I do think people should read
@The Esk thread on wage cost implications to probably understand the bigger picture on the Stones front. I don't think it can be put into the Rooney/Rodwell/Arteta/Lescott/Jeffers/Ball camp where we reluctantly sold our best young talent. This is a means to an ends.
Nobody at the club would want to lose John Stones of that I'm certain. We certainly don't need to sell him to make up our transfer kitty that is there anyway and Koeman can sign pretty much any player he likes providing he can convince them to come. However there are real complications when it comes to wages. These are not restrictions placed on the club internally from lack of drive or ambition by the board but external factors from the Premier League. We can only raise wages 7 million a year.
In order to add the 4/5/6 top class international players we want too we need the funds and also a way to get around the wage restrictions. The funds are in place from Moshiri but the wages issue is thorny. We want to be a top 4 team and to do so we will have to probably double our wage bill to be in line with them. We are prevented from doing so. A short term solution is selling Stones for 50 million as it will allow us to raise our wages by 40 million this season on top of the 7 million allowance.
It really is a means to an end. There is a sadness to it but trading at the right moment is an important part of any business. Even if he does go on to be as good as Bobby Moore and captain England is the trade the right one for us to do now, to allow us to add an additional 40 million to our wage bill (IE 6 players on circa 140k per week?). That is the dilemma we are left with.
I understand people saying just trade our squad players. I have no problem with that and I would happily move on half a dozen squad players (for different reasons, mainly to allow a pathway for younger players but also to get rid of the ethos of failure). However we do have to be realistic in that it won't be easy to shift these lads on and we may end up making a loss on them (which defeats the object). The days when we could offload of squad players to poorer premier league teams is diminishing. All teams have lots of money and most would not be massively enthused about players such as Oviedo, Kone, Cleverley & Lennon. The money all the clubs have have opened doors to the foreign market. More foreign managers have also aided this process.
I see people plucking numbers for players we can sell, but there needs to be somebody willing to pay that figure otherwise it is irrelevant. We know somebody is willing to pay around 50 million for Stones so it becomes a concrete decision not one based in hopes or ambition.
I also appreciate some may look at some transfers and say Stones is undervalued. I would urge caution on this. Particularly in this window it is going to be crazy. There will always be examples of players going which will make Stones look cheap. There will also be players going that will make him look overpriced. Everyone will use Troy Deeney as their example. That's fair enough. However you can also get international Centre backs for half of the 50 million of what we'd get for Stones. I do think we shouldn't lose site of the end goal with Stones though, which is allowing us to trade more effectively.
