Scandal of the sky-high demands
Prem pays high price of success OZIL’S AHEAD OF THE GAME
WATFORD boss Marco Silva has been stunned by the prices demanded for foreign players.
And he says the root cause is the money sloshing around the Premier League.
The new Hornets chief said: “Maybe the value of the player is £5million in the normal European market, but if you come from the Premier League it is double. The minimum is double. It is a big problem but this is football.
“This year the market is completely crazy – and we haven’t even reached August.”
Silva (above) conceded it was easier to sign players when he was manager of Olympiacos in Greece.
Barter
“The clubs know that if it is the Premier League calling, they can ask more,” he said.
“If you ask teams in Portugal, Spain, Italy or wherever what club they want to sell their players to, everybody says China or the Premier League.”
But the former Hull boss says it’s just as difficult to barter with Premier League rivals.
“It is really difficult to buy players inside the Premier League,” said Silva. “The players with quality are really difficult to get because the clubs have good financial situations.”
Silva, who failed to keep Hull in the top flight after taking charge in January, said he took advice from fellow Portuguese Jose Mourinho before accepting the Watford job.
“We have a very good relationship and he knows the Premier League very well,” said Silva. “Before I went to Hull we talked. And when I needed to take the decision to join Watford, he is one of the people I talked to about my move.
“He is a good person, a fantastic person, and I have a very good relationship with him.” I CAN’T say I was too surprised to learn Mesut Ozil (left) is the most followed Premier League footballer on social media.
He’s a World Cup winner and has played for Real Madrid, after all.
He also falls into that category of being a popular player among gamers – kids buy him on FIFA because they know he gets them loads of points at the end of every week.
His advisors will have had that information already, but now we are all aware it will again strengthen contract talks. The Germany star, 28, can go to the Arsenal board, or his representatives can, and tell them: “We have this huge brand, now pay up or we’ll go somewhere else where they will do.” SOMETIME soon, one of football’s governing bodies is going to have to step in — and sort out this transfer madness once and for all.
Maybe it needs to be FIFA, the overlords?
Or perhaps the best bet would be for UEFA to do it, seeing as Europe — and most notably England — is where most of the silly money is?
What we need is sensible player-pricing introduced, with levels based on age, achievement and international caps etc.
And hopefully that would see some sort of sanity and longevity returned to the transfer market — because we cannot keep going on like this.
Even Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho and Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola admitted that much last week.
Although, frankly, those two as much as any managers have paid the silly money for players that has got us into this mess — which does make their comments seem a bit rich.
Mourinho has spent money everywhere he has been, bar Porto. At Chelsea he was very much part of the billionaire-driven money boom in English football.
And then you have Guardiola — who in this window alone has spent £100million on a couple of full-backs.
Obscene
I understand the argument that the top stars have a brand value and that a club can get their £100m back in merchandising and attracting other players.
But when you get deals like £50m-plus for Kyle Walker then, I’m sorry, that’s just obscene.
United and City aren’t the only clubs guilty of paying over the odds — take West Brom, for example, who have paid £12m for Jay Rodriguez.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see Rodriguez succeed after the injury problems he has had.
But that’s still an awful lot of money for a player who has so much to prove in terms of fitness alone.
In the Championhsip, Ross McCormack cost Aston Villa almost £13m last summer, and Ruben Neves has just cost Wolves nearly £16m from Porto.
If they were that good they’d be playing in the Premier League. But they’re not.
The worst consequences of the sky-high transfer fees are for the clubs that have fallen out of the Premier League but no longer have parachute payments to keep them competitive.
They’re having to go and hawk I’VE got into my fair share of scraps on Twitter but, unlike Kenedy, I’m a one-man band and not part of a team. Unsurprisingly, his “f**k China” tweet hasn’t gone down very well at all and it’s bad for Chelsea, because they have to work so much harder in those south-east Asian markets than Manchester United and Liverpool do. Perhaps he should have done what Vinnie Jones did last week and claimed his account had been hacked.