It’s a bit of both, Coombs. If you have a healthy organization overall, you’ll be in much better shape walking in. By that I mean that let’s say you were buying infrastructure. If you actually had a clear plan for how the infrastructure fits in your strategy and whether or not it needs to be bought with services, then when you hand over to your negotiation team, they have really good understanding of the facts.
If you don’t have that basic understating, what can happen is you walk into a negotiation and someone prices you a hardware and services contract with all kinds of hidden costs, but you should’ve kept the negotiations separate.
In a footballing context, having a very clear understanding of the parameters of the Torreira and Partey contracts separately would be important before trying to do a related deal. That’s why you’d always want to push as far as possible on just a Partey deal alone and see what all the different things you can flex are. Then you have a good understanding of how much different elements (like guaranteed cash, timing of payments, bonuses, triggers of bonuses) are worth to each party before you start throwing in another player like Torreira. Because if you don’t do this discovery, you could end up failing to understand what’s actually at stake. And that’s why it’s worth doing multiple formal and informal rounds even if only 1 or 2 formal offers are ever put on the table.
