It does appear Woodward is penny-pinching (again
). I'm hoping he'll have a breakdown of some sort and overpay for all the players we're interested in. Benatia is pretty much off the table now; Bayern will get him, or he'll stay. Of course as soon as Bayern's interest appeared, we suddenly were never interested... yeah, right.
Another concern is we haven't really shipped any players out yet. I get some are on high wages but we'll have to cut our losses a bit and subsidise them to get the deals done, or let them go cheaply.
The closer we get to the end of the window, the worse it'll be. The only exception being Di Maria, I think we might be able to get him a bit cheaper assuming PSG have actually pulled out and RM are keen to sell him. RM value him at €65m, a price which needs to come down a fair bit. In today's market £40m would make him a decent buy. The problem with signing him is that in our current system, he doesn't fit a critical position, not CM, not CB. To be honest he doesn't really fit in at all.
If we suddenly turn our attention to Blind, Ajax are going to do what Everton did with Fellaini and force us to overpay. I think he'd be good next to Herrera, he's a tidy player and can do all the basics very well, something our other midfielders are poor at. If LvG genuinely wanted him, we'd have signed him a while back. He'd be keen on a move and Ajax wouldn't stand in his way.
We can surely afford to push through a couple of huge deals as we have the financial backing to support the wages and instalments over the next few years; for example Di Maria at approx £25m a season over 4 years (wages+fee). It doesn't sound so bad when you consider the kind of income we have secured for future seasons.
If, for whatever reason we do have limited funds - then buying Shaw for £27m was insanely stupid. Herrera I think will turn out to be worth it, when we get a good player to partner him and he settles into the league. Something seems off about Shaw so far, first his fitness concerns, then his injury...
It's really, really confusing, and infuriating at the same time. At least there's still time to fix it, but are we really going to suddenly spend £100m+ in the space of 13 days~? I really doubt it, but would love to be wrong.
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