Valiants will be so keen to secure the future of Gibbons
PORT Vale will be well aware of James Gibbons’ contract situation and I am sure they won’t want to leave it too long before getting him on a new deal.
There will be other players out of contract next summer, but I just don’t see it being a problem if Gibbo is given a deal well in advance of that.
He’s having a great season and, just because he’s offered a contract, that doesn’t mean other players will be saying, ‘well, what about me?’
He’s said himself that his focus is on staying in the team and playing well after missing most of last season through injury. He’s got a great attitude and that’s typical of him.
But he’s come back all guns blazing and, the way he’s playing, you would think other clubs will be keeping an eye on him.
Everyone’s situation is different and, as you’d expect, players’ contracts improve the more established they become.
When I was starting my Football League career at Crewe, they would put young players on deals that would improve as you went along.
You would get a target of games so you would get more money the more games you played.
That made more sense than suddenly giving a young player £1,000 a week and then him potentially dropping his standards because he thought he’d made it.
Instead, you would have an incentive so your money would be topped up with appearances.
Experienced professionals command more money but, certainly when Gibbo was breaking into the team at Vale, the senior players were genuinely happy for him.
Older players tend to look after the younger ones and we’d be telling him to knock on the door and ask for a new contract because we’d been in that situation as well.
I LIKE the idea of a levy on transfers to raise money for lower division clubs and the rest of the football pyramid.
That’s one of the proposals in the new fan-led review into football which has just been published.
So, when Premier League clubs buy players from overseas or other top-flight clubs, a percentage of that goes to help the game as a whole.
At the moment, a lot of the money that comes down from the Premier League is in parachute payments to clubs that go into the Championship. In fact, the EFL chairman Rick Parry said last year there were six Championship clubs receiving more than £200m between them in parachute payments.
That makes life harder for all the other clubs in the Championship who don’t get those payments. So, I’ve said before that some of that money should be used to help clubs lower down the pyramid instead.
Clubs need some help. I know the Vale sold 5,000 season
tickets and are one of the bigger clubs in League Two but it’s still very difficult and lower division clubs need some help.
It would be great if these latest proposals can help the game as a whole. A transfer levy sound like a very good idea. Let’s see if it happens.
· OLE Gunnar Solskjaer is obviously a genuinely great bloke, and not only cares for Manchester United but loves the club.
But he was out of his depth as manager and really the club shouldn’t have waited until last weekend before parting company with him.
Having said that, United’s biggest problem has been recruitment and I don’t know if he is solely to blame for that.
I can’t understand why they spent £73m to sign Jadon Sancho when they were crying out for a central midfielder,
Replacing Marcus Rashford with Sancho was never going to get them an extra 15-20 points a season. Replacing Fred with Declan Rice might have done.