Chairman explains his decision over Mooy exit
PHIL Hodgkinson has shed light on the circumstances that led to Aaron Mooy’s departure from the club.
“I think what you’ve got to remember is that we’ve always been a trading club, we will always be a trading club, so we will continue to sell some of our assets and that money will go back into the football club and a proportion of it will be reinvested,” he said.
“In our last four seasons in the Championship in 13/14 we spent less than £5m on transfers, in 14/15 less than £2m, 15/16 less than £1m and the season we went up we spent just over £4m on transfers.
“Within that period these are some of the free transfers that we brought in because there’s been a lot of people that have been talking about free transfers: Jon Stead, Harry Bunn, Lee Peltier, Martin Cranie, Dean Whitehead, Michael Hefele, Chris Lowe, Jack Payne, Danny Williams, Rob Green, Erik Durm – all free transfers.
“If you look at this season in the Championship there’s 24 teams including us.
“The average spend is £7m. We spent £11.5m on transfers this window. The fact that one of the players [Isaac Mbenza] was already here is irrelevant, we’d have still spent that money on other people. So we spent £11.5m on incoming transfers. That’s the sixth-highest in the division.
“The average transfer income is £13m. The average number of loan players per club is three and the average number of free transfers brought in this season is three per club. That’s the Championship now.”
Hodgkinson continued: “Because this is football. It’s volatile. People change their minds, agents get involved, clubs change their minds.
“So some of the things that I’ve said, I haven’t lied to anybody. I’ve said things with the best intentions and things were happening and then in a couple of circumstances the most bizarre things have happened – I’ll write a book!
“But you can’t control everything in football.
“I’d rather be open but to do that, supporters have got to accept that you can’t guarantee everything, so to be open you have to accept that some things you’ll try to make them happen but you might not be able to completely control it and that some things may happen in a different way.
“Or we can get to a point where I just don’t say things till it happens, which I’d rather not but if I’m going to be held to the letter of everything that I say or it’s going to be misinterpreted and I then get in bother for it or criticised for it, then it’s best to say nothing. I don’t really want us to go down that road because I’d like to be as open as I can be. Kieran Dowell was going to be Aaron Mooy’s replacement, it was all agreed, it was ready to go and the agent was very impatient.
“Aaron – who by the way, what a great guy. I can’t speak highly enough of him – Aaron’s agent had told the club before I got involved that if we weren’t in the Premier League to not bother offering him a new deal and so nobody at the club did.
“So he was starting this season as his last season and there was no option [to extend the contract]. We found out that Aaron was changing agents about 10 days before the end of the window. I rang Aaron and said ‘do you want to talk about a new deal’ and he said ‘I don’t see why not’, at which point it looked like he was staying.
“Kieran Dowell’s agent got impatient and took him to Derby the next day. I asked his agent to just hold off for a week.
“His agent said yes and then took him to Derby the next day and he signed.
“We made Aaron a contract offer that was the biggest contract we’d have ever offered a player in the Championship. They came back and said there’s a few tweaks but you’re not a million miles away.
“We sent over an amended one, I met Aaron and his agent and as soon as I walked in the room I knew he wasn’t going to be staying with us.”
Mooy would ultimately go on loan to Brighton, but not before signing a new three-year deal with Town.
“Nobody is more gutted than me [that he left], but I had to make a decision. To let Aaron go out on loan fulfilled what he wanted. To keep Aaron without signing a new deal we’d have a 50-60 per cent [motivated] Aaron [for a season before] leaving on a free.
“Neither of those were good for the football club.”