In modern day transfers, there are 3 parties, the buyer, the seller and the player himself and the players nowadays have so much power when it comes to transfers, it happened with us in Lukaku's case, we didn't want to sell him but the player himself forced the move and left us with one option, do the best deal possible for us and that's what we did, we negotiated the best deal possible and moved on.
With Sigurdsson, it's the same situation, the player is forcing the move, he already withdrew from their pre-season, this is a good point for us and a bad point for Swansea when it comes to negotiations, if we tell them we are out, they will have an unhappy player who already turned his back to the club, their fans are already saying what we were saying about Lukaku after he told the press "returning to Everton is not an option".
Do you think Sigurdsson withdrew from their pre-season on his own? Obviously his agent is in contact with us and the move (withdrawing from the squad) was a calculated move.
We said we want 100M for Lukaku, in the end we had to settle for 75M + Add-ons and even negotiated a free transfer for Rooney, i am sure its the same situation right now, Swansea trying to get as much money as they can while we are somehow in a comfortable situation, we have the player on our side and we are not panicking against their strategy, we won't pay 50M, simply because we don't want to make other clubs have the same strategy as Swansea (they put the price and we pay it), i am also sure that our 40M offer (in case it was true) was not 40M, it was much less with add-ons, the final outcome will be the same, Swansea will say it's 45M while it will be something like 35M + Add-ons.
