Claudius wrote:
No. It won’t be worth it.
We are a midtable team that is not in the Champions League and coming off a season and half without fans. We are in a rebuild. We need to aim to build a team that can regularly compete for the title for the next 4-5 years in a cost effective manner. That means building smartly. Using a combination of the creme de la creme of our academy and well scouted players we get at value relative to the market - more Gabriels, Martinellis and Tierneys for example. We have examples of really good recruitment. We just need more of it.
We cannot afford to live beyond our means. Even £200k for 4 years is £40m on salary for an unsaleable asset. All those other players I mentioned will jointly make less than that in that time and probably have over £120m in value at the end of that period
You are talking as if players have an actual defined value until you decide to sell them, but they don't. Resale value is mostly nonsense. How many players have we ever sold for a significant fee, and how many times did the money go into improving the actual team? Anelka is the exception, not the rule.
Look at Torreira, how much is that 35 million investment worth today? Bloke's gonna leave for a few measly millions and has brought nothing but selection headache to the table for us since he wasn't good enough to start. You try to sign players who can help build up the club by doing great things on the pitch. That's the only kind of value that really matters. The rest is just the sort of mental gymnastics that makes you spend £80 million on Nicolas Pepe "because he has value even if things don't work out". I imagine people will be in for a shock when they see just how little he'll leave for this summer despite having the perfect age profile.
