1: Why do you think a players transfer fee would be cheaper if he signed for Atletico Madrid rather than Everton?
2: All of the English players you have listed were high potential players for those clubs. Tom Davies hasnt shown anything 'special' in 3 years now.
3: A transfer fee is set by the selling club and what the buyer is prepared to pay. Im also not sure what youre talking about re:goals, youre comparing Davies whose played almost always in midfield and considers himself to be an attacking midfielder to someone whose mostly played centre back and defensive midfield.
4: Sigurdsson was signed for £42mil on a 5 year deal. Amortized now his book value is £16.8mil. That means that we would need to sell him over that value for an FFP gain -- this is why posters are saying we simply cant sell Iwobi as it negatively affects our FFP + why players we want to give away like Bolasie we needed to ask fees for and had to loan out so not to affect our FFP.
Davies is classed as free so any sale puts at an FFP positive. If we sold him for £12mil that goes into our books immediately. Conversely a purchase fee is spread over the length of a players contract, for example if we signed a player for £60mil that would mean the £12mil goes out this year (davies fee) and the same for the following years.
This is why Walker-Peters and Hojberg were classed as separate deals so both Southampton and Spurs have immediate positive FFP values. You may also want to check out the Pjanic / Arthur transfer between Barca and Juventus.
6: Totally agree on Sigurdsson. He should be the first out the door but unless we sell for an FFP loss on his fee then how to sell him? Also perhaps by selling Davies we can work FFP to sell Sigurdsson at a lower fee so the positive outweighs the negative.
What if no bids come in for Sigurdsson? Do we just keep Sigurdsson, Gbamin, Delph, Gomes and Davies? Then what, still add in 2 centre mids so we have 7 on our books?
If we want to sign new midfielders then we have to sell some.
Im a great advocate of our young players coming through and wouldnt be against keeping him or Kenny but we need to recycle the squad.
1. Because it happens all the time. Foreign teams know the eye watering money in the PŁ and so the price goes up. It's unfortunate, but it's the way it goes. Same applies when Barca, Real and PSG come knocking, the selling club can't believe their luck.
2. There's no arguing with you here. Davies has shown potential, certainly above and beyond what Solankę has. Yes, he has struggled a little since his breakthrough, but in 4 years of being in and around the Everton 1st team, he has played under 7 different managers, with numerous different styles and formations, and has yet to have 1 settled run in the side. Honestly, the expectations of young players to instantly be world beaters regardless of circumstances is insane.
3. Of course the fee is set by the selling club, I don't know what point you are making here. Also, the only reason I mentioned goals is that people were using Davies lack of goals from CM as proof of how poor he is and why the low price was justified. My point was Gbamin, also a CM, being older, having played more games, in less competitive league, had similar low numbers. Not all CMs have prolific scoring rates. In fact, our entire midfield unit, Bernard, Walcott, Iwobi, Sigurdsson, Delph, Schneiderlin, Gomes, Gbamin, Gordon and yes, Davies, scored about 7 between them in the entire season. Its a team problem, not an individual problem.
4. I genuinely think there is a flaw in your theory about how this income over spend works. If we sell Tom Davies for £12m, it may well be all profit. But it will be £12m worth of profit, and it will be gone once we spend £12m. It doesn't regenerate in the accounts every year for 5 years because we decide to sign someone for £60m over 5 years. We would have to find an additional £12m next year, and the year after, and so on.
And like I said, it's all well and good saying take the money and run, we can just sign someone else to replace him. To replace him with another player who costs the same price, and with the same wages, would cost us almost £20m. Realistically, we would probably have to spend more than £12m to replace him, and most likely have to spend more on wages too. So that £20m becomes £30m. Or half a Tom Davies every year for the next 5 years to use your Amortisation example.
I think we can all agree that the big money we can save would be on Delph/Sigurdsson/Bernard/Sandro. If we can somehow manage to shift them, the finances begin to look a lot less murky. As you say, it would be hard to get big fees for any of them, but maybe enough to cover the book value? By my reckoning, Sigurdsson must be about £28m left to go over 2 remaining years. At this point, with the extension on FFP due to COVID, this may be the perfect to time to bite the bullet and cut our losses.
But in order to do that, we would need to keep the likes of Davies so we don't find ourselves short. I have faith that a full season under Carlo could do him the world of good.
