Football Why it was so important the Robins kept hold of Weimann
BRISTOL City chairman Jon Lansdown is a huge follower of American sports. In particular baseball, where he’s been an avid New York Mets fan since his schooldays after first falling in love with the game at Fenway Park while accompanying his father on a business trip to Boston.
It’s relevant to Bristol City because since he became vicechairman in 2013 the culture and ideology behind American sporting institutions has increasingly helped inform a lot of what the Robins do, most notably in their overall marketing and presentation of themselves as a club - from the launch of the new club crest to kits to social media activity and other smaller aspects.
It’s helped create a modern sense of identity about City. Some supporters aren’t wholly comfortable with it all the time but it’s meant the club has always moved forward and tried to stand out from the pack, in regards to those particular aspects of the business.
In the absence of transfer fees in American sports, the contract is king. Salary caps means players only move via ‘trades’ (ring any bells?), essentially swaps with the value often in the contracts that are taken on, or when players become free agents.
Taking veterans on big contracts who have a higher risk of getting injured and lessening their impact, isn’t always wise when you can have several less experienced figures who take up less salary space but, of course, don’t possess the same reputation or established level of performance. Ultimately, it’s about striking the right balance between output and value.
The reason why this is relevant is that Covid-19 has had a huge impact on the way clubs do business, particularly in the Championship and below where transfer fees of the recent past were all but eradicated in favour of free transfers.
Of course, the hyper-capitalism of football means fees should eventually return but given the huge financial shockwave felt across British football, it’s reasonable to forecast that little will change over the next 12 months, before you even start considering the plights of Derby and Reading and how others will surely follow. Football clubs simply cannot afford to spend anything close to what they did before.
While there is no salary cap in football, having been cancelled in League One and League Two and unable to be ratified in Championship, as much as the Lansdown family supported it, improved contract management is going to become a major aspect of general
club governance. After the rather odd policy City adopted in the final season of Mark Ashton’s time as CEO, signing a number of veteran players on contracts with little to no resale - almost a total departure from previous seasons - the club’s policy has shifted back under Richard Gould.
City will spend money again, as witnessed by the £1.9 million spent on Rob Atkinson and George Tanner but on value signings; players aged 24 and under on relatively low contracts, as both those players came from divisions below the Championship.
However, amidst all this were the decisions to hand long-term deals to Matty James and Andi Weimann. In terms of the former, he was clearly a personal pick of Nigel Pearson who knows how important the 30-year-old will be to not just how his team play, but how they train and conduct themselves in general.
By common logic, giving a threeyear contract to Weimann, a player about to turn 30 who’s just recovered from an ACL injury isn’t particularly good business sense. And the truth is that, ideally, City would rather have furnished Weimann with a slightly shorter deal, perhaps with an incentivised extension. But the Austrian had interest from Stoke City, to the point it became a serious consideration, but in tandem with his preference to stay in Bristol, that extra year on the contract offer convinced him to stay.
To flip the scenario around, as a footballer about to turn 30 off the back of a serious injury, you simply don’t turn down three-year contracts. Now, who knows what Weimann’s contract will look like in 2023 with 12 months to run and the forward approaching 32 in August.
But, if anything, it doesn’t matter because the Austrian is a special case in many ways and run contrary to common logic.
Firstly, given the state of the market and the lack of quality forwards either available or attainable to City, the club simply couldn’t allow Weimann to walk away, especially not to a Championship rival.
Famara Diedhiou was a different case because his negotiation was about cold hard cash, which the club weren’t willing to pay, nor was any other English club. He was allbut out of the door long before confirmation was made in early May.
City had to exercise the option to keep Weimann, taking the hit in an extra year’s salary rather than the greater expense from month to month. Losing him would have left Pearson with Chris Martin and Nahki Wells, and not a lot of alternatives out there to replace him.
That’s crucial because Weimann, as he’s showing this season, is absolutely fundamental to what Pearson wants his team to be. Yes, the four goals and two assists make for nice reading and have put points on the board but his contribution L goes far beyond that.
EE Johnson once said he’d trust Weimann with his life, amid criticism that the forward wasn’t producing the necessary quality in the final third to justify being picked ahead of more “glamorous” players such as Niclas Eliasson.
“Andi’s not the most technical player in the world but he’s so consistent and he’s a 9/10 every week in terms of his tactical score and a physical score,” said Johnson.
“For where we are, at this level, trying to go to the next level, Andi and his consistency in his training and his recovery and his training, his personality and his performances is up there as one of the best players I’ve had in terms of that trustworthy nature as a human and a football player.”
Pearson wouldn’t be quite as dramatic but the crux of the sentiment remains - he does everything that is asked of him on the pitch, on and off the ball, and the effect of that spreads across the team.
With City in possession, he runs channels, always offering passing options and out-balls for defenders being rushed or to create space for others; when on the ball he’s either in forward motion or incredibly unselfish (his lay-off for Martin’s goal at QPR evidence of such); and off the ball he presses from the front relentlessly.
As Martin said earlier in the season, Weimann’s high-intensity stats nearly always exceed his team-mates. Footballers are competitive types, that alone will force his colleagues to try to beat him, bringing up their own numbers.
In a City team that, in a crude sense, aren’t particularly possession-heavy and like to defend in a structured sense before counterattacking, Weimann is perfect for that. The ultimate away-day player, as Robins fans have witnessed down the years.
Taking him out of this team now would have a huge impact, and it’s no coincidence, admittedly with a number of other mitigating factors, their dip post-Weimann in 2021-22 was so severe.
His injury and this comeback have helped accentuate his importance to the layman but, internally, at City it was never in doubt.