catcherintherye
Player Valuation: £80m
An utterly laughable amount of money for a pretty bog standard player.
Imagine us paying 150m for Glen Murray, a player who has scored triple the amount of goals as Zaha.
There would be UPROAR.
I'll be frank, I was relieved when the deal didn't go through and relieved when I read we bid once, at around £52 million pounds and while we negotiated there were no bids of upwards of 70 million being turned down. It is consistent with all the other negotiations is that we negotiate hard and are prepared to walk away. We weren't getting carried away with this marquee signing nonsense.
I do understand people's frustrations. A big part of it, and you almost get a herd mentality is that it gets discussed pretty much everywhere for days. Whats starts as a really good play, with decent numbers (similar to Gylffis) very quickly becomes a world class player who will single handedly move us onto the next level. It's often not based on much other than an opinion formed in the cauldron or increasingly wild and ambitious thoughts.
I am of the view money isn't an issue (like Moshiri said) so I don't think it's as simple to say the money saved can be spent elsewhere. I think money is available whenever Brands wants it. I think they trust him implicitly and will back him. However you do have to consider FFP and other cost controls which would be impacted upon if we were tied into a massive deal.
At £50 million I would consider Zaha but thats about it. Maybe it gets done in January (don't rule it out if his influence turns toxic at Palace). The wider lesson in this though is to try not to get too caught up in the hype train around certain players. We could still finish 4th this season, and could still break the top 6. If we fail to, I sense it won't be the lack of Zaha that may be the key (I think it will be the lack of a Zouma).
Anyway it was pleasing to see Brands walking away from deals yesterday that I could have seen us committing too under Walsh & Koeman and which we are still paying the penalty for now. It's odd people don't seem to join the dots on those things. Being upset at not paying a massive fee for Zaha while at the same time bemoaning the lack of flexibility in the transfer market because we overpaid 2 years ago.
I eagerly await the day Brands can operate with full impunity having cleared the last of the dead wood off, which is essentially going to be from next summer.