball buyer I don't mind taking a risk on a what appears far from the perfect article if there is some decent quality and potential there.

In 2019 we bought Dykesteel, Bola and Browne for around £4m in total. We got a bit back when Browne went. Bola is probably worth at least £1.5m and Dyksteel £5m and rising plus we have had a lot of useful games from them - That's decent business. No one was going wild when we bought Bernie Slaven for £25k (about £1m today)

To me worst case scenario this season we end up with what we had last season upfront, but have improved the defence and goalkeeper. We do need to invest in midfield too.

 

[MVBoro]

The thing with gyokores is that I think he could also do quite well in the prem if we got promoted. So although he would be a signing to get us up, he could save us more money long term. I prefer that to a couple of unproven overseas projects. We need someone who is effective straight away. Obviously this is predicated on him being available and affordable which doesn’t appear to be the case. I have a feeling he will become an established premier league striker in years to come, and will be forever talked about here (even though he never played for us or was ever close to signing)!

 

[Muttley]

It is this ridiculous notion that we should have got more than £12.5m + £7.5m add ons for Spence and £10m + £2m add ons for Tavernier, yet we shouldn't be willing to spend £12.5m plus £7.5m add ons for the best forward in the league.

The idiocy of lurching to having to commit £20m up front does not require addressing.
There are lots of ways to construct and stage deals before jumping to that.

We are still committed to the £20 million. I think a better example than Britt is Ashley Fletcher. Paid over the odds for him and in the end got nowt when he left. The £20 million can only be spent once no matter how you "structure" it. It might mean no money to spend on a CB or a midfielder next season or the season after, we still don't have a top keeper contracted to us. Investing that much of our money in one asset could be crippling if it went wrong. There are more effective ways to spend that sort of money.

 

[Nano]

People have been saying for days that the key is spending big on proven players, the list proves that very wrong, that’s all I was doing with that list. My argument isn’t that all low priced players work out so I don’t really get your point.

I didn’t include any clubs that were in the Premier League the season previous, you can’t compare them to us, their spending power is on a different stratosphere. Bournemouth bought Solanke while they were a Premier League side. Same with Mitrovic actually, they only loaned him when they were in the Championship.

The timing of the transfer is completely irrelevant. The question is "what is needed for promotion?". It doesn't matter if you are a parachute payment club or you bought all your players in the PL. The primary reasons those teams got promoted is because they had squads full of the best players. There are several ways you get those players into your squad, low cost gambles on unproven players, free agents on big contracts, loans on unproven players or pay a premium for proven players. Fulham and Bournemouth both had teams full of proven players that had previously done well at the top end of the Championship or higher.

Can we get a striker for cheap that can score 20 goals? Yes, it is possible. Is it more likely that we can buy the correct unproven player or would it be more likely that a proven player can just keep doing what we know they are capable of?

The chances of a proven player continuing their form is higher than an unproven player. We can look back with hindsight at all of the successes and failures we have had over the years. How often have we turned an unproven player into a big money striker? We had way more success with strikers buying proven quality.

Yes, we got stung with Britt but I would argue that was poor recruitment because watching him a few times it was evident that he was technically very limited. He could score goals if you played a certain way and we didn't really do that (and he could no longer do it after his injuries as effectively anyway. Fletcher and Braithwaite were just disaster signings. That was spending big money unnecessarily on a player that nobody thought was worth that much and another who had no interest playing for us. We have had more success in the past buying proven quality. We knew what we were getting with players like Yakubu, Viduka & Hasselbaink and it was a far more effective policy than buying budget potential on players like Tuncay & Aliadiere. I don't think we should let our recent bad results with strikers put us off buying the right player at the right time.

If we say paid £15m plus for Gyorkeres and gave him £35k/week and he developed a long term injury and we have put nearly all our eggs in one basket. As we need to spend on midfield too now.

I am happy to spend upto £10m on a striker, but prefer to buy at least 2.

I guess I am a bit of a Moneyball buyer I don't mind taking a risk on a what appears far from the perfect article if there is some decent quality and potential there.

In 2019 we bought Dykesteel, Bola and Browne for around £4m in total. We got a bit back when Browne went. Bola is probably worth at least £1.5m and Dyksteel £5m and rising plus we have had a lot of useful games from them - That's decent business.

To me worst case scenario this season we end up with what we had last season upfront, but have improved the defence and goalkeeper. We do need to invest in midfield too.

Promotion is worth £100m+. If we Moneyball it every year so we can stay mid table in the championship indefinitely then we're just waiting to get lucky with having a good squad and manager at the right time. If we sign Gyokeres and get promoted he is worth the money. If we don't sign him and we miss out because we haven't scored enough goals then is that better value? It's less risky but the rewards are less likely. In week 1 we have seen the cost of having poor strikers. We missed open goals and dropped 2 points. Do that 4 or 5 times in a season and you kiss goodbye to promotion.

You can't make decisions based on people maybe getting injuries. That is part of the risk of signing anyone and there is obviously the possibility of it happening to anyone.



I'm not saying spending £15m on Gyokeres is the right idea. Just that it should be a possibility if we think he will do what we need someone to do in order to get promoted and there is more chance of him doing it at that price than the other options at a lower price.

 

[Sheriff_John_Bunnell_ret]

It would only make sense to spend big on a player if there was some sort of correlation between size of transfer fee and quality of player in the championship. There isn't.

 

[Andy_W]

I think we'd get 0 for him. You say "half back". Who is going to pay 7m for a championship striker who hasn't delivered for a couple of years? Certainly not a PL club, and the few in the championship with the money to do it will want a better chance of success.

And realistically, if he came for 15m, he'll have a big contract. His agent won't settle for 10k a week if we're prepared to shell out that sort of fee. No one will take that of us.

He'd be Britt part 2: running down his contract and leaving in a free.

Ok, I take it you've not seen him play? Even if he stopped scoring (which he probably won't), he would still be a great player.

It depends what you mean by not delivered, I'd expect him to get 14/15 goals in an absolute worse case scenario (he's already got 1), like Britt did, for two years. We would have still got decent money for him then.
I don't see any reason why he wouldn't match what he did at Coventry (17, which is the same as Bamford's best season for us), not with the supply we now have from Jones and Giles, and how much of the ball we should have (assuming we get another couple of players). I think he'd get at least 20, which would be good enough for me, but I think he could get even more than that.

He got 17 last year for a pretty poor team, and none of those were penalties.

Brereton only got 22 and four of those were penalties, is that "only had one good season"? He's been touted at £15m to the prem for 100k a week, and he's only got one year left on his contract.

 

[Chappy112]

The timing of the transfer is completely irrelevant. The question is "what is needed for promotion?". It doesn't matter if you are a parachute payment club or you bought all your players in the PL. The primary reasons those teams got promoted is because they had squads full of the best players. There are several ways you get those players into your squad, low cost gambles on unproven players, free agents on big contracts, loans on unproven players or pay a premium for proven players. Fulham and Bournemouth both had teams full of proven players that had previously done well at the top end of the Championship or higher.

Yeah and the reason they had those proven players is because they were a Premier League club, the timing of the transfers is absolutely relevant. If Newcastle get relegated this season but keep all their players is the key to going up then to spend £20m-£40m on multiple players? We aren't competing with those clubs financially and nor do we need to, it's irrelevant what they do. We're competing with the rest while hoping Burnley, Norwich and Watford have stinkers although they're probably 3 decent clubs to be up against because they don't blast money like Fulham and Bournemouth do.