Balancing act as Town ponder Mooy options
A MINDLESS five-minute doublebooking against Aston Villa aside, Aaron Mooy is getting on well on his loan spell at Brighton and Hove Albion.
The Town midfielder has played the full 90 minutes in all of their last four games and utterly ran the show in their 2-1 win over Arsenal, claiming his first assist for the club as he teed up Neal Maupay’s winning header.
Unless, for some reason, either Town or Brighton opted to trigger a January recall clause - and we stress that it seems very unlikely that will happen - then Mooy’s loan period will last until the end of the season. If the Seagulls want to keep him beyond that, they will need to either renew the loan or make the deal permanent.
Looking from the outside, you can only imagine it could be quite convenient to Town if Brighton were to make their intentions known sooner rather than later: even if the deal were not to be made permanent until the summer, knowing for sure that a surely substantial fee was coming in a few months could embolden the club to take recruitment decisions in January that they might otherwise shy away from in the name of caution.
It’s not a nice thought, but simply put, without a deal in place it would be a risk to Town to go and spend, say, £5m of the potential Mooy money in January only for the midfielder to go and do his ACL the following day. If a deal for the summer were signed and sealed in advance, however, the whole thing would be written in stone and decisions could be made with more certainty. There are a few issues with this, the biggest of which is that Brighton may have little or no reason to do that at this stage. That would depend on two th ings : whether or not a permanent transfer fee has already been preagreed between the two clubs, and whether Brighton have first refusal on making an offer. The club have not been
If a deal for the summer were signed and sealed in advance, the whole thing could be written in stone
forthcoming on either point.
The other issue is that even if a deal were to be struck, every club Town were trying to get players from would be aware of it, which would of course drive up the price on every negotiation they did in January. In the longer run, they might be better off being able to portray themselves as being on a budget in the upcoming window, already a notoriously difficult time to do business. So perhaps it wouldn’t be quite so convenient after all.
This could all be immaterial, of course, if Town opt not to dip into the permanent transfer market at all. Karlan Grant proved a more than excellent purchase at £2m last January, but such mid-season bargains are vanishingly rare.
With Jaden Brown, Fraizer Campbell, Lewis O’Brien and Alex Pritchard all set to return from injury imminently, using the three loan slots both manager Danny Cowley and chairman Phil Hodgkinson have alluded to to fill the most urgent holes in the squad - in our analysis, that’s a left-back, a number 10 and a winger - could be sufficient to get Town through to the end of the season – at which point they could start putting their long-term plans into effect in the much kinder summer market.