I don’t think FSG are spending 50 million on a 19 year old lower premier league player, not when you are doing a clean out. If he is home grown and covers that plus his ability 35, otherwise I can’t see how he jumps in front of Bajetic after his efforts last season.
Absolutely fair points. If he was worth 50m, we would have paid up. We paid up for Dom without negotiating. We paid up for Nunez pretty much what was asked. The fact that we are negotiating is simply because he is a good player we like, but not to the point that he is worth 50m. We might eventually pay close to 50m but thats not a validation of the 50m value, its more a case of us getting him for as low as possible. But my opinion is the hyperbole that he is a must buy is over the top. Even for 45m, there would be plenty of options that would be young, very good and can become world class. Simply put, many generational talents as some are implying him to be, just simply do not not turn out to be that.
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Do you really think that Lavia can be a regular starter? He hasn’t played a lot more than Bajcetic last season, and he’s roughly the same age. I wonder what allows us to assume that he’ll be a ready-made starter right from the off?
Also, the qualities you describe are exactly Bajcetic’s strengths, no?
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all fair points @gasband, but Nunez as good as he potentially could be is not worth what we paid for him…
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Maybe there’s doubts about Bajetic’s long term fitness? He didn’t make the trip to Singapore, staying behind to keep Thiago company in the treatment room apparently.
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Definitely. He could turn out to be a dud. I was talking more about our club psyche when buying players, why we seem to bargain over some players and why we don’t for some. And it speaks on how we evaluate players internally disregarding what people say about “market price”
I’ve seen this thing about not playing much more than Bajcetic elsewhere, but if you look at minutes he spent over four times as long actually on the pitch in the PL - 2,230 vs 529 for Bajcetic.
Which goes to the heart of the problem for me, Bajcetic has less than 6 full games under his belt in the league, he needs to develop, especially physically, not thrown into the deep end starting a couple of dozen games or more.
And yes, I would see Lavia starting for us. Perhaps not immediately, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a similar route into the team as Robertson at first, maybe with Thiago and/or Mac getting most of the minutes at DM, but I think by the end of the calendar year he’d be a fixture in the team.
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I think the difference with Nunez was he is a great talent but could be blended in due to our romping front line. Lavia wouldn’t get that luxury, so is he really the type of player we can justify.
No doubts, just standard given the type of injury he had.
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Romeo Romeo, Where For Art Thou Romeo…? :0)
Lets get this done… or not!
I thought we’d put the low-balling days of Hicks & Gillet behind us. How many players did we lose because of those tactics? More than one I think. If a selling club has dug their heels in and obviously aren’t going to cave, either put up or stop wasting everybody’s time and move on to another target. Fksk.
Things arent really dragging. Reportedly made first bid earlier this week, second today/yest. Negotiations take time. Not like FM/FIFA where you get instant replies to offers.
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Err…how do you know they are not working on other targets? And buying a player can be easy but not as easy like taking it to the self checkout, scan the barcode, swipe your card and go.
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We’ve almost always tried to get the best value under these owners. Since their first window at least. Roma hated us after we got Salah so cheap because of their financial struggles. Diaz was cut price because Porto had bills they needed to pay. Minamino was a bargain. Shaqiri was a bargain. Robertson cost a Kevin Stewart.
They don’t get everything right all the time but they don’t usually fuck up these situations so just let them do their thing and calm down.
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Roma only ‘hated us’ after they saw Mo ripping up the premier league. At the time of the deal they thought they had got much the better end of it.
In the end, I’m not even sure their financial struggles were much of a thing by the time we concluded negotiations anyway as they had already sold at least one other player before then.
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I dont understand your point @gazmaninaus… So we over paid for Nunez (who is a great talent) because he could be blended in due to our romping frontline while lavia has no such luxury (blended romping midfield)??? Would it not make much more sense then to overpay for lavia (based on your arguement) so we can create a blended romping midfield.
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Roma also clawed back a lovely chunk with Ali’s fee.
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Yeah my memory of the Ali deal was that they didn’t really want to deal with us because of the Salah deal.
Reports like these…
Either way I think it’s fair to say that more often than not we’ve tried to get value. The outliers are the lads who were genuinely contenders for best in the world in their position which I don’t think Lavia would count as.
No what I’m saying is we overpaid for Nunez but he was afforded a blending in process, Lavia is more of a must be ready to go, which I doubt he is, and at 50 million the pressure would be immense.
Honestly I think Lavia is stronger, quicker, fitter, a better player on the ball, a more incisive runner and a more technical player than Bajcetic.
Bajcetic is a better defender and can be a really solid midfielder in future but I really just think Lavia is a whole other level of talent.
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