Toon after £60m worth of players according to rumours – yeah right!
Posted on November 14th, 2011 | 125 Comments |
Amidst the rants of Llambias and the mutterings of discontent or otherwise about the stadium renaming, there was also a healthy serving of transfer speculation on the weekend.
One such nugget of gossip has us interested in Roma’s Bojan Krkic. He’s 21, can play on the wing or up front and is said to be worth somewhere in the range of £10m-£15m, which sounds at the upper range of what Ashley might pay for a player but perhaps just about feasible.
There is however a potential problem with his contract situation. Roma bought him from Barcelona for €12m in July 2011 and Barcelona have an option to buy him back after 2 years for €13m unless Roma pay another €28m to get out of the buy-back clause. So even assuming there’s any truth to the rumour and that we are indeed interested in the player, it might prove to be a tricky contract to negotiate.
Krkic’s tally is 29 goals in 112 games, although I have no idea where he played for all those games and in how many he was merely used as a substitute. In his time at Barcelona he seemed to be billed as a striker, although he was behind Lionel Messi, Pedro Rodríguez and David Villa in the pecking order and I would imagine that he would have been a substitute for many of his 104 league games for them.
Perhaps one of the more laughable rumours has us ‘ready to swoop’ for Spurs pair Jermain Defoe and Roman Pavlyuchenko, although personally I think this is about as likely as Llambias getting a Christmas card from Kevin Keegan. They’re both 29 and would demand big wages and that’s two criteria that would seemingly go against the current Toon recruitment policy. £20m is the supposed price for the two of them, possibly as a sort of buy-one-get-one-free deal.
I tend to think this ‘rumour’ is merely the work of a bored hack and, anyway, my fingers struggle to manage ‘Pavlyuchenko’ for some reason so I can’t be doing with him on the books.
Apparently, PSV defender Erik Pieters is still one of our targets too. The Sunday Sun thinks our move for him in the summer was scuppered due to excessive demands by the various agents involved and further suggests that such demands might yet scupper our move for him in January. They do however maintain that we’re still interested in the player, who is said to be valued at about £7m.
This seems like a much more realistic rumour than the others, as does our continued interest in Mobido Maiga where some press reports seem to have him as a dead cert to be playing for us in January, although I don’t know how much truth there is in that. Maiga himself was asked about his potential move to Newcastle by FootballAfrica365 and he said:
“I do not know, we’ll see. Next what is clear is that all players dream of playing for a club like that and I hope it will happen, either this winter or in the summer. There are no more problems with Sochaux, everything is back to normal.”
As usual, treat all the rumours with suspicion and believe nothing until Pardew’s shaking a player’s hand and handing him a black and white shirt. There are about £55m-£60m worth of rumours in this article alone, which just goes to show that most of them must be rubbish.
well i would take away the £20 million defoe and pavlova rumors and you have £35-£40 million worth or rumors.
i doubt we would be as sensible to find a player like pieters turning up at ST. JAMES PARK although i do believe he can play anywhere across the back 4, so maybe its a winner.
i think the next two transfer windows will probably bring us one striker, i would not like to say any more, and defensive cover 3 possible 4 defenders. two worth paying for and 1 or two to sit around and wait, like abeid in in midfield.
i wouldn’t see us straying too far from our current policy but if we do find ourselves with £55-£60 million worth of stock id expect to have sold at least £50 million in the process.
you know there will be a big sale in january and tiote springs to mind. £20 million in cashleys pocket. as guthrie is doing so well in midfield i think it might be the mentality to sell the greater priced.
although ranger, lovens, smith, harper, forster might bring in £10 million with fees and wages taken into account.
if peiters comes in then i think raylor will go. he might fetch £10million if rumors are true although i don’t think liverpool will want to do any more business with lamearse for a while if at all.
so all in all we could quite easily bring in £40 million by selling players who are on the fringe, and this season might be the best time to sell certain players as last season they were first team regulars. so cash in while we can.(except tiote)