Clauses in our players’ contracts.
Oh. Yeah. That one hasn’t been in place ever since our contract with Suarez.
I guess the rationale for that is, we are not a selling club, so why would be put release clauses in. We are here to compete for the highest honours.
It probably means, overall, we are in a stronger position (when things on the pitch are going well), with few players actually wanting to leave/leaving for free (unless their time is up). Trent is an outlier here. Generally in football, this is becoming a trend. Its why we need to get a few contracts sorted this year (Ibou and Macca are the two i want to see sorted sooner rather than later)
More importantly, we might well have looked at the situation and decided that £50m was worth it retaining him for one more season to win the title?
Doubt we would have thought the title was realistic before the season started, TAA or not. We have a similar dilemma now with Konate and I think it’s an open question what the club could do.
It would need to be proportionate to the contract length, and the player. If Trent signs a 4 year deal, his exit clause couldn’t be £50m
Fans, perhaps. Otherwise the people in charge would have looked at it and probably evaluated it (correctly) as a situation where we had a team that only fell short thanks to injuries and as @cynicaloldgit would point out, being shafted by referees.
We were 9 points short, having been obviously robbed by at least 3 (I’m thinking against Spurs), and having lost our full-backs repeatedly through the season. Let’s not forget that Clark even got himself a start. Kelleher got 10 starts.
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That would beg the question of why Real Madrid would pay it, since it would take a significant chunk out of their budget.
Not to mention the Odegard handball and city getting away after kicking Mac in the chest. That’s 6 points right there.
Also the point remains that at the time those refereeing mishaps (against Arsenal and City) happened, giving those decisions in our favour would have probably ensured that we would have clinched the league as we were in the process of building a sizable lead that year.
Injuries played a part in us derailing but refereeing decisions played a bigger part.
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We also had a new manager making a huge step up and replacing one who had been regarded as brilliant at motivating his players. I can’t imagine that the club said to Slot ‘we expect you can win us the title this season, so we’re keeping TAA instead of cashing in’
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I can’t imagine them saying to him “we’re expecting you to not do so well so we’re going to jeopardise your progress and standing with the fans and weaken the team by cashing in on our world-class vice-captain and starting right-back”.
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Might a @gasband illustration help in the imagination process?
(Can @gasband draw a good Arne or even a passable Henry?)
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I assume sign on fee’s factor into budgets.
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FIFY
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If Real Madrid were paying him £50m as a signing on fee, I’m not sure why people are upset that he might choose to leave for the money…
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Of course there are good reasons why we don’t do clauses or are trying hard to prevent having them in our player’s contracts.
Clauses themselves can also be different, see how Brighton and Bournemouth had clauses that were valid from and to a certain point that allows them to move quickly onto players replacing the likes of Mac Allister and Huijsen.
Being a top club, among the top of the football food chain (in which players can wish to go from one to another, as it’s the case), not having clauses also gives you the possibility to actually negotiate a price, depending on the player.
Not many players left us in recent years in a really bad way, be it footballing wise or financial wise. Not everything is in numbers, because the value of players can drop. Value is also to be found in service and quality on the pitch, years we spent together, especially if it was successful.
As for Trent, I think 2023 might have been a real vital moment, perhaps the last one when a new deal was possibly if we had our things post-Edwards’ departure sorted above Klopp.
He ended that 22/23 season in a brilliant way, him and Jones were in great form. He then went to the US for a special programme, as I think he wanted to squeeze more from his body, because it started to change (obviously gained strength, but perhaps it had a negative effect on his stamina, hence why his game changed from going up and down to more of a playmaking from deep one (and that hybrid role was great at first, but it’s also very demanding).
Losing a player like Trent on a free is certainly a blow, but there is value in the amount of time we were great for each other and had success. Multiple factors led to this outcome. But players leaving on a free isn’t necessarily catastrophic by default. It depends from case to case.
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All if, buts and maybes. What people are going to see is march of last year we opened talks with him, he knew a change was coming with Klopp going, so why not go last summer. Unlikely the club would have stopped or persuaded him due to the new guy coming in as this year was an unknown. We all have our opinions and we are fairly split on them. Why give the new guy a chance only to leave when he was successful, doesn’t happen. He knew then he was going imo.Be open about it last summer and there is no/less problem. For most who have a problem it felt sneaky, orchestrated while pretending it wasn’t.